Madeleine DeMilleBesprekingen

I'm finding the variety of the adventures into which Blake and Mortimer get themselves enmeshed one of the pleasures of this series. From militaristic, gung-ho, pulp-style war heroics, to Flash Gordonesque science fantasy antics or Quatermass-style scientific speculation, to magic, mysticism and ghosts, or spy adventures and "The Great Game" of Empires.

In The Oath of the Five Lords, Yves Sante delivers a murder mystery, combining political intrigue with a revenge vendetta. As the readers and the protagonists of the stories become further separated in time, the writers of the new adventures feel able to bring in historical characters contemporary with Blake and Mortimer, in this instance, T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia". We're also given some further flashbacks into Blake's back story, which proves integral to the plot.

There are some neat background clues as to suspects and motives for the observant reader, the 'Hamlet' theatre poster in Alfred's room being my favourite, and while the mystery isn't so hard to fathom, the details as to motive, the blending of fiction and fact, and the ambiguity as to Lawrence's intentions are handled well. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

I’ve been impressed with a couple of Sente’s scripts, more so than I have anything written by series creator Edgar P Jacobs – chiefly because Sente manages to stitch his stories into real history. And so he does in this one, and it’s particularly effective. The story is essentially a murder-mystery. The titular lords are a secret society, created decades before to safeguard a pamphlet written by TE Lawrence but which he was never allowed to publish. Someone is bumping off the lords and stealing their portion of the pamphlet. It’s up to Blake and Mortimer to learn the identity of the killer/thief before the pamphlet is all together lost and the five lords all murdered. It’s not a very complex mystery, though Sente still manages a few bits of sleight of hand with his clues. I thought this one of the better entries in the series.½