The Trumpeter of Krakow
by Eric P. Kelly
Summary
In 1461 the Charnetski family flees their home in the borderlands after the mercenary Peter of the Button Face, acting for Ivan III of Russia, burns it down, driven partly by the fact that the family guards a mysterious object called the Great Tarnov Crystal, which the raiders and others want badly enough to keep hunting the family across the country. They settle in Krakow, where young Joseph Charnetski's father Andrew takes work as the church trumpeter at St. Mary's, playing the Heynal, a call sounded from the tower every hour toward each direction of the compass and always broken off at exactly the same note, according to legend, in memory of a trumpeter shot by a Tatar arrow before he could finish it centuries earlier. Joseph learns to play the Heynal himself and befriends the alchemist Nicholas Kreutz, whom he saves from a mob early in the story, and the two families' fates tangle further as a hired agent named Peter of the Button Face keeps pursuing the crystal on behalf of a foreign power. Kreutz, obsessed with what he believes the crystal can teach him about turning base metal into gold, is hypnotized by his student Johann Tring while staring into it, and Tring reads the symbols from the trance as a recipe for an explosive, mixes it, and triggers a fire that spreads through the city while Joseph, cornered in the tower during the chaos, breaks tradition and plays the Heynal all the way through as a signal for help. The crisis resolves with the king banishing Peter, Kreutz recovering his sanity once the crystal is finally thrown into the Vistula River rather than kept by anyone, and Joseph marrying Kreutz's ward Elzbietka six years later, the family's long danger finally ended along with the object that caused it.
Kelly builds the adventure on real Krakow geography and the genuine, centuries old custom of the broken Heynal call, still played today, and the book moves at a steady clip through intrigue, fire, and a small amount of real alchemy lore rather than lingering long on any one scene. A 1960 assessment from the National Council of Teachers of English found the historical setting so dominant that the characters exist mainly to walk a reader through it rather than to live convincingly on their own, a fair complaint about a book whose real strength is its sense of place.
Historical Context & Significance
Macmillan published The Trumpeter of Krakow in 1928, and it won the 1929 Newbery Medal. No committee citation survives from this era, but that year's runners up numbered six, an unusually large field: John Bennett's The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo, Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats, Grace Hallock's The Boy Who Was, Cornelia Meigs's Clearing Weather, Grace Moon's Runaway Papoose, and Elinor Whitney Field's Tod of the Fens. That year's field is notable now mostly for Millions of Cats, a picture book that has gone on to become far better known than the novel that actually won the medal.
The novel remains in print and in circulation as a free audiobook through LibriVox. Its Heynal trumpet call is not fiction Kelly invented for the plot; the actual call still sounds every hour from St. Mary's Basilica in Krakow, four times in succession toward the four points of the compass, and still breaks off at the same note. Kelly's novel is in fact the earliest written version of the story that a Tatar arrow cut the trumpeter short, so the legend and the book have fed each other ever since.