UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ruth Dudley Edwards, Murdering Americans (2007)

Ruth Dudley Edwards  is a historian, journalist, and biographer, born in Ireland and now living in London, who  began writing mystery fiction in 1981. Murdering Americans is her eleventh crime novel. Her detective here is the rightwing Lady Troutbeck , a member of the House of Lords by virtue of her title and also the head of St. Martha’s College in Cambridge    (a wholly fictional college, by the way). Ida, Lady Troutbeck, who insists on being called Jack, is a Margaret Thatcher Conservative, and the trouble starts when she accepts an invitation to teach at an American college. Jack descends on Freeman University in Indiana as a distinguished faculty visitor, and discovers a corrupt president and a violently repressive provost who, under the aegis of diversity, imposes a tyrannical political correctness. Political correctness is Jack’s meat; she likes nothing better than to do battle with it, always from her own particular political perspective. We might almost expect we were dealing with a political tract here, except Jack’s politics and methods are so over-the-top. Also the book is funny in taking its shots at liberalism. We know how seriously to take things from the beginning, when Jack is detained by security at the airport because of something that her parrot said.

Also, of course, there is something for Jack to investigate. The former provost died under mysterious circumstances. Students are beaten up or expelled if they try to demand that teachers teach.  Jack mounts a revolution of dissatisfied students on Founder’s Day and all turns out well.  She doesn’t really solve the crime, but she happens to have her pistol with her (illegal, of course) and she shoots the boy who presumably murdered the provost and the provost’s goon, when the boy tries to kill someone else at the Founder’s Day activities.

Before this dénouement, though, Jack has to try to make the culinary desert of New Paddington, Indiana livable.  She enlists the aid of a willing student to help with this task, but when she tries to hire other students to help her investigation of the college administration, the students meet with a mysterious accident. Jack is up to the challenge, though, and brings in her own help in the form of her young friend Robert Amiss, who is the detective in some of Edwards’s earlier books.

If your politics match those of Edwards’s Jack Troutbeck, you’ll enjoy this book. And if you’re of a more liberal persuasion but can laugh at liberalism’s excesses, you may like it, too. The trick here is to disregard the book’s not so subtle, Anne Coulterish implication that liberalism itself is the problem, leading to repressive and violent behavior.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Agatha Christie, The Thirteen Problems (The Tuesday Club Murders) 1932

           “The Tuesday Night Club” identifies the characters meeting at Miss Marple’s house in St. Mary Mead: Miss Jane Marple, her nephew the novelist Raymond West, the artist Joyce Lempriére, the solicitor Mr. Petherick, the clergyman Dr. Pender, and retired Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Henry Clithering, who proposes the first problem, the idea being to present to the others a mystery to which the teller knows the solution and see who can solve it. These are the earliest stories about Miss Marple and they play out with the same result in each case: Miss Marple finds a parallel story in the village life of St. Mary Mead and goes straight to the correct answer. Everyone marvels. No one expects her to do it again the next time, but she does.

            In Sir Henry’s problem, the husband seduces the maid and then gets her to prepare a trifle with poisoned “hundreds and thousands,” sweet decorations for desserts, to kill the wife. Dr. Pender tells the story of “The Idol House of Astarte,” in which Elliot Haydon, rushing to his cousin Richard’s aid at a masquerade when the latter stumbles in front of Diana Ashley (dressed up as Astarte), stabs him with the dagger in the belt of his brigand’s costume and then replaces the dagger, all with his back to the other guests. “Ingots of Gold” concerns the supposed search for Spanish gold off Cornwall by an acquaintance of West’s who has invited him down and who is actually hauling off gold stolen from a modern-day boat wreck. Joyce Lempriere tells another Cornish story, “The Blood-Stained Pavement,” about a bluebeard who knocks off a succession of wives he meets at watering hioles. Petherick’s story, “Motive versus Opportunity,” which he promises to be free of legal tricks, involves the use by the nephew and one of the rightful heirs of disappearing ink on the will of the old man who’s been charmed by a golddigger into changing his will to leave everything to her, cutting out the nieces and nephew.

            And so it goes through the stories, although Christie changes the venue and the characters, with the next group as Miss Marple attends a country-house party. Despite the predictability and the stock characters, the stories are entertaining and occasionally quite funny. Miss Marple is solidly in a tradition of armchair sleuths who are able to draw on a wide knowledge of criminal activity.  The surprise is that the knowledge comes not from studying the crimes going back a century, as Holmes seems to have done, but simply having observed human nature at work in a small English village over a lifetime.