UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child, (Colin Duckworth, 1977; rpt. Mariner, 1999).

            Penelope Fitzgerald is a British novelist who did not begin publishing until she was in her sixties, but who eventually won England’s top literary award, the Booker Prize, as well as the National Book Critics Award in this country.  Her first book, The Golden Child, is a mystery based on the Tutankhamen exhibition which came to London’s British Museum in 1972.  But the museum in the book is not quite the British Museum, though it resembles it; the Golden Child of the title, a gold-encrusted mummy, is not quite Tutankhamen; his country of origin is not Egypt but “Garamantia;” and the museum director is not quite Lord Kenneth Clark, though he looks and acts like him.  And unlike the Tutankhamen exhibit, this one turns out to be a fake; the thousands of people in folded queues in the famous courtyard are unaware that the mummy in the gilded sarcophagus is not the adolescent king but a much more modern corpse covered with gold-leaf.

            The quirky staff of the museum, besides the Kenneth Clark look-alike, includes a precious aristocrat his coworkers call the May Queen, a ubiquitous assistant known only as Jones—whose name turns out to be Jones Jones—the cantankerous old Sir William, discoverer of the real treasure of the Golden Child, and Sir William’s sleepy, insouciant, six-month’s pregnant secretary Dousha Vartarian.

            Fitzgerald shows a Dickensian playfulness about names, such as that of Professor Untermensch, the expert on hieroglyphics.  The book has a parody Frenchman, a sort of combination of Jacques Derrida and Claude Levi-Strauss.  There’s a little touch of P. G. Wodehouse and more than a little reminder of Waugh as the museum employee at the bottom of the food chain is the one singled out for an intrigue-filled trip to Moscow, where he uncovers the real Golden Child artifacts and the international Cold War politics that dictate that a fake one be sent to England.  The British ambassador to Garamantia, where the Golden Child came from, is, according to the museum director, “Pombo Greene, whom I have known, since he was in my election at Eton, to be exceptionally foolish and incompetent.”

            The book has an orthodox mystery plot with a couple of murders, but its strength is social comedy, and its conclusion is a farcical scene which satisfies our desire for poetic justice.  Fitzgerald died in 2002, shortly after this book was reissued in a Mariner paperback.  It’s her only mystery.