UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End (2008)

            I went to a concert in the late sixties to see a Canadian singing duo called Ian and Sylvia. One of their original songs, “Four Strong Winds,” had been high on the charts a few years before. When they started this song, the audience began to sing it, and when Ian and Sylvia Tyson tried to change the words in the third verse, they were drowned out by the crowd’s singing of the lyrics that had been on the record. Just whose song was it, I wondered at the time.

            This question of who really owns a creative project like a song or in this case a book’s characters, is taken up by Karen Joy Fowler in her 2008 mystery, Wit’s End. In this book, Rima Lansill, saddened and confused by the deaths of her mother, father, and younger brother, arrives at Wit’s End, the Santa Cruz shoreline house of her godmother, the mystery writer Addison Early. She comes for a kind of rest cure and stays to solve a mystery.

            The mystery is partly what the relationship was between Rima’s father and Addison, a relationship that would prompt Addison to put Rima’s father in one of her mysteries as a serial killer, complete with his real name. But there’s also a stalker who haunts the coast house and who may or may not be the same woman who writes fan letters to Addison’s fictional detective and who may or may not have grown up in a cult called the Holy City with the person who inspired the character of the detective.

            At the house called Wit’s End, Rima encounters a cast of eccentrics that includes Tilda the tattooed cook, her unpleasant son Martin, the dog walkers Scorch and Cody, and various strangers who have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction. The detective in Addison’s books becomes a regular visitor in Rima’s dreams, and she finds herself drawn into an investigation that puts her in danger from those who have been deranged by their bizarre and violent past.

            Karen Joy Fowler has had several bestselling books, the most recent being The Jane Austen Book Club. She’s not really a mystery writer. What I mean by that is that her attention is always less with pacing Rima’s discoveries and clearly elucidating the mystery, always more with the developing new social order at Wit’s End, as well as whether and how Rima will fit into it. As she has shown from previous books, some of which combine historical and science fiction, she’s a little bit of a genre bender. But she kept me reading with a really ingratiating style that is often funny and never mistakes sarcasm for wit.

 

Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle: or, the Whole Art of Storytelling (2012)

             Dirda discovered Sherlock Holmes when he was a boy and says of reading The Hound of the Baskervilles for the first time “I shivered with fearful pleasure, scrunched further down in under my thick blanket…as happy as I will ever be.” He goes back and forth between his own experience with Conan Doyle’s writing and description of his life.

            The young Dirda in Lorrain, Ohio finds the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes which keeps him busy for a while. In the course of his going to college at nearby Oberlin, moving on to graduate school at Cornell, and ending up, after some teaching and translating, finding his niche reviewing for the Washington Post’s Book World, he expands his reading to Conan Doyle’s other works, including his historical novel The White Company and his “club tales” narrated by Brigadier Gerard (“comically naïve, charmingly vain, and absolutely convinced that every woman finds him irresistible”). Dirda’s grasp of Conan Doyle’s oeuvre is wide and deep, though he confesses to not having read everything. He notes the author’s efforts to find justice for the unjustly accused George Edalji and Oscar Slater. He also notes Conan Doyle’s thirteen books on Spiritualism and the one arguing for the existence of fairies. He has read the stories, mostly based on Doyle’s and other doctors’ experience, in Round the Red Lamp, as well as his book on books, Through the Magic Door, and autobiography, Memories and Adventures.

            Dirda got involved with The Baker Street Irregulars, the club that originated so-called “Sherlockian scholarship”—the whole tongue-in-cheek field of writing about Holmes and Watson as if they were real people. Something too much of this, here, but the book is entertaining and informative (I didn’t know about the “club tales,” for instance) for those of us who have been lifelong Holmes fans.

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.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Amanda Cross [Carolyn Heilbrun], In the Last Analysis (1964)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

             Kate Fansler teaches literature at an unnamed private university in New York. A student of hers, Janet Harrison, asks her to recommend a psychiatrist. The year is 1962, and psychiatry is all the rage. Fansler is not sure she believes in psychiatrists, but she has slept with one, and she gives her student the name of her former lover, Dr. Emanuel Bauer. Several months later Fansler discovers that Janet Harrison has been found, murdered, on Emanuel Bauer’s couch.

            It appears that the police have no intention of investigating the murder beyond finding more evidence to incriminate their only suspect, Dr. Bauer. Fansler decides to do a little investigating herself. She enlists the aid of an old friend, Reed Amherst, who is an Assistant District Attorney, and she is also helped by Jerry, a young man about to marry her niece.  Fansler figures out that Janet learned a secret about the offices Dr. Bauer shares with other doctors. Specifically, she discovered that the gynecologist in the adjoining office is not in fact Dr. Michael Barrister, whose name is on the door. Harrison, it turns out, had once been the real Barrister's lover. So the book, in the last analysis, is very much a tale of former lovers.

            A literary allusion to D.H.Lawrence's The Rainbow tips Fansler off to the truth.  And that’s fitting because Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, an English literature scholar who taught for many years at Columbia. In 1972 Heilbrun became the first woman tenured and promoted to a full professorship at Columbia, a fact and a date that implies a good deal of resistance to women and an old school, old boy network at that university. Not surprisingly, Heilbrun became a feminist.

            In the Last Analysis was the first of Heilbrun’s Kate Fansler mysteries, and for a time only the publishers knew the identity of these books’ author. By the time Heilbrun was revealed as Amanda Cross, she had tenure, and there couldn’t be any reprisals for some of the highly unflattering depictions of her colleagues that show up in her books. Heilbrun wrote fourteen Kate Fansler novels in all, and this first one is less concerned with academic life than most of the others. The series ended with The Edge of Doom, published a year before her death. She also wrote books of literary criticism and personal books about writing, about being a woman author

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932)

             The first known mystery novel written by an African-American is Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem.  Fisher wrote it in 1932, and it was reprinted a few years ago by the University of Michigan Press. In it Dr. Archer, a Harlem physician, is summoned at about eleven one evening to a house across 130th Street from his own, where a psychic with the comic name Frimbo has apparently been killed.

            A black homicide detective named Perry Dart is called in, and he and Archer together investigate the murder, interrogating the usual small list of suspects, including a numbers runner, the undertaker whose parlor is on the ground floor of the psychic’s office, the undertaker’s beautiful young wife, a Pullman porter for the New York-Chicago Twentieth-Century Limited, and a drug addict who thinks Frimbo has put a spell on his dying brother and who admits to trying to put a murderous spell on Frimbo. All those present mention the psychic’s hired man, who ushered his clients in and out of the psychic’s presence; this man has apparently disappeared, and we clever readers begin to suspect that perhaps he doesn’t exist; perhaps the psychic did his own reception work in disguise.  The truth turns out to be a little more complicated, however.

            Fisher includes a man seemingly resurrected from the dead, plenty of disguise, the use of blood testing and dental records to establish identity, a love triangle, and a Harvard-educated African tribal chief.

            The story wouldn’t pass the rules of fair-play detective mysteries, where all the suspects have to be part of the action from the beginning, but there’s hardly a dull moment.  The language is frank for the most part, and the view from the inside of black Harlem society of theaters, poolrooms and psychic parlors is fascinating, as is the view of Africa as something exotic and unknown.  There are a few—not many—topical references, among them one to Lindbergh’s flight, one only to the Depression, and one to a “television receptor” in Frimbo’s up-to-date laboratory.  But the book is fun because it’s a real period-piece.  It feels like the thirties not because its author is trying to recreate an era, but because he’s really writing in the thirties, so the speech of black Harlem and all the slang rings true. 

            Rudolph Fisher was a doctor who wrote novels and short stories.  He lived in Harlem and on Long Island, and he is generally considered one of the core figures of the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties.  He died a couple of years after The Conjure-Man Dies was published.  This is his only attempt at mystery fiction.