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

           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, and about aging. Heilbrun committed suicide at the age of 77 in 2003.

           

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Anthony Berkeley [Anthony Berkeley Cox], The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929)

           In “The Avenging Chance,” a short story published earlier in 1929, novelist and amateur detective Roger Sheringham finds a murderer for his friend Chief Inspector Moresby. A man sends poisoned chocolates to a friend, then induces the friend to give him the chocolates. He cleverly eats several himself, becoming sick but not dying, having already given them to his wife, who does die. The novel adds the fiction of the Crimes Club, a fictional model of The Detection Club that Berkeley had founded the year before with Christie and others. The same facts about the murder are presented by Moresby to the six members of the club, and then Sheringham challenges everyone to solve the crime. They come to six different conclusions, pointing out the arbitrariness of the usual mystery solution, where any one of a closed circle of suspects could have committed the crime. One of the club members accuses another member of the crime, another accuses himself, adding that he could as easily pin it on the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the President of the United States. Sheringham’s solution, the same as that of the short story, is demolished by the next presenter, a brilliant woman novelist who turns out to be the murderer. The last presenter produces a chart, the mainstay of so many classical mystery stories, but this chart, instead of being helpful, shows that each of the known facts Moresby related was used for half a different deductions by the members of the club.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: K. C. Constantine, The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes (1982)

            Mario Balzic is Chief of the Rockford Police Department. This little western Pennsylvania town used to be supported by a big bituminous coal mine, and the mine’s closure has caused plenty of problems for the residents, or in some cases, like that of Jimmy Romanelli, the loss of work has revealed character flaws that are going to end in tragedy. When Jimmy goes missing, his wife Frances starts calling Chief Mario every couple of hours.

            It’s a largely working-class town with many first-generation immigrants among the older population, and in the mixture of Greek and Italian and Eastern European and other groups, Mario feels at home. He is half Italian and half Serb; moreover, his father was a mine union organizer. But he begins this investigation with a guilty conscience, because Frances Romanelli’s father and Jimmy’s father-in-law is Mario’s own father’s old friend, Mike Fiori. Fiori was the mine organizer most feared in the old days by the mine owners, and Mario hasn’t visited Fiori since his father died.

            Mario, like his father before him, thinks something might be learned from Mike Fiori’s inflexible attitudes about union negotiation and his complete confidence in himself. Mario is engaged in negotiations, along with police union representatives, the mayor, and a particularly unpleasant city councilman, about the new police contract. And the chief has his father’s trait of seeing all sides in a dispute. This makes him a bad negotiator, though it also makes him a good coach of his young patrolmen at handling dangerous domestic disturbances. Unfortunately, the present case turns out to be a domestic disturbance that’s past handling.

            I had heard of this book before I picked it up and began reading it, but I was not aware at the time what a favorite of the critics it is. It shows up on several lists of best mysteries of the twentieth century, among them the one compiled by members of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. Critics compare the depiction of social class in Constantine to the books of John O’Hara. They say his handling of dialect and dialogue hasn’t been seen since the great crime writer George V. Higgins. Sometimes his recreation of milieu gets mentioned as reminiscent of The Sopranos, and his concentration on the workings of his main character’s mind reminds others of the Maigret books of Georges Simenon.

            K. C. Constantine is actually Carl Constantine Kosak, a writer about whose personal life we know little because he has the sense of privacy of a J. D. Salinger. We do know that between 1972 and 1999 he wrote fifteen books about Chief Mario and the other members of the Rocksburg Police Department, and that The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes is the fifth in that series. I think you’ll like it.