Why do we not talk about the Kate Fansler mysteries these days? Contemporary readers are missing out on a wonderful character, sound plots, and witty, literate writing. These books are positive gems.
I read the series years ago and found a copy of the second one recently. Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003), an accomplished academic during a time women struggled to be taken seriously within the ivory towers. She was professor at Columbia University, the first woman to receive tenure in the English department, and a prolific feminist author of scholarly studies. In addition to writing or editing 14 nonfiction books, she received Guggenheim, Bunting Institute, and Rockefeller Fellowships and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellow in 1983. She received the Writer of Distinction Award from the National Council for Research on Women in 1990.
Heilbrun’s detective Kate Fansler is also a professor of English at an unnamed New York university. She often speaks for Heilbrun in deploring the rampant misogyny of academia and its willingness to publish anything, regardless of its actual scholarly value. Heilbrun wrote 14 Fansler mysteries and a collection of short stories under the name Amanda Cross to keep her fiction separate from her employment, something the authors who used the pen name Emma Lathen also found necessary. She successfully hid her real name for years.
Kate Fansler’s debut In the Last Analysis (Macmillan, 1964) was shortlisted for the 1965 Edgar for Best First Novel. Her follow-up The James Joyce Murder (Macmillan, 1967) is a literary delight laden with references to The Dubliners, a collection of short stories by Joyce, which makes sense as Fansler is sorting the extensive correspondence of Joyce’s US publisher. She has taken up residence in the publisher’s country home in western Massachusetts, far from her beloved New York City, in a tiny town called Araby, the name of one of the stories in The Dubliners. The chapters are also named after the stories and many character names are repeated. But knowledge of Joyce and his works are not necessary to the enjoyment of this fine mystery.
Kate hired a graduate student to catalog the letters, which universities and researchers are clamoring to examine. She also has her 12-year-old nephew Leo with her for the summer, and she hired another graduate student to tutor Leo when he is not attending the camp down the road. The unconventional household quickly becomes the target of a neighbor who is the bane of the town’s existence. Mary Bradford is gossipy and inquisitive and an all-round nuisance. She became the natural target of Leo’s morning target shooting, which was undertaken with an unloaded gun. Kate knew about the unloaded gun, she did not know Leo was aiming at their neighbor until an unknown someone loaded the gun and Leo killed Mary Bradford.
The gun could have been loaded by almost anyone but there was no way to hide the fact that Leo actually pulled the trigger. Keeping her nephew out of the Massachusetts criminal justice system became Kate’s immediate goal. The obvious villain wasn’t the killer after all but he did have a surprising secret. The method used to make the killer reveal himself was ingenious.
Anthony Boucher praised the book in his “Criminals at Large” column in the New York Times of 19 March 1967: “Amanda Cross has had a wonderful time planting special clues and allusions for Joycean specialists in THE JAMES JOYCE MURDER (Macmillan, $3.95); and probably if you write to Macmillan, they will send you a copy of the diabolic examination she has set for her more learned readers. (I flunked badly.) She has also written a highly attractive specimen of the leisurely and witty academic mystery novel, much like her M.W.A.-scroll-winning In the Last Analysis (1965; Avon, paper 50 cents). Not for action enthusiasts, but a happy souvenir of a once more popular school, which I still find delightful.”
I would also have failed the Joyce test. However, I loved the wide-ranging literary references lavishly sprinkled throughout. I cannot imagine how the names of these disparate authors could possibly end up in any other work: Henry James, Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, Ngaio Marsh, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Evelyn Waugh, Chaucer, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Frank Harris. I am sure I missed a few. In addition, there was a sly shoutout to Edmund Wilson, American critic, who published a controversial essay in the January 1945 New Yorker called “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”
An English major’s delight and a fine puzzle for almost any mystery reader. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.