Kate Fansler is a professor of English literature at an unnamed New York college, who at the time of The James Joyce Murder, is dating a district attorney, Reed Amhearst. She is tall, soigne, and independently wealthy, with three brothers with whom she does not get along, as she is a feminist and they have old-fashioned views about women's place in the home.
At the beginning of The James Joyce Murder, Reed, who has been out of the country on business, tracks Kate down at a house in the country. She is fulfilling the wishes of the daughter of a recently deceased friend, who was a publishing giant back in the days of such famous writers as James Joyce. She is to go through a vast array of papers and decide which academic institutions should get which papers.
Also resident in the house is her young nephew, foisted upon her for the summer by one of her brothers. In order to take care of her nephew, Kate hires a tutor, William Lenehan, and another young man, Emmet Crawford, to help her sort through the papers.
Reed decides to stick around for a week or so, and at the same time, Kate has two visitors from New York, an aged female professor friend, and a younger female professor friend who is also in love with Emmet Crawford...who just happens to be celibate.
But this isn't a soap opera. Next door to the house is a farm, inhabited by an extremely irritating and noisy neighbor who is intent on causing trouble for everybody. Each morning, Wiliam and Leo practice shooting - with an empty rifle - at this neighbor, just for fun. Except one morning, someone has put a bullet into the rifle, and William's aim is true. The neighbor dies.
Was it a practical joke gone wrong, or did someone hope to murder the woman by proxy? That is what Kate Fansler and Reed Amhearst have to find out.
Mary Bradford - the murdered woman - has a lot of enemies, and Kate's task is by no means an easy one.
I am a fan of the books of Amanda Cross (although I believe her early books are much better than her later ones, which are more like feminist tracks with the mystery grafted on) but her works do have limitations. They are puzzles. Character development is non-existant. The books are very wordy...there can be three pages of dialog, and all her characters do tend to sound alike. I'm not saying that you get confused by who is saying what - she's an expert writer and identifies each speaker...but she has to do this, otherwise you just wouldn't know!
Cross writes intellectual puzzles, and this one is quite enjoyable.
Here's a few paragraphs:
"Do you think Mr. Bradford would mind our intruding on him, especially today?"
"He's rather patient about it, actually. It seems to me Leo and William used to spend every afternoon down there at milking time, till they knew more about it than he did. Anyway, maybe we ought to be detecives and see how he's reacting. Shall we go? Across the fields, or down the road?"
"The road, I think," Grace said. "I understand how to cope with cars better than those dangers I know not of. With which, icidentally, the rural life seems to be replete. I have known many raging passions in my time, from naked ambition to naked lust, but no one has ended shooting anyone else, though a few to be sure have endfed their own lives. I blame it not on the greater inherent violence of rural life, but on the greater familiarity with guns and violent death. I expect after you have many times seen a deer or woodchuck blown to bits, the thought of a human being blown to bits is that much less impossible to conceive."
"Bradford once told me," Kate sai, "that there are no thefts around here precisely because everyone knpws that everyone has a gun, knows how to use it, and will use it."
"It does then, doesn't it," Grace asked, "sound rather as though someone would be likelier to grab a gun and shoot Mary Bradford out of sheer annoyance, rather than slip a bullet into someone else's gun? I mean, do you think this really sounds like a rural crime? It seems to me more the crime of a metaphoric mind."
"A Joycean mind?, you mean" Lina asked.
"Literary, anyway.""I don't follow that," said Kate. "It seems to me some rural type who hated her saw the chance of getting rid of her and took it. The fact that it would be involving a pack of nuts from the city in a hell of a lot of trouble simply added to the attraction of the method. Here comes a car."
The three of them stepped to the side of the road as the car, driven too fast by the inevitable adolescent mail, slowed only enough to permit the yelling back of some invitation seething with sarcasm. As the three of them returned to the road, Grace chuckled.
"Now in a piece of mystery fiction, that car would contain not howling adolescents, but adventure. Do you ready mystery stories?"
"Certainly," Kate said.
If you like literate and intelligent mysteries, you'll enjoy the Kate Fansler series. Give this one a try.
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