The James Joyce Murder, by Amanda Cross

To the first reader of this--and other things





Note:
The Friends of Mr. Cairo shares dedications (if any) made in various mystery novels.
For book reviews, please visit our blog:Topical Murder and Dated Death

Poetic Justice, by Amanda Cross

Note
It will, of course, be obvious to every reader
that the quotations at the heads of the chapters,
and most of the poetry scatterd reverently
throughout this work,
are from the writings of W.H. Auden.
The author is grateful to Random House, Inc.,
for its permission to quote from the
copyrighted woriks of Mr. Auden


Note:The focus of The Friends of Mr. Cairo has changed. This blog will now share dedications (if any) made in various mystery novels.For book reviews, please visit our blog:Topical Murder and Dated Death

Sweet Death, Kind Death, by Amanda Cross

For David Hadas
To mark a quarter-century of conversations
about death and life


Note:The focus of The Friends of Mr. Cairo has changed. This blog will now share dedications (if any) made in various mystery novels.For book reviews, please visit our blog:Topical Murder and Dated Death

The Players Come Again, by Amanda Cross

To Grace K. Baruch
1936-1988

Note:The focus of The Friends of Mr. Cairo has changed. This blog will now share dedications (if any) made in various mystery novels.For book reviews, please visit our blog:Topical Murder and Dated Death

Amanda Cross: The Collected [Short] Stories

Amanda Cross is the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun (1926 - 2003). Heilbrun was a professor of English at Columbia University until she retired in 1993. Throughout her career, and after her retirement, she wrote scholarly books in her field. But she had a secret sideline, she was also a mystery writer.

In 1964, she began writing mystery stories using a pseudonym. Her main character is Kate Fansler, a professor of English at a New York college, who is independently wealthy, and who becomes involved in mysteries of a literary -- and of a feminist -- nature. Some times there are murders involved, at other times she is just investigating mysterious disapperances.

There are 14 Kate Fansler novels, and 9 short stories featuring her. All of the stories are collected in The Collected Stories, as well as one extra featuring a "one off" story, to bring the number of stories in the anthology to ten. Cross began writing these stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1987.

In order to fully appreciate these stories, you do reallly need to know a little bit about Kate Fansler's background, or at least, the style in which Cross writes. The stories are very literary, and the characters act in ways that [probably] real life people would not act (but who knows, in today's times?)

If you are a fan of Isaac Asimov's Black Widower stories, you will probably like these. Asimov also, particularly later in the series, used the slightest of hooks on which to hang one of those stories. (I'm not damning with faint praise...they are still fun to read, but again, they are stories taht just wouldn't happen in real life. But that's why we love them!)

Tania's Nowhere - Kate Fansler's niece Leighton narrates this story, inthe manner of Watson sharing the explots of Holmes. Leighton is supposed to be in her early twenties and has the precise prose of a woman in her 60s, the only drawback on that score. However, the story itself is disapppointing - the weakest one in the collection. It has elements of one of Cross's novels, No Word From Winifred. Tania Finslip, a 62-year old happily married college professor, has disappeared, and no one can find her, until Kate figures out the mystery. I found the denoument unconvincing.

The rest of the stories are more agreeable, if not more realistic.

Once Upon A Time - A family is staying in a house for the summer in a nice, safe residential area. Four children are playing a game of badminton in the yard, when a toddler comes out of the woods and toward them, clad only in diaper and shirt. The children take the baby into the house, and the parents decide to give it to a childless couple whom they know. Twenty years later, the toddler comes to Kate Fansler to find out who her biological parents were, and why she was found in such odd circumstances.

Arrie and Jasper - Jasper is a dog, a Jack Russell terrier, and he's been kidnapped. Arrie is a twelve-year old girl who comes to Kate for help. Her sister, much older, had been a student of Kate's. Kate, who doesnt' like children, nevertheless likes Arrie, who is very mature for her age, and she visits Arrie's home to do a little investigating, because the mystery deepends, even as Jasper reappares. Eventually Kate finds out the truth.

The Disappearance of Great Aunt Flavia - Women in Amanda Cross stories do have a tendency to disappear without telling anyone where they're going, but these types of stories usually have happy endings, and so it is in this case. Aunt Flavia, who has learned that old women are really, invisible, unremarked and unnoticed by a society that cares only for the young, disappears. Where is she, and what is she doing? This story echoes one of the themes of another Kate Fansler novel, The Imperfect Spy, and perhaps even how Amanda Cross herself felt about society's appreciation for the young and unappreciation of the old.

Murder Without A Text - One of only two stories in the collection with a murder, it's another visitation on the theme that one old woman looks like another to the young. A Professor of English, who had been giving a class to ten students who disliked her and whom she disliked, is on trial for the murder of one of them. They all believe she's guilty. She proclaims her innocence. The reader wonders if Carolyn Heilbrun had had to deal with such students in her teaching days - they do seem incredibly rude, but in the 1970s, that's perhaps how students acted.

Who Shot Mrs. Byron Boyd - Two mystery writers, one a male chauvanist male and the other a feminist writer (not unlike Cross herself) are on a panel at a mystery convention. Mrs. Byron Boyd, the emcee, is shot from the crowd, and dies. Why? The motive for the murder seems to be too slight, but nevertheless it's a fun read.

The Proposition - Kate receives a letter from an old friend, who has now become a nun and lives in a convent in Texas. The convent has very few treasures, but one treasure they did have was a painting called "The Proposition." According to Cross, who got her information from Women Artists 1550-1950,

While paintings and prints showing men making indecent proposals to women were common in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a work portraying a woman who has clearly not invited such an invitation and refuses to accept ii is unique." [Readers learn such esoteric things when they read an Amanda Cross work!]

The painting has disappeared, and Kate's friend asks her to help them get it back. Kate eventually succeeds.

The George Elliot Play - Most mystery novels that deal with found plays usually deal with a Shakespeare play - finding a lost one would be worth a fortune - but Amanda Cross, ever the feminist, chooses as the engine of her story a George Elliot play. It's fun.

The Baroness - The final story in the collection, and the only on e not to feature Kate Fansler. Instead, it is a first person narrative by Anne, who has been the lifelong friend of Phyllida, a woman who is now a British peer. Phyllida summons her to England, where she tells her friend that she is the accidental possessor of a stolen painting. How can she return it to its rightful owner. A story that may - just may - have been plausible in the 80s and even 90s, but is impossible now, with the strictures of search that most plane travelers have to got through these days... still, another fun story.

In The Last Analysis (1964)
The James Joyce Murder (1967)
Poetic Justice (1970)
The Theban Mysteries (1971)
The Question of Max (1976)
Death in a Tenured Position (1981)
Sweet Death, Kind Death (1984)
No Word From Winifred (1986)
A Trap for Fools (1989)
The Players Come Again (1990)
An Imperfect Spy (1995)
The Collected Stories (1997)
The Puzzled Heart (1998)
Honest Doubt (2000)
The Edge of Doom (2002)

The James Joyce Murder, by Amanda Cross

The James Joyce Murder (1967) is the second of fourteen Kate Fansler mysteries, a series that began in 1964 with In the Last Analysis, and ended in 2002 with The Edge of Doom.

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.