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Michael
Cohen
Michael
Cohen is Professor Emeritus at Murray State University. His
book, Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery
Fiction, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
in 2000.
Jill
Paton Walsh, The Bad Quarto (St. Martin's, 2007)
Listen
to the audio of this commentary here.
Imogen
Quy is the college nurse of a fictional college at Cambridge
named St. Agatha's. She moves into the quarters of the dead
Professor Talentire, who apparently killed himself by taking
the foolish leap, known as Harding's Folly, between his fourth
story college rooms and the ledge of the library nearby. There's
quite a lot in this book about the culture of climbers at Oxford
and Cambridge: undergraduates, usually, who climb the seemingly
impossible sheer faces of towers and turrets in these old college
towns. Quy becomes involved with a college dramatic society
that's in serious financial trouble.
A
rich undergraduate offers to bail out the society if the players
will let him act the lead role in Hamlet. The artistic director,
horrified at the idea but outvoted by the other members, picks
the text of Hamlet known as the Bad Quarto. It was the first
printed version of the play, in the ordinary size that the book
people call a quarto, and it's called bad because it's generally
thought to be an unauthorized version of the play, put together
from memory by actors from a rival company who went to see the
play in order to steal it. The Bad Quarto is only half as long
as the other versions of Hamlet we have; so the artistic director
thinks a production with an amateur in the lead will be only
half as painful with this version.
When
the play is performed, the Bad Quarto turns out to be not so
bad, the amateur undergraduate's performance is not the disaster
the director feared, but most surprising of all, the play within
the play, which Hamlet arranges in order to accuse his uncle
of murder, is used by the undergraduate for a very different
purpose: it not only suggests the death of Professor Tarentire
was murder, but it directly accuses another English professor
of the crime. Many mystery writers have used Shakespeare for
titles, quotes, and plot inspiration; Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens,
Michael Innes's Hamlet, Revenge! and John Dickson Carr's Panic
in Box C are constructed around performances of Macbeth, Hamlet,
and Romeo and Juliet.
I'm
not sure Jill Paton Walsh is quite in the same league with those
folks, but she manages to keep us wondering whether the professor's
fall was really murder and, if so, who did it. This is the fourth
book Walsh has written about Imogen Quy, though some of you
may know her better for having written Thrones, Dominations,
starting with a manuscript Dorothy Sayers left unfinished at
her death. Since that book she has published yet another Lord
Peter Wimsey novel on her own. The Bad Quarto will appeal to
you if you like backstage mysteries, academic mysteries, or
the gentle sort of murder mystery perfected by the English and
often known as the British cozy.
James
L. Swanson, Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer
(2006; rpt. Harper 2007)
Listen
to the audio of this commentary here.
James
Swanson tells us his method in a preface to Manhunt: The Twelve
Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer: he says "all text appearing
within quotation marks comes from original sources." It is the
strength and also probably the weakness of the book that he
believed everybody. But it means he can narrate almost everything
that happened from Lincoln's second inauguration (where a photograph
shows John Wilkes Booth quite near the president on the reviewing
stand) through the assassination and the following manhunt.
Where
his sources are silent, Swanson does not speculate about what
might have happened or have been said; he reverts to physical
evidence such as the architecture of the presidential box at
Ford's theater or the clothes and blankets of the fugitives.
Swanson fills in details about the people in Booth's circle:
George Atzerodt, who was supposed to kill Vice-President Johnson
but ran away; Lewis Powell, also known as Payne, who did attempt
to kill Secretary of State Seward; and David Herold, who was
holding a horse for Powell and escaped when Powell was pursued,
eventually accompanying Booth for the full twelve days of his
attempted escape to the South.
Secretary
of War Stanton's role in the manhunt was important, and there
are many detectives and army officers who figure in it. The
man who shot Booth, Boston Corbett, was a religious fanatic
who had castrated himself; he would eventually be institutionalized
after holding hostage the entire Kansas House of Representatives,
where he was employed as sergeant at arms. Swanson traces Booth's
escape route from the time he convinced a sentry to let him
cross the Navy Yard Bridge into Maryland to his day at Dr. Samuel
Mudd's farm, his week hiding in a pine thicket near Thomas Jones'
farm, his abortive crossing and then successful crossing of
the Potomac, and his betrayal by the Garretts at their farm.
There
seems to be little mystery here: the Federal forces knew whom
they were chasing, almost from the beginning. But not clear
at the time was the extent and the motive of the conspiracy,
and some details are still not clear. Mary Suratt, the Washington
boardinghouse owner who was hanged along with Atzerodt, Powell,
and Herold, probably was innocent; her son John, on the other
hand, probably was involved, but because he was not tried until
long after the events, his trial ended in a hung jury and he
was released.
Dr.
Mudd, who definitely was involved in the earlier conspiracy,
was given a prison sentence and later pardoned. The earlier
conspiracy was a plan not to kill Lincoln but to kidnap him
and hold him for ransom as a way of saving the southern cause.
It now seems likely that when Booth once got people to agree,
even half-heartedly, to the kidnapping, he used their commitment
to blackmail them into helping him afterwards. Swanson keeps
this story interesting for almost four hundred pages.
Sebastian
Junger, A Death in Belmont (Norton, 2006)
Listen
to the audio of this commentary here.
You
may remember Sebastian Junger as the author of The Perfect Storm,
his book about the 1991 Halloween storm in the Atlantic that
killed crews aboard fishing vessels and caused billions of dollars
of damage. In A Death in Belmont, published in 2006, Junger
writes a true-life mystery about a murder that took place in
Belmont, a suburb of Boston where his family lived when Sebastian
was only a year old. In the fall and winter of 1962-63, Sebastian
Junger's mother Ellen, who lived with her husband and one-year-old
Sebastian in Belmont, employed a builder and his two assistants
to add a studio to their house.
One
of the two workers was Albert DeSalvo, who eventually confessed
to most of the murders the papers were calling those of the
Boston Strangler. Before they were finished with the building,
and on a day when DeSalvo had spent a short time by himself
on finishing work in the new studio, a woman was strangled just
a few blocks away. The pattern of the crime was like that of
the murders to which DeSalvo eventually confessed, although
his confession did not mention this particular killing. In the
meanwhile, a black man named Roy Smith, who had worked as a
housecleaner at the murdered woman's home that day, was arrested,
tried, and convicted of the murder. When DeSalvo was later caught
and confessed to a number of stranglings, no attempt was made
to implicate him in the Belmont killing or to overturn the Smith
conviction.
DeSalvo
was stabbed to death in a prison hospital in November, 1973,
ten years after Roy Smith's conviction. Roy Smith died of lung
cancer in another prison hospital in 1976. Junger cannot prove
that Smith was innocent and DeSalvo guilty of the Belmont strangling
(the way it was told to him by his parents when he was a child),
and during his investigation of the crimes and the people involved
he is not always convinced that that is the way it happened,
but he seems to end with that conviction, though he admits it
cannot be proved. For my money, Junger is more convincing at
showing that Roy Smith is very unlikely to have committed the
crime than he is of proving that DeSalvo did it, but DeSalvo
left very little evidence at some of his crimes.
Without
his confession, some of them would have been difficult or impossible
to successfully prosecute him for. Junger reawakens some of
the horror of the time, partly by making it personal, recording
how on more than one occasion his mother was alone in the house
with the Boston Strangler.
J. A. Jance, Desert Heat (Avon, 1993)
listen
to the audio of this commentary here.
Joanna Brady is Judy Jance's Arizona
detective, forced into that role in this first book of the series
when her husband, a Cochise County sheriff's deputy, is murdered
and his death made to look like a suicide. Worse, there is evidence
that Andy Brady was also involved in drug smuggling. Jance was
not new to mystery writing when she published Desert Heat in
1993; she already had ten books in a series about a Seattle
detective named J. P. Beaumont. But the setting of this book
returns to the area where she grew up, in southeastern Arizona,
in the copper-mining town of Bisbee and the surrounding Cochise
County. Part of the book is set in Tucson as well, and since
I grew up in southern Arizona, I keep trying to read mysteries
set there, just because it's pleasant to come across familiar
places when I'm allowing my imagination to inhabit the scene
of a book.
Unfortunately, not every Southwestern
author writes like Tony Hillerman, and I have put down quite
a few of these local mysteries after ten or twenty pages of
mediocre writing. Jance is a good writer, though, and a good
deal of the interest I found in this book is in the way she
has constructed it. The book has a structure I would call comic.
I don't mean that it's funny, but rather that it has a plot
arrangement that shows up in Shakespearean as well as classical
Greek and Roman comedy. Before the reputation of the good guy
even begins to be threatened by the bad things he seems to have
done, we have already been shown that someone other than the
villain knows the truth and can eventually reveal it. This is
reassuring for the audience or the reader.
So it may be a test for Joanna Brady
to continue to believe in her husband with each new revelation
that seems to incriminate him, but we readers never doubt him
and know the truth will out. In Shakespeare's Much Ado About
Nothing, for instance, we know that the accusation against the
beautiful young heroine will come to nothing because the police
have already captured the drunken bunglers who helped to manufacture
the evidence against her. In Desert Heat, Jance concentrates
on two characters, Joanna Brady and the woman who has unwittingly
become mixed up with Andy Brady's killer. In different ways,
each finds more strength of character than she thought herself
capable of.
And if you want to know how the series
will continue, let me give you this hint: Joanna Brady's father
was sheriff of Cochise County, and her husband Andy was running
for sheriff when he was killed. As one of the characters says,
"sometimes the best man for the job is a woman."
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