Female Academic Detectives
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is such a thing - and Beth fights for its integrity. Finally, it seems that the mysteries
she becomes involved in are, for Beth, a way of becoming part of a temporary
community - a community of people trying to solve or concerned about the crime.
In The George Eliot Murders, for example, Beth becomes part of a Hawaii hotel
community, and more specifically, a small community of tennis players, whom
she observes carefully in order to narrow down the list of suspects for a brutal
murder. Of course, since she cannot be sure whom to trust, this kind of “crime
solving community” is not a close or lasting community - but it does represent
well one kind of complex interrelation and interdependence between individual
and community in these novels: Beth has to remain an individual critical thinker,
has to remain on her guard, in order to help achieve what is ultimately good for the
community.
J.S. Borthwick’s Sarah Deane resembles Beth in her propensity to become a
part of the community she temporarily works and sleuths in. Since the only other
constants we meet from her life are Alex and her aunt Julia, we can’t tell whether
communities of friends, neighbors, or organized groups play much of a role for
her. When Beth and Sarah investigate academic mysteries, they both help restore
the academic/collegial community into a more cohesive and peaceful place - but
they also expose and critique problems in this community (or at least the novels
expose them for us): in The Mark Twain Murders, academic rivalries, the pressure
to publish, student exploitation, and inconsistent applications of plagiarism penal
ties; in The Student Body, professorial incompetence, clearly delineated academic
hierarchies, and various petty rivalries and jealousies.
Karen Pelletier also works in the service of an academic community, both by
helping to restore “order” or effecting change, often by exposing academic pres
sures and politics. In Quieter Than Sleep, the killer she helps catch is an unproduc
tive senior female scholar, threatened by the content and speed of her colleagues’
research (the murder victim’s discovery of a Dickinson letter throws years of her
research into question). While this solution to the mystery constitutes an ironic
critique of individual professors’ idiosyncrasies, it also attacks the old academic
“publish or perish” syndrome - it blames not only the individual, but also institu
tional priorities. The Raven and the Nightingale has Karen involved in another com
bined critique and defense of “the academic community”: she helps find the killer
of the colleague she disagrees with, but she also has some sympathy for this killer,
who turns out to be an adjunct instructor desperate to land a tenure track job in a
tight job market. Once again, her intention of restoring order in her academic com
munity does not signify full support for the politics ad ideology of this community.
Nowhere is this dynamic more noticeable than in the Kate Fansler mysteries.
While not all of her mysteries involve crimes in academia, those that do allow her
to fight for those aspects of the “academic community” she believes in, while also