Customer Reviews

Poetic Justice

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This is one of Amanda Cross's best, wittiest, best conceived mysteries. The characters are well drawn and three dimensional. Some of her descriptions were so true to type that I laughed until I cried. It may be her most literary novel. Each chapter is introduced by a quotation from the great English poet, W.H. Auden and Auden is present --though generally in absentia -- throughout the novel. The mysterious death of one of the University's most bigoted faculty members is presented against an accurate picture of University politics, during the Columbia student revolt of the last '60s. (The author, AKA Carolyn G. Heilbrun, is Professor Emeritus from Columbia, where she was awarded an endowed Chair in Humanities after teaching Victorian literature for many years.) Lionel Trilling, the great American literary critic and scholar appears, thinly disguised as "Frederick Cremance." Trilling/Cremance coined and popularized the expression "the life of the mind." Heinlein was one of his students, though he doubted that women were capable of having a "life of the mind." As Kate Fansler she has an opportunity to challenge him at long last. The writing is graceful, literary and tasteful.

This novel is set during the turbulent student uprisings. Kate is charged with saving the University College, sort of like NYU's New School, primarily for adults returning to finish their education. The powers that be do not want the school to continue, the reasons are not clear. The leader of the movement is Professor Cudlipp, a stereotypical academic snob, he appears in all of these novels in one form or another. Predictably, he is murdered and Kate and Reed are bound to find out the truth.

I usually enjoy these academic mysteries, but this one is just too dated for my taste. The radicals of this time were the repressed conservative professors of my time, and this mystery doesn't age as well as her others. The writing and mystery are still fine, but the setting is old fashioned, but not enough to be historical or quaint yet.

Academic novels are often great fun, but this one is rather laboured. Did academics in English literature around 1970 quote poetry as often as this suggests? That would've been motive enough for more fatal pills.