“Emily gave a curt nod. ‘Then it seems to me we have a real mystery on our hands.’”
So ends the seventh chapter of Because I Could Not Stop For Death, an Emily Dickinson Mystery by USA Today bestselling novelist Amanda Flower (there’s one more, I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died). Flower has swiveled from the cozy to the historical mystery genre, but there are still tropes of the cozy in this one––all violence offstage, and no sexual advances from the narrator’s marriage-minded suitor. The narrator is not Dickinson but a fictional maid hired to assist the historical one, Maggie O’Brien. Willa Noble’s brother has died, and Willa suspects his death was no accident. A visit to the stable where he worked ends with the quote from Willa’s mistress.
The pre-cloistral Dickinson in Flowers’ novel gets a faraway look in her eye when she murmurs to herself or thinks about words that might form a poem. She’s keen on her family’s status, but willing to chum with her maid and with a Black stable hand. Everyone who’s anyone in Amherst is involved with the Underground Railroad, and the mystery turns on a citizen who’s betraying what is called, unironically, the Cause. The novel is historically accurate to the Dickinson family’s time line, but any further accuracy is confounded by unbelievable dialogue and simplified characters who make a serious reader of Dickinson wince. Lavinia, who saved her sister’s writing and was the prime instigator of its publication, is portrayed as a hausfrau-in-training tidying up, throwing away scraps on which Dickinson wrote verse. Father is not an eclipse but doting, though stern.
The novel is a species of fan fiction, and its existence claims a still-potent fan base for Dickinson the icon. A few lines of poetry are scattered in its pages, along with the character’s compositional reverie. The book makes me wonder what other American writers might make a good fictional detective. Walt Whitman––investigative reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle? Or, while taking dictation from a dying soldier, does he discover a plot to poison General Grant?
I could see Edith Wharton snooping around Lenox, MA while writing The House of Mirth. How about Thoreau finding a body on the train tracks while strolling from his nearby Walden cabin–– wouldn’t Ralph Waldo make a perfect Watson? Then Lidian Emerson, thought to be Thoreau’s crush, could be the apex of a cozy triangle. The possibilities are endless.
The New York Times Book Review noted that this year marks the 100th anniversary of Dorothy Sayers’ first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body? Sayers’ scion of the nobility is a shell-shocked WW I veteran, and his urge to turn detective reflects a need to manage the chaos he suffered through. Did Sayers and other women crime novelists of that “golden age”––Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham—feel compelled to create one small corner of a predictable moral universe after the carnage of the Great War? I’ve come to see my own habit of reading detective stories from the 1920s and 30s, along with books from the later 20th and current century, as a craving for certainty––however fictional––in our own deranged times.