Two murder mysteries
Jan. 25th, 2025 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustJ. gave me Judith Woolf's The Case of the Campus Cat for Christmas: J. doesn't read crime fiction, but Judith Woolf is a friend of hers... The publisher appears to be just a step or so away from self-publishing, but there was nothing amateurish about the presentation of the book: on the contrary, I was wary of a certain slickness, a sense of buttons being pressed. So the title - like the cover (I rather like the cat on the cover) - announces that this is a cat-related crime, itself a flourishing genre; the back cover presents the odd-couple detective team (she is a literary scholar, he is a ten year old maths prodigy, together they ...); and just to be on the safe side, she's a lesbian.
None of these elements is a bad thing, but I was relieved to discover that although they are all present in the book, that doesn't tell you much about what kind of book it is. And I'm not going to say much about that, either, because it would be mean to deprive readers of the pleasure of finding out. Two caveats, though. The first is that if you are, indeed, looking for a nice cosy mystery featuring a cat, you should be warned that the cat does not come out of this well. The second is that although I have described The Case of the Campus Cat as a murder mystery, the murder comes quite a long way into the book, and is solved only in a generic way. Most of the detective work, and most of the emotion, the suspense, concerns the abduction of a baby. This is disconcerting, and I don't think it's inadvertent: given that the person who spots the vital clue and finds the missing child is not any of the people who is actively investigating, surely Woolf is playing with the expectations of her readers? If you are looking for a classic mystery in which the Great Detective gathers the suspects in the library and explains his deductive process, look elsewhere. If. on the other hand, you want the unexpected, and would like to spend some time being both entertained and moved, then The Case of the Campus Cat is worth a try.
The murdered woman is an anthropologist, who has worked with the Kainu, a (presumably fictional) tribal people of South America. This is an important strand of the book, although not one that the publisher chooses to emphasise. So I will say only that, for a number of specific reasons, when I finished the book I picked up Peter Dickinson's Skin Deep / The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, in which the surviving members of a tribe from New Guinea are living in a terraced house in London - and detective Jimmy Pibble is called in to investigate the murder of their chief. I'm always glad of an excuse to re-read Peter Dickinson, and this was far from my first re-read of The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, so it's no surprise that I still like it just as much as I expected. More of a surprise, though, was that the parallel is even stronger than I thought: in addition to the importance of a tribal group with a traumatic event in their past, there's the rôle of a young boy who - oh, that would be telling. Not so much a parallel as an echo, perhaps, is the presence of an exclusive Christian group, Woolf's Sealed Brethren and Dickinson's Pure People.
Both books are recommended, then, but I'm surprised to find myself issuing so many content warnings (very much not my habit). The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest was published in 1968, and is told largely from the point of view of Jimmy Pibble, "ageing, unglamourous, greying towards retirement." I can discern no racial prejudice in his relations with the Ku, but the vocabulary in which he thinks of them was old-fashioned even by the standards of 1968 - and some of the minor characters are worse. They are presented as completely in the wrong, but if you are distressed by the very presence of the words, brace yourself.
None of these elements is a bad thing, but I was relieved to discover that although they are all present in the book, that doesn't tell you much about what kind of book it is. And I'm not going to say much about that, either, because it would be mean to deprive readers of the pleasure of finding out. Two caveats, though. The first is that if you are, indeed, looking for a nice cosy mystery featuring a cat, you should be warned that the cat does not come out of this well. The second is that although I have described The Case of the Campus Cat as a murder mystery, the murder comes quite a long way into the book, and is solved only in a generic way. Most of the detective work, and most of the emotion, the suspense, concerns the abduction of a baby. This is disconcerting, and I don't think it's inadvertent: given that the person who spots the vital clue and finds the missing child is not any of the people who is actively investigating, surely Woolf is playing with the expectations of her readers? If you are looking for a classic mystery in which the Great Detective gathers the suspects in the library and explains his deductive process, look elsewhere. If. on the other hand, you want the unexpected, and would like to spend some time being both entertained and moved, then The Case of the Campus Cat is worth a try.
The murdered woman is an anthropologist, who has worked with the Kainu, a (presumably fictional) tribal people of South America. This is an important strand of the book, although not one that the publisher chooses to emphasise. So I will say only that, for a number of specific reasons, when I finished the book I picked up Peter Dickinson's Skin Deep / The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, in which the surviving members of a tribe from New Guinea are living in a terraced house in London - and detective Jimmy Pibble is called in to investigate the murder of their chief. I'm always glad of an excuse to re-read Peter Dickinson, and this was far from my first re-read of The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, so it's no surprise that I still like it just as much as I expected. More of a surprise, though, was that the parallel is even stronger than I thought: in addition to the importance of a tribal group with a traumatic event in their past, there's the rôle of a young boy who - oh, that would be telling. Not so much a parallel as an echo, perhaps, is the presence of an exclusive Christian group, Woolf's Sealed Brethren and Dickinson's Pure People.
Both books are recommended, then, but I'm surprised to find myself issuing so many content warnings (very much not my habit). The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest was published in 1968, and is told largely from the point of view of Jimmy Pibble, "ageing, unglamourous, greying towards retirement." I can discern no racial prejudice in his relations with the Ku, but the vocabulary in which he thinks of them was old-fashioned even by the standards of 1968 - and some of the minor characters are worse. They are presented as completely in the wrong, but if you are distressed by the very presence of the words, brace yourself.
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Date: 2025-02-11 02:16 am (UTC)I'm amused because in reading this post I realize that Joanne, a relatively new friend of mine, reminds me very much of you. This is probably why I liked her so immediately. She has commissioned a piece of art from me which includes favorite cat-related books; I mean to let her know about this book you recommended.