Death in a Tenured Position (Kate Fansler Novels (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: This one's okay, but far from her best
Review: Generally speaking, there are two sorts of mystery novels. One gives most of its attention to the complexities of the crime and the ingenuity of its solution. The other gives much more space to development of the characters and commentary on the setting. (Ideally -- in my opinion -- the perfect mystery, like those of Sue Grafton, gives nearly equal weight to both sides of the story.) "Amanda Cross" is the nom de plume of Dr. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who, like her protagonist, Kate Fansler, is a university professor of English in New York. This time Kate is called to Cambridge to help Janet Mandelbaum, an old acquaintance (but not really a friend) who has been named the first tenured female professor of English at Harvard. As difficult as it may be to remember, this was a really big deal in 1978, as Harvard was almost the last hold-out among prestigious American universities to develop a coed faculty as well as admitting women to the student body. Kate's somewhat manipulative friend, Sylvia Farnum, is in the story, as is her own niece, Leighton, and her old semi-lover, the laid back Moon Mandelbaum (who was also married to the late Janet twenty years before). The plot all seems a bit disconnected, not to say haphazard, and the solution is a bit of a cop-out -- or maybe not, I haven't decided. But the author certainly does a job on Harvard! This isn't Amanda Cross's best work, but it's certainly worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful writing but a poor mystery
Review: In "Death in a Tenured Position," Amanda Cross (Carolyn G. Heilbrun) presents a literate mystery. Someone has left Harvard a million dollars to fund a chair in the English department for a female professor. At 1978 Harvard, the idea of women professors is still something to be viewed with, if not utter revulsion, at least significant apprehension. It is a time when "women's studies" is considered a fadish and unnecessary program. Harvard hires Janet Mandelbaum, who also disdains such things as "women's studies" and who aspires only to succeed based on merit. At the misogynistic Harvard, though, to succeed based on merit, one first must be a man. Janet thus finds herself ostracized. Soon, she finds herself drugged and left in the women's room in a compromising position.

Kate Fansler, a professor from New York, is asked to help out Janet, and Kate agrees, securing a position as a Fellow and beginning to consider the attempt to discredit Janet. Before long, though, Janet is found dead, and the police arrest someone Kate believes is innocent. Kate then turns to an unethical lawyer to help her friend while she investigates the death.

As a real-world mystery, "Death in a Tenured Position" is rather a disaster. The lawyer hired to defend the police's main suspect seems not to care at all about his client and goes to great lengths to please Kate while harming the client. What is more important, though, is that one of the characters had to have known the solution to the mystery long before the denouement and should have explained it. In short, the mystery doesn't make sense, and it doesn't work in any real sense. The mystery, however, does involve some wonderful use of English poetry and prose, complete with allusions that make it all seem obvious, albeit only after the fact.

But there is more to the novel than the mystery, and it is there that Cross succeeds admirably. In a field that is, nearly twenty years later, marked by increasing percentages of bad writing, "Death in a Tenured Position" is a remarkably well-written novel. Cross writes almost melodically, and her characters take on personalities merely by their word choice. To read a character correcting himself for saying "rather extreme," for example, is a pleasure. More to the point, though, the indictment of Harvard, which seems to be one of those all-too-frequent oxymora, the institute of higher learning mired in a pre-Elizabethan view of women, is unmitigated, unqualified, and unrepentant.

Rating:
Summary: Readable, but not the best Kate Fansler
Review: In this Amanda Cross mystery, Kate Fansler is approached by a complete stranger, to help a former aquaintance out of a situation that she shouldn't need rescue from. The aquaintance ends up dead of cyanide poisoning, her former husband, who is also a former lover of Kate's is accused, and Kate is asked to solve the mystery.

The setting is Harvard University, where Kate's former friend is appointed as the first full professor in the English Department over the objections of the all-male faculty. Someone spikes her drink a department party and she ends up passed out in a bathtub with a local "sister" from a commune trying to revive her. Gossip flies about the campus. Another sister from the coffeehouse commune is sent to get Kate. Kate is more entranced by the dog than the sister, but still goes to Harvard to help.

I had only one question during the whole story--WHY?

Why does Kate go to a place she hates, to teach a class she doesn't want or need to, takes a leave from a job she loves, in a place where she is respected, to help a person from her past who she really doesn't give a damn about?

As usual, the book is well written, the characters are not as well developed or sympathetic as I would have liked, but I suppose in a temporary position Kate wouldn't have gotten to know everyone all that well either. Not bad, but not her best work.

Rating:
Summary: Death in a Tenured Position
Review: This would be a strange mystery if it didn't have such an obvious agenda: to probe at Harvard's sexism towards women, specifically its failure (as of the late 70s) to accept women as tenured profs in the stuffy old-boys English Department. Everything about the book, then, is geared to attack this unbending attitude: the dialogue (lots of witty remarks, asides, quick jibes that poke holes in the massive structure of hypocrisy and prejudice that looms like a big chauvinist-pig mountain), the characters--lots of frustrated women, be they stoic professionals just trying to make it by playing the game in a so-called Man's World, or the real rebels: feminists gathering their anger together to fight the established order; plus, of course, many narrow-minded men, profs and students alike who either actively block women from success at Harvard, or at best, sell soft sexism without even realizing how ingrained and foolish their attitude is; even the solution to the puzzling murder, which speaks to the damage done on a personal level when a lone woman, picked for her docility, finds she is ill-prepared to be the Jackie Robinson of Harvard. Instead, she becomes a murder victim.

If you commit to this read, be prepared to witness Harvard's English Department at its most revolting. I would even venture to say that the book is so locked into its agenda, that two things happen: the filter feels too narrow, and no matter the importance of the message, as mysteries go, this one really feeds you one thin dimension in order to support that message (I found I wanted to stop reading about Harvard as soon as possible, and was happy it was a short book); plus, in a story where everything has to do with sexism at Harvard--every page, every paragraph--I wouldn't say that's a guarantee for a classic mystery. The clues are eccentric and, in some crucial cases, quite literary, the motive is obviously going to relate to the main thrust of the book in some fashion (ie. if Harvard weren't like this, she wouldn't be dead--don't just blame the killer, blame the environment,and so forth), making the solution as predictable, with hindsight, as it may be surprising at first glance. You will have to decide if there has been an actual cheat.

What the novel succeeds in doing is pointing out, and giving a human face to, a great inequity. The most striking quote from the book--the one that hits home for me--is the fact that women often make the best students at a place like Harvard, but then are not allowed to teach there (or weren't, when the book was written; I confess to not keeping up with Harvard's stubborn machinations in this area).

Be aware that there are a few decent males in the novel, but in this arena, a decent male seems to mean one who doesn't think about anything too deeply or too much, and while taking things rather easily, is nevertheless handy for venting to, or leaning on, temporarily. Any male that opens his mouth with a serious opinion about anything, in Cross's mystery, is bound to incriminate Harvard, or men in general, and should have kept his mouth shut since puzzle-solver Kate Fansler always has the perfect retort, no matter how enigmatic or cerebral.

A crime novel with an axe to grind; I liked being enlightened and shocked, I didn't think it was a mystery for the ages that hearkened back to the Great Detectives. No way.