Arts
Lucie Blue Tremblay:
Folk Concert Benefits Pride
Queerly Pursuing the Wiccan Path
So Many Books, So Little Time
Rocking and Writing Against Depression
Navel Gazing Author Predicts the 'End of Gay'
Reviewed by Euan Bear
Every month OITM receives anywhere from two to six books for review, along with dozens of notices of publication and email pleas from self-published authors seeking reviews. It’s not always easy to separate the worthwhile from the trash, and even the “trash” can be diverting for a few hours. All of these books hold high potential for beach reading, entertaining but not strenuous.
Odd Girls Press closed up shop last December and offered case-lots of four of its recently published titles to nonprofit lesbian-connected organizations. We’ve got two titles: Night Mare, a mystery by Franci McMahon and Gaslight, a memoir by Carol Guess (and, as a pitch and disclosure, both are available on our website, click on “affiliates”).
In Night Mare the sleuth is Jane Scott, an independently wealthy horse owner who lives in Putney (yes, our Putney). She’s in the endstage of a relationship with a lipstick lesbian whose closest connection with horses is leather. While writing for the local paper, Jane stumbles on a scam to steal for resale or kill expensive thoroughbreds for their insurance value.
There’s a human murder as well, and Jane is abducted by the horsethieves on their way to Wyoming. She and the title horse (Night Mare) escape and are given shelter and care by a lesbian rancher. Of course, the murderers / horsethieves are caught and Jane is left wondering whether she might want to move out to Wyoming to be with her new love.
Mysteries – at least the ones I read, lesbian or not – serve a couple of functions: they restore order in some portion of a disordered milieu; and when they are well researched, they teach readers about that milieu, whether it’s drug culture, antiquarian books, reservation life in the southwest, Disney World, or horses.
Restoring order is reassuring, if unrealistic. When was the last time you got the answers to why a person died in questionable circumstances? When was the last time you were so closely involved in a person’s life that you would spend time, energy and money to explore your intuition that something about the ‘official story’ just didn’t feel right? We’d like to believe we matter that much to someone, but unless the death-scene anomalies are blatant, motives easy to come by, and/or money at stake, we all go on with our lives and hope it never happens to us.
Perhaps the most realistic thing about Night Mare is the amount of shoulder-shrugging by characters who would rather not be involved, who don’t care about getting answers. But despite them, order is restored, at least in this corner of the horse world. On a scale of one to five, I’d give this lesbian mystery a three and a half: an entertaining read, the lesbians are not all ‘good,’ the straight folk aren’t all anti-gay bigots, and I learned something about the economics of horses.
I’m saving my review of Gaslight for another time.
Vermont’s own New Victoria Publishers (see OITM‘s September 2002 Community Profile or www.newvictoria.com) has received awards for its groundbreaking feminist nonfiction publications, and they’ve published some good lesbian fiction, too. The two books released last year were both mysteries: She Scoops to Conquer by Robin Brandeis and A Cold Case of Murder by Jean Marcy.
There is an apparent sub-genre of lesbian detective story wherein the sleuth, rather than being independently wealthy, is a seriously dysfunctional dyke willing to overlook, forget or forgive the most abusive behaviors for a good fuck by an attractive or powerful – or both – sex object. Brandeis’s sleuth Lane Montgomery is well intentioned – she becomes involved in the murder she solves because she insists on pursuing a human-interest story on the inner city murder of an African American adolescent with a stellar reputation. But her brains too often end up in her underwear, or rather in the underwear of her main reporting rival Ann Alexander. Alexander steals her photographs of a slumlord doing business on the shady side and in many other ways runs a no-integrity campaign to always get the credit first.
I suspect that this first novel was actually an attempt at a romance hidden within a mystery. The mystery is engaging enough, and Montgomery as a heroine has enough political consciousness and feminist heart to meet New Vic’s “spunky heroine” criterion. But the romance needs a lot of work. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of dysfunctional dyke relationships out there, but this one is so painfully obvious that it detracts from the plot and our willingness to follow the sleuth into danger.
I’d rate this mystery as a two.
New Vic’s other mystery, A Cold Case of Murder by ‘Jean Marcy’ is the fourth in a series co-written by life partners Marcy Jacobs and Jean Hutchinson, a pair of saftig, middle-aged dykes. Jean is a retired English teacher, and Marcy works at a battered women’s shelter. I’ve read three of the four books in the series.
Set in their home territory of St. Louis, the series makes ample use of recognizable land marks: an old brewery, favorite cafes and bars. The sleuth here is Meg Darcy, a private investigator who will eventually inherit her uncle Walter’s agency. The love interest is the emotionally dysfunctional dyke cop Sarah Lindstrom. Sometimes they work together on a case and sometimes their interactions swing wildly between bluff and threat, seduction and near-rape.
The current case begins when an adoptive mom asks Darcy to search for her daughter’s biological mother. It gets complicated when the bio-mother’s case turns up as an eight-year-old unsolved murder possibly involving pillars of the community, scions of an old-time brewing family. And oh, by the way, the adoptive mom is trying to extricate herself from an abusive marriage to an ex-cop who is running security for the brewing family. The setting comes into play not only because of St. Louis’s brewing past, but also because of the caves under the city.
For mostly plausible (though sometimes monomaniacally obsessed) characters, a nice clear writing style, good use of unusual settings, and some smoothing out of the relationship, I’d score A Cold Case of Murder as a three and a half.
While on vacation, I naturally went to Wild Iris Books, the local feminist bookstore – there are still a few in existence! Among the batch of books I got were three from Bella Books (www.bellabooks.com), Drifting at the Bottom of the World, Death by the Riverside (first published by New Victoria, by the way), and The Many Deaths of Jocasta.
Drifting at the Bottom of the World was written by native Floridian Auden Bailey, who gave up the sun and humidity to explore working in Antarctica. It’s not a mystery, except in so far as nearly everyone who goes to that end of the earth has some secret to grapple with or escape from. How do we know? Jubilee Oval, an archetypal storyteller and legendary plow driver, tells us so – their secrets “leak and reek.” Sometimes she even tells the secret holder what the problem is, as she does for An (for Angus) Jones, the protagonist.
I don’t know how it happens, but nearly every novel I’ve picked up lately has sexual abuse as its revealed secret, warping the lives, relationships and perceptions of one or more major characters. And it happens even though I consciously avoid books with “family secret” or “past betrayal” or anything connected to sexual abuse in their cover blurbs. But here it is again, with an added twist.
Bailey’s depiction of the characters – and I do mean characters – living in the closed society of a scientific station at the bottom of the world is well done... maybe just a bit exaggerated for illustrative purposes. The folk stories ‘Jubilee Oval’ crafts to explain the Antarctic are engaging and lyrical; the interactions of the station staff provide a gritty, realistic backdrop to stark beauty and fear and the every day possibility of death by nature and human stupidity.
Drifting at the Bottom of the World deserves the rating of four that I’ll award.
Maybe I’m the one who is naïve here, but J.M. Redmann’s PI Mickey Knight – not to mention her murky picture of near-underworld (not to mention nearly underwater) New Orleans – only confirms my intention to stay away from the Crescent City. It’s not that Knight, a former swamp rat turned Vassar graduate in philosophy (reflecting Redmann’s own geographic and educational history) is unrealistic – especially given that the series began in 1990, when dykes of a certain age might be working out the oppressions of their childhood and young adult lives through drink, drugs, and frequent casual sex with many different partners.
But Knight easily qualifies as one of the most obnoxious dyke detectives I’ve read so far. She drinks away her emotional pain and numbs herself to the caring of friends and lovers. She has slept her way through what passes for dyke society – mostly in the law enforcement and medical milieus – and managed to push away anyone who might want to get seriously involved. Every time we read about her thinking, it’s almost all self-pity and her assumptions that others are pitying her too, which her stubborn swamp-rat pride can’t stand.
And yet, there’s something there, someone potentially rescuable, a person who might learn – with some help, which by the end of Jocasta she might get.
In the series opener, Death by the Riverside, Knight goes on assignment (as a favor to dyke police detective Joanne Ranson, who could be an object of attraction for the PI) to an import-export company suspected of importing and distributing illegal drugs. The delivery site is next door to the ancestral home of Cordelia James, engaged to be married (but not for long). James, it turns out, is the daughter of the rich and socially well-connected drunk driver who killed Knight’s father and two other people.
Bad guys die, good girls and PIs are wounded near unto death (but recover).
The feeling here is the Tennessee Williams-William Faulkner-creepy, crazy, slimy, out-of-control two-faced South, where everyone is all politeness and smiles on the surface while plotting poison and murder underneath. Of course it’s a clichˇd portrait, but there would be no clichˇ if there were no truth to it. The only saving grace is the sometimes grudging but no less real loyalty of the group of lesbians surrounding Knight. They get impatient with her self-hate and angry at her clumsy, self-protective betrayals. I recognize these friends and family-of-choice who put up with Knight’s shenanigans.
The Many Deaths of Jocasta is the second book of the series and shows Knight beginning to tire of her own self-destruction. Her wealthy mentor (who made college possible after helping Knight escape a money-grubbing, esteem-destroying, falsely pious aunt) hires Knight to run “security” at her annual spring gay-la. There’s a scream from the woods as a guest discovers the body of a young woman, the apparent victim of a botched abortion. Knight, of course, is in the middle of it, juggling the jabs of friends equally tired of her self-destructive tendencies, her jealousy of Cordelia’s date, her need to impress police detective Joanne Ranson, and her sense of guilt for not having been able to prevent the murder.
And it’s Knight to the rescue when Cordelia, a doctor at a women’s clinic, is arrested for murdering a second young woman whose body is found near the clinic. Other bodies turn up, all young and all apparent victims of botched abortions. But Knight and Ranson eventually get to the bottom of the mess, which perhaps less-than-realistically involves a thwarted lover using an anti-abortion group to carry out revenge for an old grudge.
I’d give these two a three on a scale of five. The next book in the series, The Intersection of Law and Desire, won a Lambda Literary award, and Jocasta and the fourth book in the series, Lost Daughter, were Lambda nominees.
While I’m touring through my most recently read dyke mysteries, I can’t resist making a case for Val McDermid as the author of a collection of solid, concretely and entertainingly political lesbian and feminist mysteries.
The one I collected in Florida was Common Murder, in a second edition published by Spinsters Ink, number two of the four Lindsay Gordon mysteries. Gordon is a tough working class dyke deeply involved in union (Union Jack) and feminist politics (Common Murder). In Common Murder, Gordon has already talked her editor into letting her do a piece on a forthcoming action at Greenham Common, the famous women’s peace encampment outside the gates of a US missile site, when there’s a murder near the encampment and a friend of Gordon’s is arrested.
Gordon negotiates tricky ethical territory among her allegiances to her job as a journalist, her friendships and political connections within the camp, and a burgeoning tactical alliance with and increasing respect for the local police commander.
McDermid’s writing is not seamless or smooth – just like life. Gordon has to make leaps and guesses, and half the time they’re wrong. It makes the novel feel gritty and choppy and edgy, unsettling – it’s not restoring order to a disordered universe, but recognizing that personal integrity matters even in a chaotic world that is out of our control.
Common Murder gets a four and a half star rating.
These seven books ought to occupy you for a week at the beach – or two months of Sundays.
Editor Euan Bear devours books by the batch in Bakersfield.