20 Books of Summer 2022: Honest Doubt by Amanda Cross

 

In Richard Curtis's film Love Actually Karen (Emma Thompson) tells her husband (Alan Rickman) that;

'Joni Mitchell has been the soundtrack to my life.'

I know exactly what she means, and yes I too can still sing The Hissing of Summer Lawns without missing a beat. By the same token, Amanda Cross (aka Professor Carolyn Heilbrun) has been my constant companion since I first discovered No Word from Winifred in Heffers bookshop in 1986. Since then I’ve read many of Cross’s Kate Fansler novels, and although Winifred is still my favourite, I've loved every one of them.

Kate, the rebellious scion of an old money New York family, is a professor of English Literature. A feminist with radical tendencies, she and her lawyer husband Reed have no scruples about living in a fabulous Manhattan penthouse – there’s no shortage of cash – and generally enjoy the kind of lifestyle that I rather ashamedly covet. The pair of them like few things better than witty and erudite conversation – usually accompanied by a large number of vodka martinis; lucky old Kate has only to walk through her front door for the divine Reed to be plying her with cocktails of one sort or another. And because Kate Needs Space (though she’s actually already got vast swathes of it), Reed even builds her a cabin in the woods (see The Question of Max.)

In another author's hands I know I would hate Kate Fansler. In Cross’s I just want to be her; a strong-minded, principled, clever, funny, slim, tall woman, who says what she thinks, eats what she likes, drinks, smokes, and has no truck whatsoever with exercise. If only.

In addition to her academic duties, Kate is something of an amateur sleuth; her investigations always involve intellectual puzzles, and rarely provide clear cut solutions. In No Word from Winifred, for example, she investigates the disappearance of Winifred Ashby, and in doing so examines the lives of such literary greats as Dorothy L Sayers and Mary Renault. At the end of the book she has her theories as to why Winifred vanished, but theories they remain.

As Dr Kimberley Maslin so rightly says (in 'Writing a Woman Detective, Reinventing a Genre: Carolyn G Heilbrun as Amanda Cross', Clues: A Journal of Detection. 2016.) Heilbrun/Cross;

reconceptualises the role of the detective and the nature of crime and its resolution.  

These books take me back to the feminist movement of the 1970s-80s – NAC marches, Spare Rib, Susie Orbach, Ann Oakley, Gloria Steinem. I was reading social studies at what was considered a left wing college, and like many students back then I believed we could change the world. In her Kate Fansler books Cross explores all of the issues that engaged us at that heady time – radical politics, discrimination in academia (Heilbrun said that in her day job at Columbia University, where she was the first woman to hold tenure, she had endured years of sidelining and prejudice), women’s friendships, domesticity, patriarchal attitudes….but by doing so through the medium of the detective story she makes them far more accessible than some dense academic article.

Last year I came to the resigned conclusion that I was unlikely ever to complete my Kate Fansler collection from charity shops’ shelves alone, so I decided to fill the gaps with ebay purchases. One of these was Honest Doubt, the thirteenth in the series; published in 2000, it appeared just three years before Heilbrun took her own life. I had seen comments that suggested the later books were disappointing, but I am sorry to say even that had not prepared me for the travesty that is this terrible novel. I do so wish I’d never read it.

Estelle ‘Woody’ Woodhaven is a private investigator hired to look into the suspicious death of the obnoxious Professor Charles Haycock, a senior member of staff at the ultra-traditional Clifton College in New Jersey.

‘Let me guess’, Kate said, ‘Charles was anti-feminist, misogynistic, and generally the worst sort of old boy who devoutly wished women had never been admitted to higher education in the first place. It had been such a comfortable, chummy, male world before the intrusion.’

Woodhaven narrates the book; she rides a motorbike and is overweight. I don’t care what she rides or what she weighs, and one mention of these two things would have been quite enough, but Cross drags them - and Woodhaven's weight in particular - into every single scene;

I’m afraid I’ve got into the habit of mentioning my size to bring it out into the open when I meet someone so that we can go on to other things.

If only she would. Cross even mentions Orbach’s seminal work Fat is a Feminist Issue at one point, but fails to elaborate on any of the ideas in that excellent and ground-breaking book, many of which Woodhaven could do with taking on board.

Woodhaven interviews all of the people who were at the drinks party at which Haycock was somehow given an overdose of his own heart medicine. Unfortunately all of them were so unremarkable that I can remember very little about them. Then, when she is getting absolutely nowhere, Woodhaven is advised to consult Kate, on the basis that the answer must lie somewhere in Haycock’s academic milieu, and only Kate will be able to help her unravel this nest of vipers.

Woodhaven visits Kate in her apartment, and Kate tells her where she should look next. So Woodhaven, suitably impressed by Kate's sophistication and intelligence, goes off and looks. Why Cross didn’t simply keep Kate as her protagonist is hard to fathom. Instead she gives us very little of Kate and an awful lot of tedious Woodhaven. I missed Kate and Reed’s witty banter, I missed Kate’s internal musings on women’s lot, and her meetings with her wayward nephews.

And to make it worse, Kate has now been saddled with a St Bernard. I like dogs, I really do, but in her earlier outings Kate showed no interest whatsoever in pets of any kind, let alone big slobbery Banny (after Anne Bancroft. Of course..) I felt if she were to have anything it should have been a Siamese cat.

There’s a running theme about Tennyson – the poet on whom Haycock was an expert – and his dreadful views on women, and there's quite a lot about the established college academics’ defensive and dismissive attitudes towards the few women who have somehow penetrated their fortress. The problem with Honest Doubt is that these themes are dished up in the heavy handed way that you might expect in a first novel. It’s as if Cross has somehow worked backwards, using up all her energy and wit on her earlier books, and now just wants to vent about pompous male academics and the treatment of women in conservative institutions. As Woodhaven says;

If books were as dull as most of my cases no one would read them.

Well quite.

When Woodville finally works out what did happen at that cocktail party we are presented with what is obviously meant to be an homage to another celebrated writer’s most famous work. I have to say I was never that impressed with the original, and Cross’s version of it is even less convincing. I don’t usually mind at all if Kate’s cases are left open; the joy in these books, for me, is observing Kate’s fabulous life and eavesdropping on her wonderful conversations. Deprived of these but without anything else to propel it forward, Honest Doubt is a trudge the end of which I was all too glad to reach.

I am so sad to have disliked Honest Doubt so much, and I would still wholeheartedly recommend the earlier books – No Word from Winifred, The James Joyce Murders, The Theban Mysteries, Poetic Justice, Sweet Death Kind Death and The Players Come Again. I’m going to have to go and reread one of them now to cheer myself up.

My copy of Honest Doubt by Amanda Cross was published by Ballantine Books, New York.