There are pigs under every rock

Nicole Décuré Mystery Readers Journal 12 : 4, 1996-1997, pp. 4-7.

There are pigs under every rock It seems strange that universities should be favourite settings among mystery readers. One of the reasons could be that, in places supposedly devoted to matters of the mind, when grievous harm is done to the body, the shock is as great as when murder is committed in a convent or a church. And we know how popular these holy places have become lately with crime writers. Nan Weaver, the central character of Murder in the English Department and Kate Trevorne, the heroine of Monkey Puzzle do not add to the number of “professor-detectives”, as John Kramer calls them (75) although they both feature in the category that could be called “academic mysteries”, a term which loosely covers murder mysteries set at universities. For one thing, they are not professors. Yet, perhaps because they are women. Furthermore, far from seeking the truth, the way their fictional colleague Kate Fansler does, they do not feel that research automatically qualifies them for detection. On the contrary, they are bent on hiding what they perceive/believe to be the truth to protect another person. Not being professional detectives or even enlightened amateurs, they leave detection to the police and murder stays in its place as one of the concerns of the heroine, not the main and only interest, which always seems exaggerated. With the same ingredients, the authors have written two very different books, one a political tract, the other pure entertainment. Between suburbia and academia: Valerie Miner’s Murder in the English Department Murder in the English Department is one of those novels which is not really a mystery novel although it is classified as such and has received a lot of critical attention: it was one of the first feminist crime stories to be published, at the same time (1982) as V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone made their debut, and it raised the important issues of sexual harassment and rape. There is no real mystery in Murder in the English Department, although Nan Weaver may have doubts as to what she heard and saw. So, the question is not who did it, who killed Professor Angus Murchie, nor why but, will Marjorie, the killer, get caught? And then, will

There are Pigs under every Rock

she be convicted? There is no detection to be done. Only a little bit of deduction takes place, on Lisa’s part à la Agatha Christie, to get the murderer to confess and thereby let her aunt off the hook. For Nan, who “witnessed” the murder, the central question is: to speak or not to speak, to friends or family. Berkeley (academia at large) is at the centre of the story, much more than a backdrop against which the drama is played out. It is, as it should be, an epitome of the world. Too often, the university is stereotyped either as a hotbed of radicalism, a dangerous place, full of “junkies and queers and weirdos” (16) or a “boring, stuffy” place (6), remote from the realities of the world, as if it was not part of the world. But conflicts of sex, race, class occur at the university very much in the same way as everywhere else. “The English Department is part of the world,” says Nan’s friend Matt at the end. “You’re just complaining about the state of misogyny in the real world” (167). Or, putting it in other words, Nan herself comments: “There are pigs under every rock” (167). In this book, Valerie Miner tries to reconcile academia with the rest of the world, particularly suburbia. To the heroine, at the beginning, Berkeley represents a “freer world” (16), delivery from a confining restricting world, a refuge against the mediocrity of Hayward, of working class life as embodied by her sister’s family, especially her brother-in-law with his yellow house, dirty jokes, narrow-mindedness, pater familias stance. This is the world Nan has escaped from and from which her niece Lisa, who is made literally sick in this milieu is trying to escape, with Nan’s help. Nan is conscious of doing “inter-class travel” (16) when she visits her family in Hayward, to the point that her voice changes. It is always difficult to bring the classroom into a novel (or a film): to the profession, it usually sounds false. It takes an insider to really capture the spirit of what goes on in these places: the work itself, teaching; receiving students, advising them, supervising theses; department politics and power conflicts; research, for which there is never enough time because the department’s demands, for women’s visibility among other things, added to students’ demands inhibit research (on Nan’s list of priorities, students come first); activism on campus; the struggle for tenure. Nan is not one of those fictional professors who never teaches. We see her at work in the classroom, in her office, at meetings. We also see her at play, with her family, hiking, in a bar, at the sauna baths. And yet, even this world can be as stifling as the world “outside” when relations of “power and hate” (87) invade it in as brutal a way as murder, replacing more intellectual and abstract discussions on “power and love” in Iris Murdoch’s novels.

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University serves many purposes: social promotion, understanding the world or even changing it. Literature, fiction is seen as a tool to understand one’s personal life and the world at large (women’s place in literature being but a reflection of their place in society).Valerie Miner uses her own fiction to explain a little bit about academia, about power relations, about love and hate, murder being just the catalyst that precipitates events and causes crises which reveal motives and highlight problems. Murder accelerates history. This particular crisis makes suburbia and academia meet when Nan’s Berkeley friends meet in Hayward at the end and are able to speak a “neutral dialect” (154). Nan becomes aware that the two worlds are sanctuaries, in different ways and that she needs both. Her friend Matt, a gay scholar, can talk to her brother-in-law about fishing, intellectual Marjorie can relate to Nan’s matronly sister Shirley around a cheese crumb cake or a baby. The barriers of class crumble a little. But the ending is not so optimistic as it seems. On a superficial, socializing level, people may get on. But deep down the complete crossing over is impossible and Nan remains suspended in-between in a rather uncomfortable and unsettled state. She has always felt like a fraud, more like a student than a teacher. “Marjorie could walk through any door. Nan always knocked” (163). Once a working-class kid, always a working-class kid. There is no going back though but, in the end, she is not sure she will return to the university. Town and Gown: Paula Gosling’s Monkey Puzzle Paula Gosling, “the most famous unknown writer in the world” (Silet 2) also makes a sharp separation between academia and the rest of the world. Straight from the beginning, she classifies the cast of characters in Monkey Puzzle into “town” and “gown” and it soon becomes obvious that, contrary to Valerie Miner, the author’s preference goes to town. Paula Gosling has written a real whodunit and everything revolves around the central mystery: who is the author of the crime(s)? She creates a large cast of characters who all have something to hide, calling to mind some of Agatha Christie’s novels. Consequently, the successive revelations about this dozen characters take up most of the book, leaving as the only stable focus and pivot police lieutenant Jack Stryker. The pace is fast and there is no time to linger. Even the romance is kept short, as it distracts from the investigation. Now is not the time. The characters are seen mostly in police interrogations and meetings or private discussions about the murder. Kate Trevorne, the other pole of the story, gets far less space than the main hero.

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Stryker, the “town” champion, is the author’s pet. He can do no wrong. His defects are endearing, even his incredibly crude, uncouth remarks pass for wit. He stands for common sense, honesty, determination. As a former college man (a student in this very same English department, a reader of poetry) he is entitled to criticize academia (and does so repeatedly) since he supposedly knows about it . Kate, on the other side of the fence, or rather the “gap”, teaches mystery fiction in the English department. The author could have given her the role of amateur sleuth competing with the official detective. But that is not Kate’s concern. She is an academic and detection stays in its place, in books and in the classroom. Not only has she no desire to uncover the identity of the murderer, but she does her utmost to prevent the police from arriving at the truth in her desire to protect her ex-lover, Richard, who is strongly suspected. She does not know if Richard is guilty or not. She wants to believe he is not while at the same protecting him in case he is, out of a misplaced sense of guilt about the past. Paula Gosling’s rendering of the academic world is of the stereotypical sort. Contrary to Murder in the English Department, academia is never at work. Teachers are always seen before or after a class, mostly getting mail out of their pigeonholes. Students are seen, not heard, sometimes talked about. In one scene, they are even felt as intruders, in the way, which may well be realistic. The only class Kate teaches turns out to be the one where she disparages the police and discovers Stryker in the back row. This is kept brief however, mostly a farcical attack – “cheap shots for laughs” (120) – on fictional cops that she shortens as soon as she sees him. Academia is criticised on two levels. The teachers are described as “twelve little professors”, again reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers, petty, bickering, bitching, pedantic, always correcting other people’s grammar. The habit seems catching when Stryker starts doing it: it subtly shows that it is not that he does not know, he just chooses not to. Simply walking into the place at the end is enough to remind him of correct speech. Teachers are a breed apart with reactions different from those of other mortals. They see themselves above the crowd. They are apart and remote with a reserved lift, a reserved lounge, a reserved car-park. The janitor observes them from a distance and will get punished. These people are “frozen up in [themselves]” (28). For them, Stryker criticizes, ideas matter more than people. In fact, it is Paula Gosling’s ideas which are often short-sighted, as when Stryker browbeats Kate with simplistic analyses about the antiwar demonstrations where students with their “fat little heads full of fat little ideas” thought only of themselves when they jostled innocent passers-by. Not a word is said about the -4-


victims of the war itself (196). Paula Gosling cannot indulge in subtle analyses: she is after immediate effect, a good laugh, jokes, catchy phrases and cartoon characters and that precludes serious thinking. Stryker does his best to belittle those academics. “Not a bad ass, for a teacher” (31), he comments on first seeing Kate, with a remark both sexist and teacherist. Teachers are smart but not so smart, adds his faithful sidekick and the second sort of smart would obviously be a better quality. Janitors and cleaning ladies would do a better job. Teachers are even lousy at communication. The contempt is mutual. Kate has both a condescending attitude to secretaries with their petty concerns and wants more respect, wants to be called “Dr” by the secretary, not by her first name unlike Nan. Arthur Fowler, another teacher, is also condescending towards the supposedly illiterate police. Stryker remarks on the opposition of cops vs. profs: “You threw words around and performed like troupers, dazzling the dumb cops” (252). The core of the opposition between town and gown is that Stryker and the police represent what life is all about whereas academia is not real life, more of a fictional world. It is constantly referred to as an “ivory tower” (125, 176) where puppets gesticulate, meaninglessly. Stryker’s work is serious, fiction is not nor are demonstrations by “pseudointellectuals” (126) who do not understand anything whereas he, Stryker, does. The gap is wide between these two worlds. But love will bridge it. Paula Gosling is not concerned with breaking new ground, dealing with political issues. This is her inalienable right and she is a very enjoyable writer of light entertainment. But where she fails is when she chooses a milieu she knows only superficially and treats serious issues as elements of farce. The way she deals with sexual harassment, in this case homosexual harassment, betrays a total lack of sensitivity and reflection. Homosexuality is an “aberration” or an object of contempt and jokes.

Murder in the English Department and Monkey Puzzle have a few superficial points in common: the murders are set in the English department; there is a separation between university and the world at large; the issue of sexual harassment is central to the story. But the differences go deep. Valerie Miner is an insider, an academic herself; Paula Gosling is an outsider, a former student in an English Department who confesses to a fascination for university buildings which prompted her to start writing fiction and inspired this particular story (Silet 2-3, 10). Valerie Miner, deep down, is a serious writer; Paula Gosling is an entertainer, a title that she -5-


claims for herself: “I’m a ham;!% I like to entertain people” (Silet 7). They may agree that academia is a world apart but for different reasons and with different arguments and methods. In protecting Richard, Kate is as unlike Nan protecting Marjorie as possible. Nan knows Marjorie is guilty and protects her on political grounds: feminist solidarity in the fight against sexual harassment. Nan quietly deflects police enquiries and goes to jail meekly; Kate (as do her colleagues) loudly treats the police like fascist pigs to better fall in love with Stryker. Kate’s politics, or what passes for her politics, are frozen in time, at the time of the Vietnam war and students’ demonstrations, when she merely followed Richard and had only “secondhand convictions” (127). Nan was a true radical, “helping to create – a counter-culture, a freedom of the highest order. Academic freedom. Political freedom. Sexual freedom” (22). She has remained a radical, a free spirit. In Monkey Puzzle, Richard’s rape reveals his sexuality to himself and he remains civil with his rapist; moreover, as a motive, it turns out to be but a red herring and thus discarded as a serious problem. The real motive for the crime turns out to be the theft of intellectual property, not rape. Kate herself was sexually harassed (spanked during a demonstration) by Stryker and fell in love with him straight away, a taming-of-the-shrew device which is not quite convincing. Sexual harassment is at the core of Valerie Miner’s books in which sexual politics dominate to the point that Nan will go to jail for her beliefs. Murder, in the case of attempted rape, does not seem so wrong. The judge rules that “rape is an act of such physical violence that it warrants substantial use of force in self-defence” (166). Kate is harassed and falls in love. Nan is harassed and quits. Marjorie is harassed and kills. Whatever the chosen solution, women academics are seen as women before they are seen as academics.

References GOSLING, Paula. Monkey Puzzle. London: Pan Books/Macmillan, 1985. KRAMER, John E., Jr. How to Become a Series-Character-Professor-Detective. Clues 9 : 2, 1988, pp. 75-94. MINER, Valerie. Murder in the English Department. London: The Women’s Press, 1982. SILET, Charles L. P. Paula Gosling Interview. Clues: A Journal of Detection 13 : 2, 1992, pp. 1-16.

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