The Kate Fansler series involves a literature professor at a major New York University, her specialty is the Victorian English literature. She cursed her mind for being too finely tuned to moral dilemmas which more sensible people happily ignored.
The series started in the 1960’s when women professors were scarce because they are supposed to get married and disappear into anonymity, raising the children and supporting their husbands’ careers. Kate is the unmarried younger sister to three brothers who were prominent lawyers. Kate is impatient with brainlessness; has male friends for intense professional discussions, some of them were also her lovers. She considers herself an unwomanly woman; she would rather discuss medieval symbolism than take care of a husband and his house; she very very strongly believes that marriage should be a choice not a conventional destiny.
Kate is very fond of detective stories in particular Lord Peter by Dorothy Sayers, but also Nagio Marsh and Agathy Christie, all great women writers I have enjoyed to read as well. Kate is a very load voice for her right to be an independent person and not looked down upon because she is a woman. In the books the university is described in details, with very similar discussions taking place at my university even today 70 years later.
I find that reading these books is like taking a course in English literature and literary history, they are filled with quotes from what today are considered classical literature. I actually like that a lot!
Furthermore, the books are funny, they make me smile and even laugh out loudly. I imagine how the author must have enjoyed playing with the words and sentences to make it so funny, cozy and enjoyable. One student said about Kate she is one of very few professors who managed in her lectures to be entertaining and profound at the same time. I can imagine the author being just as good a good lecturer.
In the Last Analysis
The first book in the series
Published 1964, I read Faucett Books 2001
ISBN 978-0-449-00711-2
217 pages
My evaluation 5/5 stars
Nominated for the Edgar Award as Best First Novel
In this book Janet, a student, asked Kate for a recommendation for a psychiatrist. Kate recommended a close friend and former lover, Emanuel. So, when Janet was murdered on his couch and Emanuel suspected of murder, Kate feels responsible and starts to investigate.
Throughout the book are discussions about Freud and psychoanalysis, we hear how Kate thinks Freud’s theories are very anti-female, un- realistic or not common sense, but clumsy, obscuring the obvious; modern Freudian lingo has got us so frightened of appearing castrated women that we won’t take the gun away from a boy. Kate is very certain that Emanuel could not be the murderer but has to ask for help from her present male friend, Reed, a lawyer, who works for the DA’s office in New York. Kate hires Jerry who is engaged to Kate’s niece, to detect among the students. All is discovered.
The morality of one’s actions should depend on the moral quality of the person, who was going to do the action and not on the moral quality of the person one was doing the action to. Janet disagreed, she thought if someone was morally bad, you should do something about it, because of their morality not because of yours.
The murderer was revealed because he used a quote from a lecture Kate gave last semester “I was a young man from the provinces”. Very academic!
The James Joyce Murder
Second book in the series
Published 1967, I read Bello 2018
ISBN 978-1-5098-2002-3
155 pages
My evaluation 5/5 stars
From this book I learned about James Joyce, whom we had not studied at school and whom Reed describes as the Irish author of several indecipherable books.
Kate had been asked by an old school friend, Veronica, to review her father’s papers and letters; her father, Sam Lingerwell, was the grand old man of publishing academic books and important but controversial novels like the James Joyce’s books that had been banned in many places. Sam was Kate’s publisher and friend as well, more so than Veronica, the nun.
Kate has relocated to the country- side to Sam’s house with a PhD student, Emmet, her nephew, Leo aged 8 years, who had fallen behind in school, did not mange well with his family, so they forced Kate to take him for the summer, he has a tutor, also a student, William. This household has caused a lot of local gossip, how can an unmarried woman be living with two men who are not family and a small boy, who is not her son??!!
Kate on the gossip: you must realize that country people are incurable curious like cats; it is only urbanites who can ignore their neighbors.
Reed returned from Europe and found Kate in the middle of this; he proposes to Kate but she rejects him – a very funny chapter. There are several funny descriptions of mechanization of agriculture, harvesting hay, artificial insemination, milking. Discussions on whether a literature teacher (female, not male of course; but very personal) should have experienced sex to be a good teacher.
A murder happened, the most evil gossiper is shot, Mary Bradford, an accident? On purpose?
A neighbor Mr. Mulligan is a professor of English literature, Sam has published a lot of his books but like what we today call ‘ctrl-paste’; according to Kate “he cannot think”, so why did Sam publish his books?
In this book everything is detected by Reed; he finds a way to pull out the murderer.
I really enjoyed this book with the cozy atmosphere, the dialogs between Kate and Reed. And I do enjoy the quotes, some of them I look up.
ON THE AUTHOR:
Amanda Cross is the pen-name for Caroline Gold Helbrun (1926-2003).
Education: graduated 1949 Wellesley College; MA 1951 Columbia; Ph D 1959 while married to James and raising 3 children. This was actually a family with three careers, two academics and Caroline on the side had her mystery writing, which she kept a secret, because she thought she would not get tenure if it was revealed that she wrote un-academic mystery books. The first book ‘In the Last Analysis” was nominated for the Edgar Award as a best first novel, but did not win and so she could keep it a secret until after she got tenure. Another story has it she had run out of good English ‘who-done-it’ novels so she decided to write her own.
Caroline’s interest was modern British literature, especially the Bloomsbury group. She published 14 academic books and is considered the mother of feminist literature. Academic scholarly books are to meant be read by few scholars. So, in writing the Kate Fansler series she had Kate present her feminist ideas to a broader audience.
She chose the pen-name Amanda Cross because it meant ‘a- man- to -cross’.
In 1987 Caroline was an original member of ‘Sisters in Crime” to support younger women in the craft of writing mystery and crime novels.
In 1984 she became president of ‘Modern Language Association’
Caroline quit Columbia University in 1992 because she felt the women of faculty were overlooked, kept out and discriminated against.
A quote attributed to Caroline Helbrun is” the point of quotations is that one can use another’s words to be insulting’.
She strongly believed in the right to end one’s life, which she did aged 77 years.
I have enjoyed very much reading these two novels and will look for more, they are at least as good as those authors she enjoyed: Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie and Nagio Marsh.
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