Prompted by my wonderful publishers, I’ve been setting up what they call “author pages” on various book-lovers’ platforms. Signing onto them for the first time, I’ve been surprised to find Part of the Solution, not on its own, but tucked down at the bottom under the respectable academic titles I’ve produced over the years.
Writing a novel at the end of an academic career is no surprise – a gazillion professors have unfinished novels in a drawer or a desktop file waiting the glories of retirement. But why a murder mystery? Because genre fiction is purportedly a lower bar, and I’ve been humbled by a life spent among truly great works of literature? (No, I will never write Middlemarch, or One Hundred Years of Solitude.) Because it’s fun to plot out the clues and red herrings, and one needs something to do every day after Wordle and Connections?
Yeah, probably. Some of both.
But there is also a connection between literature and the pursuit of human decency that comes to the fore in a murder mystery. I don’t mean the classics of the Golden Age – those books, which I admittedly love, are replete with sexism, colonialism, anti-Semitism (yes, I mean you, Agatha Christie), and an affection for the upper classes that often makes me gag. And I certainly don’t mean the patriotic thrillers in which a single, invariably male individual saves the day for the flag or the crown. But other murder mysteries ask us to think a bit about what justice means. In Part of the Solution, both Jennifer and Ford have to feel through their very divided loyalties, have to balance competing versions of justice, and have to face the ways in which privilege comes in many guises. What happens in the few months in which the story takes place complicates both their lives forever and is still not entirely resolved when they meet up forty years later. Similar contradictions, both moral and political, have never been entirely resolved for me.