FFB: Emily Dickinson is Dead

In memory of Jane Langton, who passed away last month, I'm re-posting a previous FFB about one of her best-known works, Emily Dickinson in Dead.

Author Jane Langton (1922-2018) didn't come to mystery novels in any traditional sort of way. She studied astronomy at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan and received graduate degrees in art history at the University of Michigan and Radcliffe College. But turn to writing, she did, and in 1962 started penning YA novels (her book The Fledgling is a Newbery Honor book) and 18 adult mysteries which won her Bouchercon's 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award.

All of her mysteries focus on the same two protagonists, Homer Kelly, a distinguished Thoreau scholar and ex-lieutenant detective for Middlesex County, and his wife Mary. As the author herself once said, "Mary is the sensible one, but I confess I like Homer's rhapsodic flights of fancy." Most of the settings are in the author's home state of Massachusetts although she's sent her heroes to more exotic places like Florence, Oxford and Venice.

Langton also illustrated many of her novels with her own drawings, explaining it this way:

One of the greatest pleasures has been illustrating my adult books with drawings of the real places where my fictional events happen. I've loved setting up my folding stool in Harvard Square, or standing on my own back porch trying to get down on paper the look of the pants and shirts on the laundry line, or leaning against cars in Florence with sketchbook in hand to draw some architectural wonder. Conditions have not always been salubrious, as when my feet were submerged while I sketched the house of Tintoretto in Venice during the season of high water.

Her 1984 Homer Kelly novel, Emily Dickinson is Dead was nominated for an Edgar Award and received a Nero Award that year. It was inspired, no doubt, by the author's own interest in Dickinson, having written a text about the poet for the collection Acts of Light. The action in Langton's novel takes place at a symposium celebrating the 100th anniversary of the death of poet Emily Dickinson, where one attendee disappears and another is found murdered in the poet's former bedroom.

Langton's trademarks are all here in the novel, her memorable and descriptive settings, eccentric characters, a sly humor that pokes fun at the pompous academics and Amherst townsfolk alike. As the New York Times Book Review added, "Miss Langton is a sensitive and even elegant writer, one who deals with literate, intelligent people..." 

Homer Kelly is more of a peripheral figure in this particular novel, but he sums up the essence of his philosophy—and probably that of the author—and the book quite nicely:

Homer Kelly, too, was enchanted with the afternoon. It wasn't the justice of the women's cause that had diverted him; it was the everlasting melodrama of human souls in conflict. It was the handfuls of gritty sand that were forever being sprinkled into the machinery of daily life, grinding the ill-fitting cogs against each other, warping the sprockets, jamming the mismatched teeth. It was always so fascinating, the way people went right on being so outrageously themselves, and therefore so eternally interesting.

Although not so much a mystery as a wry study of human hubris and self-delusion, the book's character studies, snippets of poetry, Langton's illustrations, and even some details about the workings of dams and reservoirs, make Emily Dickinson is Dead an entertaining read.

Comments

[Rick Robinson]

I've seen her books around for years, and never tried one. Your fine review has convinced me. Thanks!

[BV Lawson]

It was a great loss with her passing, but she left behind a lot of books and happy readers through the years. And she made it to 95, too, which is most impressive.