Cold and Pure and Very Dead
Read Cold and Pure and Very Dead Online
Authors: Joanne Dobson
COLD AND PURE AND VERY DEAD
featuring Professor Karen Pelletier
“Joanne Dobson is also becoming a dependable teller of intriguing tales.”
—
The Boston Globe
“Dobson is adept at weaving learned allusions, academic satire and literary pastiche into her mystery.”
—The Washington Post
“Crisp writing and hilarious characterizations.”
—Booklist
“Those who love mystery amid academe will love this too, but readers don’t need to be fans of the subgenre to appreciate Dobson’s red herrings and careful character building.”
—
Library Journal
“Richly textured … a witty and withering send up of all the things lurid about bestsellerdom.”
—MLB News
“An enjoyable read. [Karen Pelletier] is unaffected and engaging. Very amusing.”
—
The Purloined Letter
THE RAVEN AND
THE NIGHTINGALE
“Not only throws Poe’s most famous poem into a provocative new light, but demonstrates that some kinds of male oppression and misbehavior never go out of style. Accomplished stuff!”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“As usual, Dobson delightfully skewers the pretensions and politics of academic life while respecting the importance of education.”
—
Booklist
“College politics and savvy plotting make this new series a contender for the Amanda Cross chair which, sadly, appears vacant.”
—Booknews
from The Poisoned Pen
“The delicate balancing act Joanne Dobson pulled off so well in her first two books continues without a wobble.… As Pelletier’s life continues to expand, so does the possibility of this series being around for a long time.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Will definitely be a favorite among those readers who love academic mysteries.”
—
The Snooper
THE NORTHBURY PAPERS
“Dobson has created an attractive heroine with the courage and wit to take on the toughest adversaries.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Dobson moves easily between impassioned evocations of forgotten women writers and catty contemporary shafts at familiar ivory-tower targets.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Few are better than Dobson at recording the minutiae of academic committee-speak, power plays in body language and jargon, and what ignites a classroom.”
—Booklist
“An intriguing mystery with excellent secondary characters.”
—
Rendezvous
Agatha Award–nominated debut mystery
QUIETER THAN SLEEP
“A white-knuckle ride through the hallowed halls of higher learning and through the dangerous rapids of personal conflicts with a delightfully funny heroine who gives as good as she gets.”
—Rendezvous
“A genuinely good read.”
—Time Out New York
“A literate and absorbing novel with an ingratiating main character and intriguing setting … a smashing debut. Don’t miss this one.”
—I Love a Mystery
“A superior academic mystery that reminds me of early Amanda Cross.”
—Booknews
from The Poisoned Pen
“Deftly balancing its literary and mystery elements, Dobson’s debut sparkles with wit and insight into college politics. Readers academic and otherwise will look forward to the next adventure of the smart and scrappy Karen Pelletier.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A truly stunning academic mystery … You’ll be all the richer for this nineteenth-century view of a very modern murder. A literary and intricate mystery with connotative power. Watch this one.”
—Mystery Lovers Bookshop News
“Emily Dickinson scholar Dobson’s first novel has an appealing heroine, a nifty payoff, and a beguiling way with the extracurricular entanglements of her teaching stiffs.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Anyone who thinks the word ‘academic’ is synonymous with ‘detached’ needs to read Professor Dobson’s tale of seething passions and deadly animosities within the English department of Enfield College. It’s a cutthroat world, academia, polished and elegant though the blades may be, and the author captures all the nuances of jealousy and fear that lie beneath the foundations of the ivory tower. Emily Dickinson, shall we say, with a stiletto in her hand.”
—Laurie R. King, Edgar Award winner
“A witty and fast-paced academic mystery. Joanne Dobson has a light touch.”
—Joan Hedrick, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
of
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
“An intriguing plot with a motive for murder that’s as old as human nature. Good characterizations and fast-paced action make
Quieter Than Sleep
an entertaining novel.”
—The Chattanooga Times
“An engaging story … a tense confrontation … will have readers rapidly skimming pages to see how it ends. An entertaining read.”
—Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph
PRAISE FOR THE SERIES
“What makes this series so fascinating and entertaining for the academic reader is Dobson’s ability to concoct lost imaginary texts; as a writer, she is more like A.S. Byatt in possession, weaving past literary genres into modern whodunits.”
—The Chronical of Higher Education
The Raven and the Nightingale
The Northbury Papers
Quieter than Sleep
This edition contains the complete text of the original paperback edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED
.
COLD AND PURE AND VERY DEAD
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Doubleday hardcover edition / 2000
Bantam mass market edition / October 2001
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by Joanne Dobson
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76810-0
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.
v3.1
For my children
Lisa, David, Rebecca
A
ny reader of Grace Metalious’s
Peyton Place
will recognize the debts that Mildred Deakin’s
Oblivion Falls
owes to the
real
1950s blockbuster novel. Scholars of American literature can trace the origins of the critical question, “but is it any
good?”
to Jane Tompkins’s groundbreaking study
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860
.
I wish to thank Miles Cahn and the workers of Coach Dairy Goat Farm in Gallatin, New York, for the delightful and informative tour of a truly world-class operation, nothing like Milly Finch’s small local goat farm.
As usual, I am grateful to my agent Deborah Schneider and editor Kate Miciak for the fine professional presentation of the Karen Pelletier novels. My good friend Sandy Zagarell has read so many versions of this novel that she qualifies as the world’s foremost scholarly expert in the works of Mildred Deakin. My family, as always, is an unending source of support and inspiration. To Dave—thanks again and again.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
—Sinclair Lewis, “The American Fear of Literature”
1
S
o, Professor Pelletier
, what do
you
think is the best novel of the twentieth century?”
At the request of the Enfield College Public Affairs Office, I was giving an interview to
The New York Times
about the Northbury Center, a research library for the study of American women writers soon to be established at the college. If Dr. Edith Hart’s last will and testament survived family lawsuits, I would someday be director of the center.
Martin Katz, the
Times
arts reporter, was young and jittery. His dark hair was cut close to his head, his sallow skin pulled tight over flat cheekbones. Although he was slight, and at least two inches shorter than his rigidly disciplined posture suggested he wanted to be, the black polo shirt hugged a buffed torso. “Novel in English, I mean,” he continued, as if he were, of course, intimately familiar with literary work in Urdu and Singhalese. As I considered my response, the journalist flipped a page of his long, skinny notebook and recorded the query. Then he glanced up at me impatiently. Interviewing an Enfield College Assistant Professor about a scholarly research center was not the ambitious Marty Katz’s idea of a cutting-edge assignment. He’d put in his dutiful half hour in my green vinyl office armchair, gotten the tedious academic facts, was concluding the interview with a throwaway question.
Afternoon sunlight spilled through my office windows and across the plush-covered cushions of the window seat, forming a luminous rectangle. The patch of sun crept across floorboards in the direction of Marty’s black-leather running shoes. When it touched his toes, the reporter yanked his feet back toward the safety of the chair and tapped his pen on the page of his notebook. He clearly wanted a response, and he wanted it fast, so he could point his rented car toward the Interstate and escape back to Manhattan without additional risk of contamination by the unsullied New England air.
“Best novel of the century?” What a question. I supposed I should give a thoughtful answer: Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
was the obvious choice. Then, because I’d recently read it, Jake Fenton’s prizewinning
Endurance
came fleetingly to mind, but … no. Of course not. No matter how well-written it was—and it was masterfully written—
Endurance
was just the kind of testosterone-driven adventure story that always got defined as “great literature.” Anyhow, this reporter’s attitude irritated me, and I wanted to give a provocative response. “Oh … I’d say …
Oblivion Falls
by Mildred Deakin.” I’d only finished reading the 1950s page-turner that morning—at 2:17
A.M
.—and its haunted characters and steamy sex scenes were fresh in my mind. All
too
fresh. I was beginning to suspect that my friends were right: I definitely needed a man in my life.