Reading: Graves in Academe
Jan. 19th, 2019 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartSusan Kenney's 1985 murder mystery, Graves in Academe, is set in a liberal arts college in northern Maine. The heroine, Roz Howard, arrives midway through the first semester of the academic year to provide teaching cover for the English department after the death of one of the senior academics in a grisly accident involving a log-splitter, only to find further "accidents" befalling other members of the department, in ways which seem oddly reminiscent of events from the texts on her syllabus. Finding the local police disinclined to believe this, Roz sets out to analyse the crimes and try to find out who is behind the attacks on her colleagues, and what they have to do with the death of a student a year earlier...
My Head of Department had mentioned Graves of Academe as her favourite campus novel, and gave me a copy when I said it sounded interesting. While, fortunately, my department has not experienced a string of bizarre accidents/murders, the academic politics is certainly very true to life. The murder mystery plot is competently executed, though I did think a couple of the red herrings were very obviously red herrings, and Roz felt frustratingly slow on the uptake sometimes (though then again, she didn't have the advantage of knowing she was in a murder mystery) and more inclined to stumble on the truth by accident rather than actually detecting it. Still, it was entertaining enough, and I didn't guess the identity of the murderer before the final reveal.
It's also interesting as very obviously feminist detective fiction. I was particularly struck by Kenney's reversal of the male-gaziness of a lot of male-POV detective fiction, with several male characters described in a way that clearly demonstrates Roz's physical attraction to them, entirely independently of any romantic attraction; subplots also deal with sexual assault on campus and general sexism in the academic world of the 1980s, where Roz finds herself as one of only two women in a department of eighteen people.
My Head of Department had mentioned Graves of Academe as her favourite campus novel, and gave me a copy when I said it sounded interesting. While, fortunately, my department has not experienced a string of bizarre accidents/murders, the academic politics is certainly very true to life. The murder mystery plot is competently executed, though I did think a couple of the red herrings were very obviously red herrings, and Roz felt frustratingly slow on the uptake sometimes (though then again, she didn't have the advantage of knowing she was in a murder mystery) and more inclined to stumble on the truth by accident rather than actually detecting it. Still, it was entertaining enough, and I didn't guess the identity of the murderer before the final reveal.
It's also interesting as very obviously feminist detective fiction. I was particularly struck by Kenney's reversal of the male-gaziness of a lot of male-POV detective fiction, with several male characters described in a way that clearly demonstrates Roz's physical attraction to them, entirely independently of any romantic attraction; subplots also deal with sexual assault on campus and general sexism in the academic world of the 1980s, where Roz finds herself as one of only two women in a department of eighteen people.
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