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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 11, No. 10 |
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RON MILLER
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Another real historical figure turns detective
of TheColumnists.com
Years and years ago, Margaret Truman, the daughter of Pres. Harry S. Truman, began to write mysteries that took place in and around the White House. They sold pretty well, so a new sub-genre of the mystery began to thrive.
The late Ms. Truman surely wasn't the first
to mine that particular streak of ore within the mystery. Who
can forget stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her best-selling "G-String
Murders" and the other notable examples of the sub-genre
that date back to the early 1940s? But I dare say the Truman
mysteries really got the thing going as
a popular trend.
Now the sub-genre has expanded so far that we are about to get a new novel in which Pres. Abraham Lincoln serves as a vampire hunter in his spare time. I'll have to admit this isn't my favorite little corner of the mystery world.
But, that said, I'll also have to admit I rather enjoyed reading the pre-publication copy of "Midnight Fires" (Perseverance Press, $14.95) that the publisher sent me for review, although the book isn't officially published until April 5. The author, Nancy Means Wright, knows how to put together a good mystery and I was never bored, even though it's true I suspected I would be when I started to read.
The heroine of "Midnight Fires" is Mary Wollstonecraft, a real-life historical figure I knew absolutely nothing about until I started the book. Although she lived in the eighteenth century, she seems way ahead of her time. She appears to have been a rebel with a genuine cause--the quest for greater freedom for women in a period when even the most talented female writers often had to use made-up male names to put on their books if they ever wanted to see them published.
Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of Mary W. Shelley, the brilliant young authoress who married the poet Percy Shelley, one of England's literary lions in his day, and, on her own, wrote the novel "Frankenstein" that has come to be a classic work of speculative fiction and the inspiration for scores of movies about Dr. Frankenstein and his man-made monster.
The Mary Wollstonecraft that we meet in "Midnight Fires" is a young governness who decides to risk everything in order to prove that a controversial Irish freedom fighter named Liam Donovan, the prime suspect in the killing of an English aristocrat, is not really the guilty party.
If you're looking for a conventional murder mystery with crime labs and forensics or private detectives vying against village police who've made up their minds too quickly about somebody's guilt, this isn't for you. There are no crime labs, no forensics, nor any real police--and Mary, the governess, certainly isn't a private eye of any kind.
Instead, "Midnight Fires" turns a bright young woman loose in a society where money and social position rules, trying to develop evidence and testimony that will result in justice, if only she can convince somebody to take an interest in what she uncovers.
In other words, "Midnight Fires" is more about the social climate of a country ruled by its landed gentry than it is about standard modern police work. As you follow Mary through her search for clues, you will learn more about the times in which she lived than about the details of a murder case.
What Nancy Wright also gives us is a full-bodied portrait of this extremely interesting and lively young woman. If she didn't do any of the things Wright has her doing in this novel, I actually think she certainly might have if the situation arose the way the author describes it.
So many of the great female authors of England's eighteenth and nineteenth centurues were rerbelling against the chains men had wrapped them in--and I have no doubt their writings helped bring an end, eventually, to the second class status of women in that society.
But this briskly-written mystery gives us a chance to identify with such a daring young lady as we see her world not only through her eyes, but through the eyes of a modern female artist who probably realizes she's helping repay a debt that she and her literary sisters of today still owe to many, many risk-taking women like Mary Wollstonecraft who blazed the trails for generations of writers to come.
"Midnight Fires" comes in a handsome trade paperback edition at a very reasonable price and can be pre-ordered now at most bookstores and at all the popular online sources for books.
©2010 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Perseverance Press. This column first posted March 8, 2010.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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