Emily Dickinson Is Dead

A Homer Kelly Mystery, Book 5

By: Jane Langton

Narrated by: Derek Perkins

Although she spent her life withdrawn from the people of Amherst, Massachusetts, every man, woman, and English professor in this small university town claims ownership of poet Emily Dickinson. They give tours in her house, lay flowers on her grave, and now, as the hundredth anniversary of her death approaches, they organize festivals in her name. Dickinson scholar Owen Kraznik has just been railroaded into organizing the event when Amherst starts to burn.

When fire consumes a fourteen-story university dormitory killing two students, transcendentalist scholar and occasional sleuth Homer Kelly considers that it may have been set on purpose. To his amazement he finds himself once again embroiled in what Dickinson called "death's tremendous nearness" as murder stalks the symposium.

©1984 Original material by Jane Langton. Recorded by arrangement with The Mysterious Press.com, LLC. (P)2013 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

"[Langton writes with] ebullience and good humor and a sort of picnic charm of abandon and play." (Eudora Welty)

"Langton's sparkling prose and inimitable wit offer a delectable feast for the discriminating reader." ( Publishers Weekly)

"Like Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, Langton is blessed with the comic spirit - a rare gift of genius to be cherished." ( St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

A Bit Dated and Not Very Mysterious Mystery

Brilliant, sensitive, “saintly” U Mass Professor Owen Krausnick is a widower with a weakness for “lame ducks.” He regrets having mentioned to his boor of a department chair Dombey Dell that the 100th anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death is approaching, because the information inspired Dell to hold a Centennial Symposium for the famous poet at the university, with conference speakers staying in the Dickinson Homestead. Owen recoils from the passion with which Dickinson experts (from professional scholars to amateur crackpots) think they possess the great poet.

Owen’s friend, the ex-policeman, current professor Homer Kelly, however, finds human conflict interesting, so he’s kinda looking forward to the conference, knowing that it will be percolating with all manner of jealousies, ambitions, grudges, and so on. (Academia for Langton is no milk and honey paradise.) Indeed, the conference promises to be a fertile site for crimes of passion: the doctor fiancée of another professor, Tom Parry, is planning on attending the event unannounced, ignorant of Tom’s fling with an incredibly beautiful coed, who is envied by an overweight graduate student who has a delusional crush on Owen, while Peter Wiggins, a professor from the University of Central Arizona (living in Pancake Flat!), is planning to make a splash (and escape the desert) by proving that he possesses a later photograph of Emily Dickinson, showing that she is more beautiful than her famous daguerreotype indicates. Meanwhile, two different pro-Dickinson feminist groups are independently planning demonstrations during the conference, as all the speakers invited happen to be men, and the male members of the Japan Poetry Society are coming in by tour bus armed with their cameras (Langton is not above stereotyping her characters).

Even before the conference begins, things start getting out of hand, with dormitory arson killing a couple male students. The police receive descriptions of suspicious people seen around the dormitory the night of the fire, including one “fat woman.” It couldn’t be Winifred Gaw, could it? All seventy-five members of the U Mass English Department (except for Owen) have just voted to fire Winnie from her job as Owen’s secretary and to expel her from the PhD program, and though Owen has set her up for work as a tour guide at the Dickinson Homestead, she is consumed by resentment and envy.

The novel is NOT a whodunnit! We know the culprit (of at least three murders) pretty much immediately. It’s more of a will-the-culprit-get-away-with-it story. And Homer Kelly and his wife don’t really get on the “case” until Chapter 37 (so I don’t get why this is a “Homer Kelly mystery”). For that matter, for the reader if not for the characters, there’s no mystery to the deaths and no narrative coverage of the police working on the initial arson case, so this is also not a police-procedural or CSI genre work. There is no private detective in the novel. Come to think of it, for a “mystery” with an Emily Dickinson theme, there is very little Mystery in the novel. The perceptive characters figure out what the culprit was doing in Emily’s bedroom with a basket and an axe and some sleeping pills and a library book in one of the last chapters…

As she is not writing a whodunnit, Langton is liberated to indulge in plenty of dramatic irony, where we know things her characters don’t, like when the coroner, Owen’s cousin Harvey, thinks a dead woman apparently walking the submerged street of a drowned village at the bottom of the reservoir is Emily Dickinson, and we know who she really is.
(The damming of Swift River and drowning of multiple villages to make the Quabbin Reservoir and send water to Boston, etc., are as impressive in the novel as the Emily matter.)

Langton understands Emily about as well as the enigmatic and charismatic poet can be understood. Many of the characters quote cool Emily lines (some I knew well, some I encountered for the first time), and each of the 46 numbered chapters begins with a plot-appropriate epigraph made of lines from an Emily poem. Chapter 8, for instance, starts with a great stanza from a poem I hadn’t read before:

How martial is this place!
Had I a mighty gun
I think I'd shoot the human race
And then to glory run!

Langton is good at getting in the heads of a variety of characters, and she writes a fast-paced page turning story, and readers who love Emily Dickinson would enjoy all the quotations from her poems and references to her home and family and so on.

Although the atmosphere and layout of Amherst sound convincing, unfortunately, the academia Langton imagines seems rather cartoonish. It’s hard to believe that a sexist lout like Dombey Dell could be English Dept Chair at a high-level Eastern university like U Mass (and would mispronounce Brobdingnagian) or that ex-cop Homer Kelly could be a professor anywhere. I can’t believe the university would be able to put conference speakers up in the Homestead and to let a student wear Emily’s white dress for a poetry recital at the conference.

Some things that date the novel to 1984 must be forgiven, like a NY Times reporter’s portable typewriter, the photos that many characters take with cameras, or the Homestead having a brick façade instead of being the mustard yellow it’s been since 2004 (which happens to be the color of the house when Emily lived there). But other things feel unpleasant, like the depiction of the visiting Japanese academics’ English and picture taking or, more disturbingly, the depiction of Winifred Gaw. Despite Langton giving Winnie a sympathetic back story of parental abuse, the fat-shaming she indulges in at her character’s expense is disconcerting. Similarly, the negative depiction of “feminists” is disappointing.

The audiobook reader, Derek Perkins, is fine, but his female character voices tend to be a bit too artificially high and “feminine.”

I feel no need to proceed to other Homer Kelly literary mysteries.