Murder, He Wrote

There’s some funny business going on in Snupperton Mumsley, a sleepy English village whose quaint and quirky inhabitants mask enough passion, intrigue, and guilt to fill a soap opera. In fact, Snupperton Mumsley is ripe for the kind of murder that snares the attention of someone like Miss Marple. Or Simon Kirby-Jones. Simon is the protagonist of two novels by Dean James ’86 in which all the conventions of the traditional British cozy mystery—a whodunit in the Agatha Christie vein—are alive and well.

Or are they?

The cozy mystery usually features an amateur sleuth, a light tone, minimal violence, a motley cast of eccentric characters, and an intellectual puzzle involving these characters’ dark secrets and cryptic motivations. James is loyal to this pattern in Posted to Death and Faked to Death (Kensington Books, 2002 and 2003), but at the same time, his detective is not exactly traditional. Or alive, for that matter, though the vein part is apropos. Not only is Simon an American rather than a Briton, he’s gay and a vampire to boot.

If it sounds like James is stretching things a bit, never fear. Even as he faithfully sets up all the mannered and stereotyped elements of the cozy mystery, he gently pushes them just over the edge into affectionate parody. His many tweaks of the genre include inside jokes and repeated references to Agatha Christie and other cozy mystery writers and their characters. For example, Simon is a best-selling author of historical novels, mysteries, and romance novels, à la Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote. Along the way, James has a lot of fun with the characters and especially with the British idiom—even though Simon is from Houston, he manages the local dialect with pure English aplomb.

What saves it all from getting silly is that the mysteries themselves don’t miss a beat—the victims are decidedly dead, the skeletons in the suspects’ closets truly might be cause for murder, and the clues unfold in a way that gives the reader the chance to second-guess Simon. In Posted to Death, it’s up to the charming vampire detective to discover which of Snupperton Mumsley’s leading citizens had sufficient reason to stamp out the predatory postmistress Abigail Winterton, and in Faked to Death, he must find out who authored the demise of a literary impersonator at a local writers’ workshop.

It’s not often you can cozy up with a vampire, but you just might want to invite Simon Kirby-Jones home with you one dark night. Don’t worry, his wit is sharper than his bite—he takes pills that control his darker urges, leaving him free to concentrate on the mystery at hand.

James lives in Houston and is the manager of Murder by the Book, one of the nation’s oldest and largest mystery bookstores. He is the author of two previous mysteries—Cruel as the Grave and Closer than the Bones—and the Edgar Award-winning nonfiction By a Woman’s Hand, written with Jean Swanson.

—Christopher Dow