Author! Author! Murder Most Academic
By Ron Lovell
To even the most casual observer,
any college campus is rife with the stuff of murder mysteries: deception,
revenge, intrigue, disguise, backbiting, snobbery, condescension, and
betrayal. All that is missing most of the time is the killing of someone
as the key plot point around which the action takes place.
I should say, the literal killing of someone. People at all levels
on campuses everywhere are killed figuratively every day. They
don’t get tenure or are not promoted, perhaps as a result of nasty
colleagues. Their research grant is not renewed through political machinations
at a higher level in the college or by the intervention of a wealthy alum
with a different political agenda. Their carefully hidden affair with
a favorite student is suddenly revealed by another student or a disgruntled
wife or husband. The list of possible scenarios is endless.
Because I came into the academic world from magazine journalism, I always
kept a certain detachment from it. I had seen the outside world and earned
my living working in it. I knew what it was like to deal with people from
all walks of life, who, horror of horrors, might not have even finished
high school! I knew what it was like to deal with people who spent their
time off drinking beer and going to stock car races, not attending a chamber
music concert or reading Proust. I knew what it was like to deal with
the real world, not the rarified and cloistered world of a large university.
Even though I tried to keep my distance from this world, I had no choice
but to plunge into it with full force, working as hard as I could for
24 years at Oregon State University to teach students a lot of what I
knew about journalism and adapting my professional life to what must seem
to the outside world a peculiarly arcane milieu.
When I took early retirement after draconian budget cuts closed my department,
I decided to write about some of what I had learned during my years as
a university professor in a series of mystery novels. The protagonist
would be, you guessed it, a college journalism professor who solved crimes
on the side. Except for the crime-solving part, I was writing what I knew.
Given my—and my protagonist’s—previous profession as
a magazine writer, it did not seem all that far-fetched for him to do
what I have him do. After all, reporting usually involves the gathering
of information to get at the facts of a particular story. Add a murder
or two and you have the ingredients of most mystery novels. Add some of
the things that are a part of everyday campus life—like commencement
and student recruitment and getting promoted and receiving tenure and
a scandal involving football players—and you have the ingredients
of an academic mystery novel. Because of my background as a journalist
and a teacher, I always included material on other subjects—so the
reader could come away with something more than the identity of the killer.
I also felt that this would lessen the possibility of boring my readers.
From the first novel in the series, Murder at Yaquina Head, published
in 2002, my hero, Thomas Martindale, has had the tendency to do almost
anything to help friends and colleagues who are in trouble. This novel
touched academe only tangentially while concentrating on the search for
who killed his friend at a real lighthouse on the Oregon coast. As a back
story, I included the victim’s manuscript about her days as a fighter
in the French Resistance during World War II, a manuscript he needs to
find her killer.
Dead Whales Tells No Tales, published in 2003, uses a whaling
conference as the setting for a tale of the murder of a nasty marine biologist
who is faking whale population figures in the pay of the Japanese and
who misuses his research assistants for rather sordid purposes. As with
the French Resistance material in my first mystery, I include a lot of
material on the killing and saving of whales. That quest also gave me
lots of suspects—from the Japanese fisheries minister to an Eskimo
whaling commissioner to a radical environmentalist.
The third book in the series, Lights, Camera…Murder, published
in 2004, is the first totally academic one. It takes place entirely on
campus and deals with subject common to many schools. After one of his
students is killed during the filming of a television recruiting ad, Martindale
hunts for her killer. I threw in a scandal involving grade inflation for
black athletes and a nymphomaniac coaches’ wife for good measure.
But I had the most fun skewering the time-honored committee system. Anyone
who has taught at a college of any size has served on—and been occasionally
appalled by—the time-honored committee system.
For the fourth book, Murder Below Zero, I took a break from campus
and took Martindale to the Arctic as a science writer on a research voyage
studying ice. Even though I brought in a few characters from “Dead
Whales,” the story becomes one of survival rather than figuring
out who killed who. Ice, a polar bear, and a band of renegade Russians
are the enemies here as Martindale struggles to save himself and a dwindling
number of his colleagues. I wanted to try my hand at writing a thriller
and it was fun, but Oregon readers were less interested in it than the
first three books. In the process of promoting this novel, I learned a
lesson in book marketing.
Searching for Murder, published in August 2006, returns Martindale
to campus and a story that is the most academically centered of the series.
I use the occasion of the search for a new university president to bring
in a lot of things that happen on every campus. The turmoil that grips
a campus when a new president is being chosen. The various interest groups
that must be represented on the committee itself.
To the outside world, however, a total concentration on such things would
be an awful bore. To enliven the process, I added a murder during the
commencement ceremony (sure to endear me to officials at Oregon State
which I don’t name but which everyone assumes is my hero’s
school) and another nasty biologist who may be conducting deadly virus
research using illegal migrants as test subjects (sure to endear me to
biologists everywhere).
Lessons for authors and readers of academic mysteries:
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Just because something is fascinating to a narrowly focused professor, it may not be equally enthralling to a mystery reader. If you go into a subject that outside world may not understand, be sure to explain it fully and use it sparingly.
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There are a wealth of situations and individuals on most college campuses to weave in your stories. Be careful in following real people and incidents too closely, lest you be sued for libel. That is why the “any similarity between actual persons or incidents, etc.” notation appears on the frontispiece. Say only that you based your characters and plot on “types” of people you know and have worked with.
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Include other subjects beyond the university world in your story. This will enhance knowledge and lessen the tendency of the non-academic reader to be bored.
My four years as a
mystery novelist have been some of the happiest of my career. While I
will never make the money I have made on one particularly successful textbook,
I am not in it for that. It is fun to make things up, while using a lot
of factual material to teach readers something beyond the murder and mayhem.
It is fun to create puzzling scenarios for readers to solve. It is fun
to meet them at readings and signings and via letters and e-mail exchanges.
It is an honor to be among so many distinguished mystery writers past
and present and, in some small way, add to the literature of a popular
genre.
After a career as a magazine writer and a journalism professor, Ron Lovell started writing the Thomas Martindale Mysteries in 2002. He lives on the Oregon Coast.