After Emily, by Julie Dobrow
After Emily is subtitled: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet. The two women were Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter Millicent Todd Bingham.
Yes, they were both remarkable. Although they strove relentlessly for the same goal – the publication in full of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters – their temperaments could not have been more unlike. Mabel Loomis Todd was ambitious, outspoken, and gifted in many areas of endeavor: art, writing, and music among them. In an era of almost Victorian restraint, she was unabashedly sensual. Finally, into the bargain, she was beautiful. 
Author Julie Dobrow describes trips to far flung locales where Mabel’s astronomer husband David Peck Todd made fruitless attempts to observe a total eclipse. (The skies invariably clouded over at the crucial moment.). But this is really an Amherst story. In 1881, David secured a position as astronomy professor at Amherst College. David and Mabel began socializing with the Dickinson family, who were prominent members of the community.
Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia lived at the Homestead, where they cared for their elderly, ailing mother until her death in 1882. Their brother Austin, his wife Susan, and their three children lived close by. When Mabel Loomis Todd and her husband David moved to Amherst, they rented a house not far from the Dickinson domiciles. Indeed, Amherst was a relatively small village; no one lived very far from anyone else.
This fact greatly facilitated the relationship between Mabel Loomis Todd and William Austin Dickinson. That relationship swiftly moved from friendship to love affair – a fervent bond only lightly concealed by Mabel and Austin. It continued, only growing in intensity for nearly thirteen years, up until Austin’s death in 1895.
Mabel’s husband David was among those who knew about the affair. He was the epitome of the complaisant spouse, allowing his wife and her lover plenty of space in which to pursue their desires. Not so Austin’s wife. Susan Dickinson was the very epitome of the Woman Scorned. Her fury extended well beyond Austin’s death. It had a perverse and lasting effect on efforts to make the poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson available to the reading public.
In fact it is the story of those efforts, doggedly pursued by Mabel and then taken up by her daughter Millicent, that takes up the bulk of this narrative, particularly its latter half. It is a very complex tale, involving copyright and other legal issues. At times, it was hard not to get bogged down. Yet I was held, especially by the depiction of the strange complexity of the relationship between Mabel and Millicent, a rapport not helped by the fact that the latter was left in the care of her distant grandparents for long stretches of time. Like her mother, Millicent had a restless, brilliant intellect; among her many achievements, she was the first woman to obtain a doctorate in geology and geography from Harvard University. Unlike her mother, she was of a conservative bent. It took her a long time to fully come to terms with Mabel’s and Austin’s connection to each other. But eventually she became reconciled to its truth, even its legitimacy.
On the surface, Millicent Todd Bingham would seem less interesting than her colorful, flamboyant, and strong willed mother. Yet in a way, Millicent is the more admirable of the two, seeing the value of Mabel’s quest, adopting as her own, and ultimately seeing through to completion.
Finally, one comes full circle, returning to the wellspring of this somewhat tortured narrative, to the elusive, reclusive genius that was Emily Dickinson. Of the many poems that I am familiar with, this is the one that haunts me the most:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?**************The Feet, mechanical, go round –A Wooden wayOf Ground, or Air, or Ought –Regardless grown,A Quartz contentment, like a stone –*************This is the Hour of Lead –Remembered, if outlived,As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
The first edition of poems by Emily Dickinson, published in 1890
American Mystery Classics – Take Two
Yesterday’s Washington Post features an article by Michael Dirda on American mystery classics. He begins with Leslie Klinger’s hefty anthology, which includes The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen, The Benson Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine, The House Without a Key (in which Earl Derr Biggers introduced the Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan), W.R. Burnett’s Little Caesar, and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.
The only one of those five that I’ve read is Red Harvest. With regard to the plot, I don’t recall any of the specifics but I’ll probably always remember what a wild ride it was. The body count alone was impressive – somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-three! Good guys and bad guys, guilty and innocent, male and female – they kept stumbling into a shooter’s cross hairs or the wrong end of a knife.
Red Harvest is not a Sam Spade novel; rather, it features protagonist known only by his job title: the Continental Op, an operative of the Continental Detective Agency of San Francisco. 
The famous first sentence more or less sets the tone for the rest of the novel:
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.
First appearing in 1929, The Roman Hat Mystery was the first novel by Ellery Queen, the pseudonym of joint authors (and cousins) Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee. This hugely successful collaboration rolled merrily along until 1971, the year of Lee’s death. I recently wrote about Ellery Queen in the post entitled American Mystery Classics, selected by Otto Penzler and published by Penzler Publishers. In that post, I mentioned The Chinese Orange Mystery. This is one of eight mysteries newly reissued by Penzler. According to Michael Dirda, it is “…probably Ellery Queen’s most dazzling case.” I didn’t much care for the novel, finding it too gimmicky and full of uninteresting characters, including, alas, Ellery himself. (The author and the investigator share the same name, a somewhat disconcerting device which you eventually get used to.)
I had previously read and enjoyed Calamity Town, first in a brief series of Ellery Queen titles set in the fictional New England town of Wrightsville. Additional reading of critics and bloggers directed me back to the Wrightsville novels (and stories). Ergo, I am currently reading- and very much enjoying – the second book in the series, The Murderer Is a Fox.
If you scroll to the bottom of the American Mystery Classics blog post that I linked to above, you will find several interesting observations on Ellery Queen by Xavier L., my occasional gracious and very knowledgeable online correspondent. Xavier has written an article entitled “Ellery Queen in France;” it can be found on his blog, At the Villa Rose.
About The Roman Hat Mystery, Michael Dirda says this:
Here was a classic Golden Age puzzle — Ellery Queen’s first case, in fact — and virtually all the characters were caricatures, the dialogue was stilted and corny, and the elaborate plot verged on the ludicrous. What more could one ask for?
He goes on to observe:
That sounds paradoxical, but artificiality is a welcome attraction in many vintage who-and-howdunits. The stories deliberately leave out the messiness of real life, of real emotions, thus allowing the reader to mentally just amble along, mildly intrigued, feeling comfortable and even, yes, cozy. In this case, the key clue — where is the murdered Field’s missing top hat? — drives home the difference between then and now: We are a long way from deranged fanatics armed with semiautomatic weapons.
I have to interject here that the dialog in The Murder Is a Fox is anything but stilted. It is real and urgent. Here is part of a conversation between Ellery Queen and a local judge:
“How familiar were you with the proceedings?”
“I followed it fairly closely at the time.”
“And your sympathies?”
“In my business,” remarked Judge Martin to his stogie, “if you have any such, you sit on ‘em till they smother to death.”
“Then you did have some.”
“Perhaps.”
“For the victim or the defendant?”
Judge Martin tapped ashes into his wastebasket. “Young fellow, you’re not going to pump me on that. Where my sympathies lay is irrelevant—purely emotional, you understand. No basis in fact, no evidential value, no standing in court.”
“What did you think of the verdict?” persisted Ellery.
“My personal opinion?” Judge Eli squinted at him through the acrid smoke. “I don’t like the kind of evidence they convicted Bayard on. As a judge, I mean. I prefer something substantial when you’re trying a man for his life and liberty—like fingerprints.”
Ellery is desperate for some kind of information that will corroborate his view of the case.
As I noted previously, The Roman Hat Mystery came out in 1929. I can only assume that the Queen cousins learned something about writing dialog between then and 1945, the publication year of
The Murderer Is a Fox. 
Ellery Queen, aka Manfred B. Lee (left) and Frederic Dannay
The sweetest music
In my youth, I became a great fan of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and sometimes (Neil) Young. I still enjoy their music.
Recently I came upon this YouTube video of a concert they gave in 2014. They’re singing “Our House,” a song that is much beloved by their fans. Anyway, it’s obvious almost from the start that as he sits at the keyboard, Graham Nash is being distracted by something. At about 1:55, you find out what – or rather, who – that distraction is:
To see this veteran rocker, white haired, still handsome, and still possessing a pleasant singing voice, so obviously enchanted by this little child, his granddaughter – well, to me it was a thing of beauty.
Crime fiction and the Man Booker Prize
It used to seem like an article of faith for book loving observers: Not only did Britain’s Man Booker Prize not go to a work of crime fiction, but works in that genre were not even considered for that prestigious accolade. Then in 2016, His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet made it onto the shortlist. (It did not win.) And this year, Snap by Belinda Bauer made it onto the longlist (but no further).
I read His Bloody Project shortly after it came out two years ago. I had this to say about it in a post from early last year entitled ‘Current trends in crime fiction part three, the books: historical mysteries‘:
Wow! A standalone novel of tremendous depth and power. The year is 1869. Amid the oppression of a community of Scottish crofters by cruel and heedless overseers, a young man’s anger and resentment build steadily until they reach the boiling point. His Bloody Project made the Man Booker Prize shortlist for 2016, apparently astonishing certain folk among the ‘literati.’
A word to the wise: if you’re thinking that the title betokens great violence, you would be correct. That violence seems to occur in the blink of an eye; it follows an extended period of almost relentlessly escalating tension and anger. The bloody climax is indeed terrible, but it does not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is the culmination of a cruel and heedless exercise of power over the powerless, one of whom reaches the breaking point, with catastrophic results.
I read Snap some time ago, so its contents are not fresh in my mind. Here’s what I do remember. In this novel, a combination of domestic suspense and police procedural, Belinda Bauer posits two seemingly unrelated story lines. You know they’ll eventually converge, but you’ve no idea how. When it finally happens, you’re treated to one of those ‘aha’ moments so beloved by readers of crime fiction.
Each story line features a young woman who is pregnant. Right away this fact ratchets up the reader’s anxiety level. (I like to think that this would be true for both female and male readers.) And then there’s the wonderfully named Jack Bright, a fourteen-year-old boy who is something of a hero, this despite certain of his actions, which are after all born of desperation on behalf of his two younger siblings.
In searching for reviews, I discovered that Snap was in fact inspired by an actual crime that occurred in 1988 and still has British police baffled. (Fair warning: details concerning that atrocity are fairly well described in the novel’s opening sections. There is no overt violence – just a terrible mystery hanging over the heads of three children.)
Snap is extremely well written, and Bauer tells a very compelling story. Highly recommended.
Books to the Ceiling 