A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

details — the sound of the housekeeper’s voice outside, Mr. McEvoy’s well-practiced but ill-advised tactic of taking refuge on the balcony. You may say that the girl Eva should have confessed at once what had happened…”

“I do indeed.”

“But bear in mind her position. Not only her post at the hotel but her engagement to the handsome Franz would be forfeited. And, after all, there was no question of anybody being tried in court. The fashionable world was perfectly happy to connive at the story that Mr. McEvoy had fallen accidentally from his window — while inwardly convicting an innocent woman of his murder.”

My mother said, sounding quite subdued for once: “But Mrs.

McEvoy must have known. Why didn’t she say something?”

“Ah, to answer that one needs to know something about Mrs.

McEvoy’s history, and it so happens that Dr. Watson and I are in that position. A long time ago, before her first happy marriage, Mrs.

McEvoy was loved by a prince. He was not, I must admit, a particularly admirable prince, but prince he was. Can you imagine how it felt for a woman to come from that to being deceived with a hotel chambermaid by a man who made his fortune from bathroom furnishings? Can you conceive that a proud woman might choose to be thought a murderess rather than submit to that indignity?”

Another silence, then my mother breathed: “Yes. Yes, I think I can.” Then, “Poor woman.”

“It was not pity that Irene McEvoy ever needed.” Then, in a different tone of voice: “So there you have it. And it is your decision how much, if anything, you decide to pass on to Jessica in due course.”

There were sounds of people getting up from chairs, then my father said: “And your, um, demonstration this morning?”

“Oh, that little drama. I knew what had happened, but for Mrs.

McEvoy’s sake it was necessary to prove to the world she was innocent. I couldn’t call Eva as witness because I’d given her my word.

I’d studied the pitch of the roof and the depth of the snow and I was scientifically convinced that a man falling from Mrs. McEvoy’s balcony would not have landed on the terrace. You know the result.”

Good nights were said, rather subdued, and they were shown out.

Through the crack in the door I glimpsed them. As they came level with the crack, Silver Stick, usually so precise in his movements, dropped his pipe and had to kneel to pick it up. As he knelt, his bright eyes met mine through the crack and he smiled, an odd, quick smile unseen by anybody else. He’d known I’d been listening all the time.

When they’d gone Mother and Father sat for a long time in silence.

At last Father said: “If he’d got it wrong, he’d have killed himself.”

“Like the skiing.”

“He must have loved her very much.”

“It’s his own logic he loves.”

But then, my mother always was the unromantic one.

Murder-Two JOYCE CAROL OATES

In John Guare’s play Bosoms and Neglect, two deeply neurotic characters are discussing neglected writers. When one advances the name of Joyce Carol Oates, the other demands (paraphrasing), how can she be neglected when she writes a book a week? From the publication of her first novel By the North Gate (1963), Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) has been the most prolific of major American writers, turning out novels, short stories, reviews, essays, and plays in an unceasing flow as remarkable for its quality as its volume. Writers who are extremely prolific often risk not being taken as seriously as they should — if you can write it that fast, how good can it be? Oates, however, has largely escaped that trap, and even her increasing identification with crime fiction, at a time that the field has attracted a number of other mainstream literary figures, has not damaged her reputation as a formidable serious writer.

Many of Oates’s works contain at least some elements of crime and mystery, from the National Book Award winner Them (1970), through the Chappaquiddick fictionalization Black Water (1992) and the Jeffrey Dahmer-inspired serial-killer novel Zombie (1995), to her controversial 738-page fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe, Blonde (2000). The element of detection becomes explicit with the investigations of amateur sleuth Xavier Kilgarvan in the 1984 novel The Mysteries of Winterthurn which, the author explains in an after-word to the 1985 paperback edition, “is the third in a quintet of experimental novels that deal, in genre form, with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America.” Why would a serious literary writer like Oates choose to work in such “deliberately confining structures?” Because “the formal discipline of ‘genre’…forces us inevitably to a radical re-visioning of the world and the craft of fiction.” Oates, who numbers among her honors in a related genre the Bram Stoker Award of the Horror Writers of America, did not establish an explicit crime-fiction identity until Lives of the Twins (1987; British title Kindred Passions) appeared under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith. Initially intended to be a secret, the identity of Smith was revealed almost immediately, and later novels were bylined Joyce Carol Oates (large print) writing as Rosamund Smith (smaller print).

Among the key attributes of the astonishingly versatile Oates is her insight into deeply troubled adolescents, a quality “Murder-Two” demonstrates, along with her vivid descriptive style and her unconventional way with a crime-fiction situation.

This, he swore.

He’d returned to the town house on East End Avenue after eleven p.m. and found the front door unlocked and, inside, his mother lying in a pool of squid ink on the hard-wood floor at the foot of the stairs. She’d apparently fallen down the steep length of the stairs and broken her neck, judging from her twisted upper body.

She’d also been bludgeoned to death, the back of her skull caved in, with one of her own golf clubs, a two- iron, but he hadn’t seemed to see that, immediately.

Squid ink? — well, the blood had looked black in the dim foyer light. It was a trick his eyes played on his brain sometimes when he’d been studying too hard, getting too little sleep. An optic tic.

Meaning you see something more or less, and valid, but it registers surreally in the brain as something else. Like in your neurological programming there’s an occasional bleep.

In Derek Peck, Jr.’s, case, confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief — the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition — from differ-ential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting later weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the town house that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence that vibrated with dread.

He crouched over the body, staring in disbelief. “Mother? Mother!”

As if it was he, Derek, who’d done something bad, he the one to be punished.

He couldn’t catch his breath. Hyperventilating! His heart beating so wildly he almost fainted. Too confused to think, Maybe they’re still here, upstairs? for in his dazed state he seemed to lack even an animal’s instinct for self-preservation.

Yes, and he felt to blame, somehow. Hadn’t she instilled in him a reflex of guilt? If something was wrong in the household, it could probably be traced back to him. From the age of thirteen (when his father, Derek Senior, had divorced his mother, Lucille, same as divorcing him), he’d