by Pa Rock
Reader
(Note: Last month my sister, our cousin, and I had to scrap a long-planned trip to Nantucket due to the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. As an acknowledgment of that missed trip, my daughter sent me a couple of Nantucket-related items for my birthday - which also happened to fall at the time that we would have been on the trip.
One of those items that my daughter sent was an old hardback mystery novel entitled "Nantucket Soap Opera" by S.F.X. Dean, a mystery writer with whom I was unfamiliar. I read the novel - and reviewed it in this blog on April 3rd - and then did some basic research on the writer. I learned that S.F.X. Dean was the pseudonym of a writer who was also a college professor in Amherst, Massachusetts, by the name of Francis "Frank" Smith. I leaned as well that his entire mystery output consisted of just six novels - all written in the 1980's.
I had enjoyed "Nantucket Soap Opera," the sixth and final novel in S.F.X. Dean's series, all featuring a college professor from Massachusetts as the amateur sleuth, to the point that I decided to try to track down the other five novels and read them as well. So far I have been able to procure four of the six.
The second Dean novel that I acquired and read was "Death and the Mad Heroine" which I reviewed here on April 12th. It was actually the fifth book in the series. Today I will be reviewing the second in the series, "Such Pretty Toys." I have one more on the shelf waiting to be read, and am still looking for the other two.
Obviously I am enjoying the series immensely!)
"Such Pretty Toys" begins as Professor Neil Kelly is closing down his faculty home on the campus of Old Hampton College in Massachusetts (a fictional school) and preparing to head to England for a long-planned sabbatical where he intends to write a biography of John Donne. But with just minutes to go before the cab is supposed to arrive to take him to the airport in Boston, an old friend from his undergrad days shows up. The surprise visitor, who now works for the CIA, tells Neil that a mutual acquaintance - who was a Neil's first girlfriend in college - is in a Boston hospital after being blinded in a bomb blast in Santa Fe. That friend, whose husband was killed in the same blast, also works for the CIA, and Neil has had an on-going involvement with their family over the years - to include dating their daughter.
The couple had a tradition of buying each other gag gifts for April Fool's Day, and this year the wife had bought the husband a jack-in-the box at a Santa Fe toy store. When the package arrived she was looking over his shoulder as he opened it, and it blew up! (Hence, the novel's title.)
Neil accepts CIA help in quickly postponing his plans and catches a ride with his visitor to the hospital in Boston to see his injured friend. The patient, who is drifting in and out of consciousness when he arrives, manages to slip him a two-word note, "EMS LINN," before entering a medically-induced coma. Neil keeps the note hidden from the CIA agents who are present at the hospital, and later that night he manages to surreptitiously make it to the airport on his own where he boards a plane to Santa Fe.
Neil had recognized EMS LINN as a reference to Linn, a grown daughter of his blinded friend's half-sister Emily, who also lives in Santa Fe. Emily's husband, Doan, is a construction mogul who has projects going all over the world and is a party to several government contracts. Linn, the daughter, is his company's computer expert. Linn has a twin brother who is is involved in some anti-establishment activities, and she is engaged an older man works in her father's construction company at a high level and has a questionable past.
And some construction equipment disappears - and a military base loses a missile - and another person is killed by a bomb blast, a young man who works for Doan's construction company but is also connected to the radical son - and FBI and CIA agents show up in such numbers that they are literally tripping over one another. And through all of the high drama and calamitous confusion comes the steady probing of Professor Neil Kelly as he deliberately and calmly sifts through the bomb detritus and desert dust to determine which facts are relevant to unmasking the traitors and murderers, and which are merely distractions.
The end result is a clever and satisfying murder mystery that is tricked out with state-of-the-art (for the 1980's) computer crime and decorated with a colorful assortment of government spooks and spies. The late author had a gift for describing his characters in such careful detail that they have survived the past forty years almost totally unscathed, and his descriptions of Santa Fe could slip seamlessly into contemporary travel guides.
The Professor Neil Kelly mysteries are well plotted who-dunnits that also happen to have a strong literary bent. The tales entertain, and the beautiful writing and literary allusions educate. They are a treat!
The big mystery with S.F.X. Dean is why this very talented writer suddenly stopped writing mystery novels thirty years before his death. That's a story that needs to be unearthed and told.
Reader
(Note: Last month my sister, our cousin, and I had to scrap a long-planned trip to Nantucket due to the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. As an acknowledgment of that missed trip, my daughter sent me a couple of Nantucket-related items for my birthday - which also happened to fall at the time that we would have been on the trip.
One of those items that my daughter sent was an old hardback mystery novel entitled "Nantucket Soap Opera" by S.F.X. Dean, a mystery writer with whom I was unfamiliar. I read the novel - and reviewed it in this blog on April 3rd - and then did some basic research on the writer. I learned that S.F.X. Dean was the pseudonym of a writer who was also a college professor in Amherst, Massachusetts, by the name of Francis "Frank" Smith. I leaned as well that his entire mystery output consisted of just six novels - all written in the 1980's.
I had enjoyed "Nantucket Soap Opera," the sixth and final novel in S.F.X. Dean's series, all featuring a college professor from Massachusetts as the amateur sleuth, to the point that I decided to try to track down the other five novels and read them as well. So far I have been able to procure four of the six.
The second Dean novel that I acquired and read was "Death and the Mad Heroine" which I reviewed here on April 12th. It was actually the fifth book in the series. Today I will be reviewing the second in the series, "Such Pretty Toys." I have one more on the shelf waiting to be read, and am still looking for the other two.
Obviously I am enjoying the series immensely!)
"Such Pretty Toys" begins as Professor Neil Kelly is closing down his faculty home on the campus of Old Hampton College in Massachusetts (a fictional school) and preparing to head to England for a long-planned sabbatical where he intends to write a biography of John Donne. But with just minutes to go before the cab is supposed to arrive to take him to the airport in Boston, an old friend from his undergrad days shows up. The surprise visitor, who now works for the CIA, tells Neil that a mutual acquaintance - who was a Neil's first girlfriend in college - is in a Boston hospital after being blinded in a bomb blast in Santa Fe. That friend, whose husband was killed in the same blast, also works for the CIA, and Neil has had an on-going involvement with their family over the years - to include dating their daughter.
The couple had a tradition of buying each other gag gifts for April Fool's Day, and this year the wife had bought the husband a jack-in-the box at a Santa Fe toy store. When the package arrived she was looking over his shoulder as he opened it, and it blew up! (Hence, the novel's title.)
Neil accepts CIA help in quickly postponing his plans and catches a ride with his visitor to the hospital in Boston to see his injured friend. The patient, who is drifting in and out of consciousness when he arrives, manages to slip him a two-word note, "EMS LINN," before entering a medically-induced coma. Neil keeps the note hidden from the CIA agents who are present at the hospital, and later that night he manages to surreptitiously make it to the airport on his own where he boards a plane to Santa Fe.
Neil had recognized EMS LINN as a reference to Linn, a grown daughter of his blinded friend's half-sister Emily, who also lives in Santa Fe. Emily's husband, Doan, is a construction mogul who has projects going all over the world and is a party to several government contracts. Linn, the daughter, is his company's computer expert. Linn has a twin brother who is is involved in some anti-establishment activities, and she is engaged an older man works in her father's construction company at a high level and has a questionable past.
And some construction equipment disappears - and a military base loses a missile - and another person is killed by a bomb blast, a young man who works for Doan's construction company but is also connected to the radical son - and FBI and CIA agents show up in such numbers that they are literally tripping over one another. And through all of the high drama and calamitous confusion comes the steady probing of Professor Neil Kelly as he deliberately and calmly sifts through the bomb detritus and desert dust to determine which facts are relevant to unmasking the traitors and murderers, and which are merely distractions.
The end result is a clever and satisfying murder mystery that is tricked out with state-of-the-art (for the 1980's) computer crime and decorated with a colorful assortment of government spooks and spies. The late author had a gift for describing his characters in such careful detail that they have survived the past forty years almost totally unscathed, and his descriptions of Santa Fe could slip seamlessly into contemporary travel guides.
The Professor Neil Kelly mysteries are well plotted who-dunnits that also happen to have a strong literary bent. The tales entertain, and the beautiful writing and literary allusions educate. They are a treat!
The big mystery with S.F.X. Dean is why this very talented writer suddenly stopped writing mystery novels thirty years before his death. That's a story that needs to be unearthed and told.
1 comment:
S.F.X.? At first blush the thought is Saint Francis Xavier or the Society of Francis Xavier, a missionary group; could Dean have been the dean of that collegial body? Or perhaps, as indicated by the exploding jack in the box, Dean was a master at special effects. The book sounds interesting but the mystery starts with the pseudonym.
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