saint dear Peter—still live in the large house down the road that Peter bought for them. This little village represents roots for Peter, and sometimes you’ll see him with one or another young girlfriend down at the pub getting pissed. When he’s really in his cups, he’ll sometimes go all weepy, telling everyone what a raw deal he’s getting from the world about Francine. It wasn’t his fault she died. He really did love her. She wasn’t planning to get a divorce. They were soul mates.
It’s enough to make you vomit. Everybody knows what a cad he was, how it was his desertion of her that inspired Francine’s greatest poetry and the realization that he wasn’t coming back that led to her death. It’s hard to see now what she saw in Putter, but, after all, he was younger then, and so was she. So were we all.
But Cassandra, I’m rambling. You know all this, I’m sure, and I’m equally sure you take as large an interest in the disappearance of Francine’s bones as I do. Why not think about paying me a visit for a few days? Bring your translating work, I’ll cook you marvelous meals, and together we’ll see—for old times’ sake—whether we can get to the bottom of this.
When I arrived at Andrea’s cottage by car the next day, she was out in her front garden chatting with journalists. As usual she was wearing jeans and tall boots and a hat that suggested hunting big game rather than deadheading spent roses. At the moment she was busy giving quotes to the journos in her usual deep, measured tones:
“Peter Putter is an insecure, insignificant man and writer who has never produced anything of literary value himself, and could not stand the idea that his wife was a genius. He drove her to…Oh, hello, Cassandra.” She broke off and took my bag, waving good-bye to the newspaper hacks. “And don’t forget it’s AddlePOOT—not PATE, author of numerous thrillers…Come in, come in.” She opened the low front door and stooped to show me in. “Oh, the media rats. We love to hate them.”
I suspected that Andrea loved them more than she hated them. It was only since her career had slipped that she’d begun to speak of them in disparaging terms. During the years when the feminist thriller had been in fashion, Andrea’s name had shone brighter than anyone’s. “If Jane Austen were alive today and writing detective stories, she would be named Andrea Addlepoot,” one reviewer had gushed. All of her early books— Murder at Greenham Common , Murder at the Small Feminist Press , Murder at the Anti-Apartheid Demonstration —had topped the City Limits Alternative Best Seller list, and she was regularly interviewed on television and in print about the exciting new phenomenon of the feminist detective.
Alas, any new phenomenon is likely to become an old phenomenon soon and thus no phenomenon at all. It never occurred to Andrea that the feminist detective was a bit of a fad and that, like all fads in a consumer culture, its shelf life was limited. Oh, Andrea and her detective, London PI Philippa Fanthorpe, had tried. They had taken on new social topics—the animal rights movement, the leaky nuclear plants on the Irish Sea—but the reviews were no longer so positive. Too “rhetorical,” too “issue-oriented,” too “strident,” the critics wrote wearily. The fact that Andrea couldn’t write a sex scene to save her life led to a further decline in sales at a time when women’s erotica filled the bookstores, and Andrea retired for good to Dorset.
“Cassandra, it’s shocking how this is being reported,” she announced as we sat down in the tiny parlor. She took off her safari hat and her gray curls bristled. “Peter Putter is here giving interviews to the BBC news every few hours. And now the Americans have gotten wind of it. CNN is here and I’ve heard that Diane Sawyer is arriving tomorrow.”
“Well, Francine Crofts was born in America,” I said. “And that’s where a lot of her papers are,
It’s enough to make you vomit. Everybody knows what a cad he was, how it was his desertion of her that inspired Francine’s greatest poetry and the realization that he wasn’t coming back that led to her death. It’s hard to see now what she saw in Putter, but, after all, he was younger then, and so was she. So were we all.
But Cassandra, I’m rambling. You know all this, I’m sure, and I’m equally sure you take as large an interest in the disappearance of Francine’s bones as I do. Why not think about paying me a visit for a few days? Bring your translating work, I’ll cook you marvelous meals, and together we’ll see—for old times’ sake—whether we can get to the bottom of this.
When I arrived at Andrea’s cottage by car the next day, she was out in her front garden chatting with journalists. As usual she was wearing jeans and tall boots and a hat that suggested hunting big game rather than deadheading spent roses. At the moment she was busy giving quotes to the journos in her usual deep, measured tones:
“Peter Putter is an insecure, insignificant man and writer who has never produced anything of literary value himself, and could not stand the idea that his wife was a genius. He drove her to…Oh, hello, Cassandra.” She broke off and took my bag, waving good-bye to the newspaper hacks. “And don’t forget it’s AddlePOOT—not PATE, author of numerous thrillers…Come in, come in.” She opened the low front door and stooped to show me in. “Oh, the media rats. We love to hate them.”
I suspected that Andrea loved them more than she hated them. It was only since her career had slipped that she’d begun to speak of them in disparaging terms. During the years when the feminist thriller had been in fashion, Andrea’s name had shone brighter than anyone’s. “If Jane Austen were alive today and writing detective stories, she would be named Andrea Addlepoot,” one reviewer had gushed. All of her early books— Murder at Greenham Common , Murder at the Small Feminist Press , Murder at the Anti-Apartheid Demonstration —had topped the City Limits Alternative Best Seller list, and she was regularly interviewed on television and in print about the exciting new phenomenon of the feminist detective.
Alas, any new phenomenon is likely to become an old phenomenon soon and thus no phenomenon at all. It never occurred to Andrea that the feminist detective was a bit of a fad and that, like all fads in a consumer culture, its shelf life was limited. Oh, Andrea and her detective, London PI Philippa Fanthorpe, had tried. They had taken on new social topics—the animal rights movement, the leaky nuclear plants on the Irish Sea—but the reviews were no longer so positive. Too “rhetorical,” too “issue-oriented,” too “strident,” the critics wrote wearily. The fact that Andrea couldn’t write a sex scene to save her life led to a further decline in sales at a time when women’s erotica filled the bookstores, and Andrea retired for good to Dorset.
“Cassandra, it’s shocking how this is being reported,” she announced as we sat down in the tiny parlor. She took off her safari hat and her gray curls bristled. “Peter Putter is here giving interviews to the BBC news every few hours. And now the Americans have gotten wind of it. CNN is here and I’ve heard that Diane Sawyer is arriving tomorrow.”
“Well, Francine Crofts was born in America,” I said. “And that’s where a lot of her papers are,
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