The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
and Other Adventures with Cassandra Reilly
Barbara Wilson
for Jen Green
Contents
Introduction
The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair
Theft of the Poet
Belladonna
An Expatriate Death
Wie Bitte?
The Last Laugh
The Antikvaariat Sophie
Mi Novelista
Preview: The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists
About the Author
Introduction
CASSANDRA REILLY, TRANSLATOR, GLOBETROTTER, and accidental detective, came into being about ten years ago, on a train, appropriately enough, travelling through Norway. My companion Jen Green, an editor at the Women’s Press in London, and I had just been at the International Feminist Book Fair in Oslo, and I was joking that the fair would be a great place to have a (fictional) murder take place. In 1986 I was still relatively new to the mystery genre and to the notion of what a feminist mystery might look like or what I might make of such a male-dominated tradition. I’d begun to experiment with Murder in the Collective, published two years before, and had just finished Sisters of the Road, which dealt with teen prostitution. Both were told in the voice of amateur sleuth Pam Nilsen, a printer and activist, rooted in her Seattle community.
“Would Pam solve the crime at the book fair then?” Jen asked.
“I can’t imagine Pam ever leaving Seattle,” I said. “No, it would have to be someone else, someone completely different.”
Cassandra Reilly, who eventually did solve the book fair murder, was different. She wasn’t rooted, she wasn’t steadily employed, and her community was far-flung. To a large extent she reflected a shift that was taking place in my own life, a movement away from Seattle and into a wider world. In my early twenties, I’d lived abroad and travelled for several years. In my mid-thirties, my work in publishing and translating, as well as a new transatlantic relationship, meant that I would be spending more and more time living away from Seattle and out of suitcases again.
Cassandra’s life history did not come to me all in one piece. In fact, the first story in which she appeared, “Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair,” revealed relatively few details about her. I never conceived her whole, as I had Pam Nilsen, a character so apparently realistic that I was frequently asked personal questions about her and her twin sister (personal questions I found, oddly enough, I could answer). Cassandra was less easy to pin down.
Some things I knew about her right away. She was a translator, from Spanish to English; that was a world I knew and an occupation that gave her a reason to travel. I based her in London, because that was where I was living off and on. I gave her an Irish grandfather, having had one myself. And I put her birthplace in Kalamazoo, Michigan, not far from where my mother was born and where she’d attended college. Most importantly, I gave Cassandra a craving to be in some other place from the place she was, a restlessness that was quite familiar to me.
But in most ways, Cassandra differed greatly from me. She was willingly expatriate—a choice I’d never been able to make—free-spirited, and of an eclectically amorous nature. She was tall and thin, much older than I (though by now I am almost caught up to her), and conveniently erudite. She seemed to know all kinds of things that I had to research and read books about. She spoke many languages well and had been to every part of the globe, several times. In bits and pieces over the years, she has revealed herself to me as not only adventurous and romantic, but also deeply melancholic and on the run from a past of deprivation and narrow-mindedness.
If Cassandra began to realize herself, mosaic-like, in my imagination, so did her circle of friends. One of them, her Australian pal Jacqueline Opal, I got to know quite well as Cassandra’s sidekick in Trouble in Transylvania, but other friends were more reclusive. Her doctor friend Lucy Hernandez, for instance, with whom she always stays in Oakland, has only made one appearance, and the two women from whom she rents an attic room in Hampstead—Olivia Wulf, a refugee from Hitler’s Austria, and Nicola Gibbons, a Scottish-born bassoonist—are glimpsed only tantalizingly in the background as yet. Gloria de los Angeles, the best-selling Venezuelan author whose novels Cassandra has translated, has never appeared in person either, but her rival, the Uruguayan Luisa Montiflores, has had a tendency to turn up right from the beginning.
Over the years, the mysteries Cassandra has investigated in foreign countries have enabled me to play with a variety of issues, some political, many literary. I’ve always chosen to interpret the mystery genre rather loosely. Frequently there is a murder; sometimes not. Puzzles of all kinds, robberies and impersonations, failed financial schemes, and hidden romances are quite as intriguing as dead bodies. After all, secrets are the heart of any mystery, and secrets take many forms. But the genre demands dead bodies, and dead bodies there are, along with suspects with bad alibis and relatives with suspicious motives.
As an amateur, Cassandra is drawn into all these situations out of coincidence and with the best intentions. Her work translating fiction has accustomed her to fluctuating meanings and alternative readings. As a translator, Cassandra is never in one world wholly; she shifts in and out of identities, cultures, even sexualities—for although in some urban subcultures of the West, being lesbian may be a fixed role, in other parts of the world there may well be more confusion, invisibility, and fluidity.
My interest in what could happen in the world of a translator-detective on the loose led me to write not only stories about her, but two novels. After I finished the second one, Trouble in Transylvania, I wondered if I would ever write another full-length Cassandra Reilly novel, because all the places I fantasized sending Cassandra (and friends have been very helpful, providing me a list of possible titles that range from Chaos in Cambodia to Bonkers in Bolivia) were as remote and intriguing as the Eastern Europe of Transylvania. I had spent some weeks travelling in Hungary and Romania, and many more weeks reading about the history and culture of those countries, in order to make the background of Trouble in Transylvania more convincing. Unfortunately my life and my other writing projects did not allow for extended visits to, much less extensive research about, Patagonia, Uzbekistan, and a matriarchal island off the coast of Okinawa—all places I was dying to set a mystery.
I contented myself with writing short stories instead, and with sending Cassandra to places with which I was more familiar. In the story form, I felt I’d found a medium that seemed to suit Cassandra Reilly’s wayward nature and literary adventures. The mystery tale offers considerable pleasures. Not least is its ability to be read at one sitting. Brevity is the soul of wit, of course, but compression can also perform wonders with a plot. A single idea is all the story requires—no need for complicated subplots, no hordes of possible perpetrators, no nets-full of red herrings.
The first Cassandra stories were mostly written in response to requests from editors. Later I began to write them for their own sake, and for the pleasure of Cassandra’s company. I’d found that as I travelled, I often ran into Cassandra Reilly in the most unexpected places. I’d see her at the Hamburg harbor, piloting a cabin cruiser up the Elbe River, and wonder what brought her there. Walking down a canal street in Amsterdam, I’d glimpse her again—tall, thin, with her wild hair clamped down by a beret—through the window of a used bookstore specializing in women’s titles. I bumped into her at book fairs and on vacations to Hawaii and Mexico. I seemed to find her most often in London though, a city I’d left behind but she had not. Her connections there helped me remain c
onnected too. And over the years, although I did not quite trust Cassandra to stay away from my girlfriends, she became a friend to me, a compañera. She gave me courage in difficult times and helped keep me amused during tedious hours on trains and buses. I listened to her stories, sympathized with the difficulties of trying to make a living as a translator, envied her zest for seeing the world, was fascinated by some of her friends and alarmed by her propensity for straying into situations where people seemed to be regularly murdered.
I am not Cassandra Reilly. I wouldn’t exactly like to be Cassandra Reilly. But I enjoy being her companion, her amanuensis, her friend.
Other people in my life take an interest in Cassandra too and often suggest scenery for her to wander through and problems for her to solve. Few of their ideas have been ones I could use directly; still, a clipping that came from England in the mail, an anecdote told over dinner in Brussels, an environmental brochure from Germany—all became grist for the mill. The foreign flavor of these stories is no accident. I have spent years of my life outside the United States and have long-standing friendships and connections in many countries. In piecing together a portrait of Cassandra Reilly, expatriate dyke detective and open-eyed observer of what goes on around her, I’ve tried to give the sense of a life lived outside North America yet deeply American all the same—one of the essential themes of our New World literature, and one that crosses gender and genre.
The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
IT IS A COMMONPLACE that in this world there are tourists and then there are travellers. Among the latter are the great travel writers, Jan Morris and M.F.K. Fisher, for example, who delight in words as much as famous sights and cities, and are inclined less to the rigors of the adventurous life than the luxuries or piquant poverties of foreignness. There are also the great travellers—Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird (a frail Victorian lady whose husband said of her, “She has the appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich.”)—women who will, whatever age, seek out the bizarre and dangerous and coincidentally sometimes produce works of fine travel literature. And then there are the travellers, not very great, who write books, not very literary ones.
Edith “Tommy” Price was that last sort of traveller, that last sort of writer. And I’d adored her.
I’d grown up reading her books. My Aunt Eavan, who was something of a traveller herself, having ventured to Alaska before the cruise ships and Hawaii before the hordes, was a great fan of Tommy Price’s and had collected all her books and sent copies on to me from the time I was eleven or twelve. Jungle Journey, To the Top of the Very Top, and Lost in the Interior were my favorites. For years they’d been out of print, but the British publisher Harridan had recently relaunched two volumes in a handsome new paperback edition, and interviews with Tommy Price had begun to appear in everything from the Guardian’s Women’s Page to Spare Rib.
She sounded such a dashing, risk-taking, literate woman that I determined to meet her. As an itinerant translator, I have travelled widely myself, but not always adventurously—at least not intentionally. My idea of foreign intrigue is an attractive woman at the next cafe table. I do admire my more intrepid sister voyagers, however, and have a nodding acquaintance with many. Therefore I wrote to Tommy Price at her home in Dartmoor and proposed a visit. I said I was in the process of translating her book, Bound for Greenland, into Spanish for an Argentinean publisher. This was not an entire falsehood. My dear friend Victoria, who runs a publishing house in Buenos Aires, should be publishing Tommy Price, and I’d have to make a note to persuade her one of these days.
A brief reply came immediately: “Tuesday, December 1, I shall be at home from three o’clock. Please join me for tea. Yours sincerely, Tommy Price.”
I took the train to Exeter the morning of Tuesday, December 1, and then hired a car for the hour’s journey to the small village of Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. December was a bleak and glorious time of year to visit Dartmoor, and it was an appropriately bleak and glorious day, with wind sweeping over the yellow gorse and purple heather and sun breaking out dramatically behind the great rock piles, the granite formations called tors. It had been many years since I’d been in this part of the country; the last time had been with Sheila Cragworth, who was at the time nursing a desperate passion for a married woman and hoped to lose herself in the close study of geology and Neolithic archeological remains. I’m afraid I also learned perhaps more than I wanted to know about the way hot lava had once bubbled up to the surface where it cooled to become granite, and about the hut circles, barrows, monoliths, dolmens, menhirs, and kistvaens of the ancient people who once inhabited this severe landscape. It had been forested then; now it was bare and dramatic, with bogs and rivulets, granite rubble, and herds of Dartmoor ponies roaming freely through the military firing ranges.
Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor is an old market village hidden in a wooded valley by a river. It has a stone church, numerous tea shops, and at least one four-star pub for the walkers who throng to Dartmoor in the summer months. The address Tommy Price had given me was down a narrow lane with thick stone walls on either side. As I drove cautiously along, a wild rain burst out, and an oncoming car, in a great hurry, almost sideswiped my rented Ford Escort.
That was irritating, but not quite so irritating as arriving at Tommy’s cottage to find no one at home. I stood on the step knocking loudly, wondering if she were deaf, or if she were the sort of woman who would deliberately invite a stranger to Dartmoor and leave her standing wretchedly in the rain outside. I remembered she had written in Lost in the Interior:
At times, I know not why, a perversely asocial sensibility comes upon me, and I find myself doing and thinking things completely at odds with received notions of good behavior. It is precisely this misanthropic and contrary streak in my character which has enabled me to turn my back on civilization for months at a time and to embrace hardship and solitude with equanimity. Alas for my friends and family, however: the suddenness of my mood changes, the violence of my antisocial emotions!
Alas for Cassandra Reilly, standing on the step and becoming more and more soaked, the unwitting victim of a burst of antisocial contrariness!
Well, I could be contrary too. I returned to the car, found a bed and breakfast not far away, and changed my wet clothing. My landlady made me a cup of tea and commiserated about the failed visit to Tommy Price.
“She’s not what you would call a friendly sort,” Mrs. Droppington said. “Keeps to herself, she does.”
“Has she lived here long?”
“Long enough. The cottage belonged to her brother, who retired here in the thirties. But he’s been dead years and years now. Miss Price keeps the place up, I’ll say that for her, but that’s mainly the work of her friend, Miss Root.”
“Miss Root?”
“Oh yes, childhood friend, I understand. Constance Root. She has always taken care of Miss Price’s things while Miss Price was gallivanting around the world.”
None of the books had ever mentioned a Constance Root.
“And is Miss Root a friendly sort?”
“The two of them keep to themselves mostly, but when Miss Price is away, I’d say Miss Root is friendlier.”
I set out again for the Price-Root household about five, in the dark of an early evening thick with rain. Familiar country smells of animals and manure mingled with the acid scent of peat and bog from the hills above us. Sheila Cragworth had not believed any of the folktales and horror stories that abound in Dartmoor, about the Wisht Hounds and the ghosts and pixies, but I, granddaughter of Irish immigrants, couldn’t help a shudder creeping back and forth across my shoulders, as I squished along the short road from Mrs. Droppington’s. Dartmoor had been a place of great religious significance once, but all that was left were superstitions. I remembered reading that the only way to deal with pixies was to take off one’s coat, turn it inside out, and put it on again.
It was too cold for that and so I only hurried on.
This time I found a light on in the cottage window, a light that hadn’t been there earlier.
I knocked. I knocked hard. And harder.
At length a gray head appeared in the window at the top of the door, and a low voice asked cautiously, “Who is it?”
“Cassandra Reilly. I had an appointment with Tommy Price for tea a few hours ago. But no one was here when I arrived, so I’ve come back.”
The door slowly opened and a woman in her early eighties stood there in a plain dress with a heavy shawl over her shoulders and slippers on her feet. The stay-at-home, I thought: Miss Root who keeps the home fires burning while Miss Price is out writing books about her adventures.
“Please come in out of the rain,” she said finally, when she could see I wasn’t moving. “Miss Price isn’t at home, I’m very sorry.”
I stepped into the vestibule and couldn’t help craning my neck for a view of a cozy-looking sitting room stuffed with books.
“She left very suddenly,” the woman said.
I remembered the car that had almost sideswiped me in the narrow lane: Tommy Price on a sudden mission to Borneo perhaps.
“I can offer you some tea,” Miss Root said. “I’m afraid I live very simply when Tommy is not here.”
She invited me into the sitting room.
“Oh look,” I said, going immediately to the bookshelves. “The original editions of Out Beyond Outback and Kangaroo Cowboys. I loved those books when I was a girl. I longed to go live in Australia.”
A faint glimmer of pleasure drifted across Constance Root’s wrinkled features, replaced almost immediately by one of disapproval. “Well, they’re terribly outdated now. The modern day reality is surely quite different. I watch television and read the papers, and what Tommy described is not to be found in Australia today. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in republishing such fairy tales.”
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