A Grave Situation
O' ARTFUL DEATH, by Sarah Stewart Taylor
St. Martin's/Minotaur, 277 pp., $23.95.
By Maureen Corrigan
A BIZARRE GRAVESTONE; a questionable death or two; a beautiful detective heroine marked by tragedy; snowstorms, sinister poetry and a remote island populated by eccentrics — what more could a lover of traditional mysteries in the mode of Agatha Christie and Clue ask for? Sarah Stewart Taylor's delicious debut, O' Artful Death, doesn't monkey around with the classic formula; instead, through elegant writing, vigorous plotting and gaudily staged set pieces, her novel rings subtle — and enormously satisfying — changes on the venerable tried-and-true.
Taylor's amateur detective is called Sweeney St. George, and her vocation is as peculiar as that dragon-slayer moniker. Sweeney is a 28-year-old art historian who teaches at Harvard. Her specialty is the "Iconography of Death," and nothing delights Sweeney more than finding a distinctive old gravestone to rub.
Hoping to entice Sweeney to his family's Christmas festivities in Vermont, her close friend Toby Di Marco shrewdly places a photograph of a macabre local cemetery-marker under her nose. The life-size marble carving depicts a naked young woman reclining in a boat, while behind her a leering, humanized figure of Death delights in his latest conquest. According to the information on the monument, the unfortunate girl's name was Mary Elizabeth Denholm, and she died in 1890.
But Sweeney's trained eye notes that the style of the gravestone and the poem that accompanies it date from an earlier, pre-Raphaelite period in art. Even more disturbing are the persistent local rumors that one of the artists living in the town's notorious arts colony murdered Mary and then created this oddity to memorialize the act. Naturally, Sweeney's morbid curiosity is aroused, and she agrees to accompany Toby to Byzantium, Vt., for the holidays. Death, of course, tags along.
Byzantium, as its name suggests, is not a village for Norman Rockwell enthusiasts. Once a mecca for Victorian, avant-garde, hedonistic types — and now home to their descendants — Byzantium veritably tingles with intrigue and oddballs. When Sweeney and Toby arrive at the estate of his aunt and uncle (King Arthur fans who strew suits of armor around for decorative flourishes), they learn that a local robber is terrorizing the residents by breaking into their well-appointed mansions. The two friends settle in for uneasy holiday festivities with a cast of characters that includes a horny old art historian, a suspiciously sweet granddaughter of one of the original artists who's enticed Toby into her arms, and a glowering Englishman who stalks Sweeney with his eyes and feet.
Sweeney's research into the long-ago death of Mary Denholm stirs up bad mojo: One of Mary's descendants is found dead — above ground — in the cemetery, and Sweeney herself nearly plummets off an icy cliff during an atmospheric midnight sleigh ride. Did she have too many shots of Johnny Walker Red, or is another hand at work, determined to ensure that Byzantium's secrets stay where they've been entombed?
For readers who like their crime leavened with culture, O'Artful Death offers lively digressions on the art and poetry of the pre-Raphaelites Alfred Lord Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Indeed, Taylor's mystery partakes of the elegiac atmosphere that haunts the works of those somber Victorians.
The most compelling presence in the novel, however, is Sweeney herself. Tall, graced with tumbling red curls and typically dressed in vintage clothes, she seems to exude life and high spirits, yet she's dogged by death and, as her profession indicates, obsessed with it. (We learn that her father, a famous artist, committed suicide and that her fiance was killed in an IRA bombing.) In one of many erudite and subtly menacing moments that typify this novel, Sweeney attempts to explain her fascination with funereal art:
"I remember seeing an English woodcut when I was about 10, of Death looking over the shoulder of a woman lying in a bed, surrounded by weeping relatives. I was fascinated by the idea that Death was an actual person, that people needed to think of all death as a kind of murder, that they made art in order to understand it, to come to terms with human mortality."
That's not a bad justification, should one be needed, for the reading of mystery novels in general. But in this particular case, O'Artful Death is an artful enough tale that no such excuses are necessary.
Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown Univeristy.
Newsday — June 15, 2003
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