In the early 1960s, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun was a young assistant professor of English at Columbia University, determined to be the first woman granted tenure in that department. The challenge was daunting. Tradition and an entrenched old-boy network were against her. She had a full teaching load, three children under the age of eight, and a husband still in graduate school, and she faced constant pressure to publish distinguished scholarship. How did she cope? She got up at five every morning to write a mystery.
Under the pen name of Amanda Cross, Heilbrun published the resulting novel in 1964. In the Last Analysis introduced amateur sleuth Kate Fansler, an urbane English professor at an unnamed major Manhattan university. Unlike Heilbrun, Kate was single (though she would soon decide to marry her lover, assistant district attorney Reed Amhearst) and childless. Kate drank and smoked and spoke her mind, despite rigid disapproval from her three hidebound older brothers. In the Last Analysis was nominated for the 1965 Edgar Award for best first novel, but to Heilbrun’s relief it didn’t win; the honor would have blown her cover and most likely her chances at tenure.
Thanks in part to her prudent pseudonym, Heilbrun not only earned tenure in 1967 but went on to a remarkable academic career, publishing ten books of literary criticism, cultural studies, and biography. At the height of her prestige in the 1980s, she served as president of the Modern Language Association. Her literary scholarship focused on modernist British writers—Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and others—whose texts percolate throughout her fiction. Above all, she became a pioneering feminist.
Amanda Cross kept busy too. Over a span of nearly forty years she produced thirteen more mysteries. All told, they’ve been translated into seven languages and have sold more than a million copies. As the books’ popularity grew, so did curiosity about the author, until enterprising readers tracked down Heilbrun’s copyright registrations in 1970. By the time her sixth and best-known novel, Death in a Tenured Position, won the 1981 Nero Award, the cat was well out of the bag. Six years later she was an original member of Sisters in Crime, keen to support younger women entering the field, especially those who, like Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton, featured strong female sleuths.
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However thin the veil of Heilbrun’s pseudonym, writing mysteries under a nom de plume gave her an imaginative room of her own, a space where she could create a detective “whose destiny offered more possibilities than I could comfortably imagine for myself.” She armored Kate not only with a droll wit and formidable intellect but tenure and a trust fund. Over a remarkable quantity of Scotch and cigarettes, Kate and her partner Reed share long conversations, studded with witty repartee and literary allusions, about all manner of meaty subjects. In short, Heilbrun gave her sleuth a fantasy life that many a bookish reader might envy.
Heilbrun’s novels are talky, luxuriant with wry quips and probing conversations, but they’re neither affected nor self-indulgent. Pages do turn, if at a ruminative pace, and readers still susceptible to English-major delights will find it gratifying that Kate’s vast command of literature proves key to cracking the case. Her arsenal is vast and eclectic: Sophocles to Emily Dickinson, Auden to Le Carré, Tennyson to Stevie Smith. In Last Analysis, for example, Kate’s insights into the novels of D. H. Lawrence help her discover who killed the young woman found slain on the couch of a prominent midtown psychoanalyst.
The mystery writer could expose and denounce the insults, indignities, and soul-grinding condescension the professor faced throughout her career.Heilbrun credited Dorothy Sayers’s 1935 Gaudy Night—set at a fictional women’s college at Oxford—as inspiration for her own mysteries featuring a woman scholar-sleuth. She was among the first to tap the crime fiction possibilities of post-war academe, rife with its many rivalries and resentments. (English departments have long held pride of place for their homicidal inspiration—but that’s another essay.) Creating Amanda Cross enabled Heilbrun to channel that discord into fiction: The mystery writer could expose and denounce the insults, indignities, and soul-grinding condescension the professor faced throughout her career.
A good example is the striking resemblance of Frederick Clemance, Kate’s daunting colleague and political opponent in Poetic Justice (1970), to Heilbrun’s own eminent senior colleague, Lionel Trilling. Although Heilbrun’s 2002 memoir, tellingly titled When Men Were The Only Models We Had, acknowledged her debt to Trilling as a teacher and intellectual mentor, Cross makes Clemance suffer, at least spiritually, for the profound arrogance that prevented him from recognizing Kate and other women scholars as his peers.
Similarly, savvy eyebrows rose when, in 1989’s A Trap for Fools, a pompous professor of Middle Eastern studies—“about as beloved as poison ivy”—is pitched out of an upper-story window. Despite Heilbrun’s insistence that any resemblance was strictly coincidental, readers recognized plenty of similarities between the odious character and her superstar Columbia colleague (and professional rival) Edward Said.
Heilbrun’s mysteries tackle much thornier matters than department politics, though. If Kate’s astute knowledge of literature is her secret crime-solving power, the villainy she faces is equally broad, abstract, and complex. Her adversaries are more likely to be attitudes and ideas than menacing brutes or homicidal masterminds. Still, she’s no sedentary or strictly cerebral sleuth; she acquits herself creditably when faced with the occasional brandished gun, ransom demand, or death threat. But the novels’ best action is the drama of Kate’s strong and agile mind wrestling with some travesty of justice. When there’s a murder—and four of her mysteries never actually deliver the standard homicide—it usually stems from grievances that transcend the strictly personal.
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Clashes in the broader cultural politics of the 1960s through the 1990s provide the underlying conflict in most of Heilbrun’s plots. Poetic Justice, for example, is set in the aftermath of the May 1968 student uprising at Columbia. The Theban Mysteries (1971) finds Kate teaching a seminar on Antigone at an elite Manhattan girls’ school amid the city’s antiwar turmoil. A Trap for Fools (1989) centers on campus racism and corrupt police profiling.
All of the novels resonate with Heilbrun’s evolving feminism. British novelist (and mystery writer) Antonia Fraser remarked that, for a contemporary chronicle of conditions for women in America since the 1960s, she could think of “no more important, illustrative texts than the Kate Fansler mysteries, and certainly none more diverting.” Heilbrun and her alter ego worked in tandem: while she battled chauvinism in literary studies and misogyny across academe, Amanda Cross gave us a front line view of those struggles in her fiction.
Misogyny is the most brutal theme. Heilbrun confronted MeToo abuses long before the subject had a hashtag.Misogyny is the most brutal theme. Heilbrun confronted MeToo abuses long before the subject had a hashtag. In Death in a Tenured Position, Janet Mandelbaum is the first woman professor grudgingly accepted into the all-male Harvard English department, and only because she’s no feminist. When she’s found poisoned by cyanide in a demeaning position in the men’s room, Kate’s asked to investigate. She concludes that Janet took her own life, overwhelmed by the cruel hostility of her colleagues and the shunning contempt of other women. In the end, Heilbrun writes, “only death welcomed her.”
The tyranny of rigid gender codes is another pervasive theme. In 1973 Heilbrun published Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, arguing that individuals should be allowed to imagine themselves free of the constraints and pressures of stereotypical gender constructs. Reinventing Womanhood (1979) and Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) expanded her critique of the restrictive ways in which women are defined and valued. She took care not to demean “feminine” and “masculine” qualities per se, denouncing rather the binary prescriptive pressures they imposed. For both androgyny and feminism, she insisted, “the whole point is choice.”
Oppressive gender expectations wreak havoc throughout Heilbrun’s novels, most notably in No Word from Winifred (1987). When a woman disappears and foul play is suspected, Kate figures out that Winifred is not murdered or even dead; she’s simply bolted. Shedding her feminine trappings and dressed as a man, Winifred escapes to a life lived freely on her own terms. In nearly every Amanda Cross novel, characters are scorned for, and often triumph through, their subversion of “ladylike” behavior.
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In 1992, after spending her entire career at Columbia feeling frustrated and resentful that power remained “always in the hands of the least worthy, the least imaginative, the least generous,” Heilbrun decided she’d had enough. She abruptly retired, choosing freedom from that constant friction. Her departure was well publicized, applauded by many but dismissed by others as sour grapes, if not grandstanding bitchiness. As a male colleague of more than thirty years complained, “Heilbrun has always been aggrieved, always.” Nevertheless, presumably to his decades of dismay, she had persisted, in part by pouring that perennial outrage into detective fiction.
At sixty-six, she gladly abandoned her uncomfortable yet expedient “camouflage” of dresses, heels, and pantyhose. She accepted her changing body, savoring again the regular meals she’d missed while lunching futilely “on a lettuce leaf” to forestall the natural sags and bulges of age. With each decision to stop fighting her age, Heilbrun found unexpected peace and even new happiness. She flourished in her final decade, publishing seven books, four of them mysteries.
Her most popular work in any genre was her 1997 collection of personal essays, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. With eloquent candor she reflects on her five-decade marriage (she wed when she was just nineteen), rich with companionable solitude, and the pleasures of her adult children, dogs, books, and especially friendships with other women.
Aging was a deeply feminist issue for Heilbrun. The subject takes center stage in Sweet Death, Kind Death (1984), in which something about the apparent suicide of illustrious historian and novelist Patrice Umphelby troubles Kate. After learning that Patrice, at 58 (Heilbrun’s own age at the time), was developing a new theory that middle-aged women experience a kind of rebirth into a more expansive life unencumbered by “youthful sexual attractions and domestic services,” Kate discerns Patrice was in fact murdered—by a jealous colleague invested in traditional theories of female aging as decline and loss.
Kate Fansler ages too, and her interests, like Heilbrun’s, grow more existential. The novels stray further and further from the usual whodunit plot conventions. Her tenth novel, The Players Come Again (1990), dispenses with murder and features instead a set of once-close female friends who meet again later in life. Kate joins them as they tangle over problems before they ultimately bond again through meditations on marriage, friendship, and feminism. Similar explorations of the fraught-yet-resourceful lives of intelligent, independent-thinking older women dominate the admittedly crime-skimpy plots of An Imperfect Spy (1995) and The Edge of Doom (2002).
For fifty years Heilbrun argued that women should be free to choose their own course: marriage, children, education, livelihood, friendships, and, ultimately, life itself. Especially for women, she saw suicide as the ultimate form of self-determination. It reverberates as a manifestation of women’s power through her mysteries. In Death in a Tenured Position, for example, Kate understands that Janet Mandelbaum took her own life when she sees Janet’s bedside reading: Simone Weil, Eleanor Marx, and Madame Bovary—all suicides.
In The Last Gift of Time, Heilbrun muses about her own decision, made years earlier, to end her life at age seventy, the point at which she assumed her productive energies would be waning. Writing at seventy-two, she marvels instead at welcoming life daily, embracing it “the more earnestly because it is a choice.” Choice was still the whole point for her five years later, when she penned a simple message—“Journey over. Love to all.”—and finally chose death.
