The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn, by Eric Wright
Reviewed by Martin Kich
[This review was originally published in The Mystery Review.]
From its quirky title to its quirky characters and its quietly quirky tone, The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn is a wonderfully off-beat mystery. In fact, it is one of those mysteries in which the mystery itself is really not the most interesting narrative element.
The detective, Joe Barley, is a part-time lecturer in English at Hambleton College in Toronto. Because he enjoys teaching but has no facility for or interest in conducting scholarly research, he is fairly content to work as a "second-class" faculty member. One senses, however, that he is indeed a first-rate teacher. For one thing, many of his former students seem to hold him in very high regard. In addition, the reader is actually provided with the gist of his lectures on a number of works--in particular a running, chapter-by-chapter commentary on much of The Odyssey.
To supplement his income, Joe Barley works for a local detective agency on assignments that require nothing but unobtrusive local surveillance: "'Mostly, . . . I just watch people who claim to be paralysed, try to take Polaroids of them clog-dancing at ethnic reunions." Then, his cleaning woman, an illegal Portuguese immigrant named Helena, asks him to investigate the apparent disappearance of another one of her employers, a lap-dancer with the stage name Rosie Dawn, who seems to be the mistress of a wealthy businessman who has built his fortune on sandwich-making.
As Joe Barley gradually becomes a full-fledged investigator, he draws on the expertise of a number of his former students. But this novel is not, strictly speaking, an academic mystery. One of its major sub-plot does involve the resolution of an accusation of racial insensitivity that is brought against Barley's officemate, a vocally discontented part-time lecturer named Richard Costril. The reader learns a great deal about campus politics in general and, more specifically, about the political and legal implications of political correctness on campuses, but as fascinating as all of this is, it has no real connection to the main plot and, even in itself, has little inherent mystery or suspense.
Another of the sub-plots involves Joe Barley's significant other, a bilingual political speech writer named Carole. She is an obsessive reader, and a good deal of domestic mystery surrounds her sudden interest in peculiar sexual experimentation. Typically, however, their relationship has been defined by a sort of nonchalant acceptance of each other's idiosyncrasies. Early on, Joe recalls how once he had thought she was dreaming passionately about him, but from her sleep talk he was able to deduce that she was instead "dreaming about reading about making love." In another instance, he describes their relationship in these wry terms: "If we got spliced, it would be a marriage of convenience foods. . . . 'If you can read, you can cook,' she says. 'It just takes all goddamn day.'"
As I suggested at the beginning, the mystery that Joe Barley is most intent on solving, the apparent kidnapping of Rosie Dawn, turns out to be a somewhat pedestrian affair. I wonder if the emphasis on other elements of the narrative will remain a regular feature of this series or is just something that Eric Wright felt was necessary to establish the characters and their slice of Toronto for future novels in this series. In either case, I'm interested in seeing where he takes his newest detective.