I just became aware this evening of
the writing career of Dorothy Margaret Salisbury Davis (1916 − 2014) who was an American crime fiction writer of no
small repute, as she was the author of 17 crime novels, as well as 3 historical
novels, and numerous short stories, and served as President of the Mystery
Writers of America.
I mention all this because Google just made me aware that
three of those seventeen mystery novels comprised what she called the “Mrs.
Norris Series”, which I naturally found very intriguing. Was that title just
random, or was it smoke suggesting a bit of Austenian subtextual fire?
I was quickly led by Google to the second of the three, entitled
A Gentleman Called, which had the
following blurb on the back cover:
“In Grand Master of Crime Fiction DSD’s second Mrs. Norris
novel, the crime-solving Scottish housekeeper helps crack the case of a serial
lady-killer”
“As housekeeper to James Jarvis’s recently deceased father, a
retired major general of the US Army, Mrs. Norris has raised Jimmie since
boyhood. Now the Wall Street lawyer faces a challenging case. The son of one of
the firm’s old blue-blood clients has been slapped with a paternity suit. But
Teddy Adkins swears he never slept with the woman.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Norris is miffed when her gentleman friend
Jasper Tully, the widowed chief investigator for the Manhattan DA’s office,
cancels one dinner date after another because a real estate magnate has been
found strangled in the bedroom of her Upper East Side apartment. Jewelry was
stolen, but there are no signs of a break-in. Tully’s investigation turns up a
trail of strangulations that extends all
the way to the Midwest. As Mrs. Norris pursues her own unorthodox
investigation, she uncovers a shocking link between the cases that threatens
her very life.”
So, Mrs. Norris is the protagonist,
but does this mean that Davis, like a Fifties Stephanie Barron, has grafted
Jane Austen into her lauded crime fiction?
That’s
when a search engine came to my aid one more time. If you’ll allow me to build
a little suspense first, let me take you to a scene well into the second half
of the novel, when Mrs. Norris finds herself being caught off guard and charmed
against her will (rather like the way Fanny Price finds herself being charmed
against her will by Henry Crawford’s reading of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII) by the cocky, pushy wooing
of Mr. Adkins --- apparently the very same fellow who was slapped with a
paternity suit, and, I also guess, perhaps someone whom Mrs. Norris will at
some point suspect of being the serial killer---when the following exchange occurs:
“Do I
understand, Mr. Adkins,” she said with quiet self-containment when he paused, “you
are proposing that we go off to Scotland together and live another fifty-five
years on my money?”
Mr.
Adkins looked at her as though he were offended by so profane an interruption. “Are
you so fond of money?”
“I’m
fairly close with my own,” she said, “and I can count it all by nickels, let
alone by dimes, and while it won’t have to do me till I’m a hundred and
twenty-two—which is the age I’d be doubled—I don’t intend to have to get by on
the half of it, whatever the years left me.”
“Ah,
now,” Mr. Adkins said, laughing, “how well you knew yourself to say you were a
prickly bundle. Bless you, my dear, I have no intention of sharing your money.
Rather I intend to match it, dollar for dollar, no more, no less. I’m an
investment broker, woman. I’m bonded to at least twice your worth. That’s why I
offered my services to you the other day. I could advise your investment of
money to return you a safe average of six percent. Are you making that now?”
“Three
and a quarter,” she admitted.
“The
Bowery bank,” he said with knowing deprecation. “What I should like to suggest—we
match our small fortunes, mine to equal yours, and manage upon the income. Would
you like to see my bond?”
“Your
bond?”
“A
certification of my right to invest—my brokerage license.”
“I
might,” she said, “if I was going to consider your proposal.”
“All I
ask tonight,” Mr. Adkins said, “and I beg it of you: do not insist upon
answering my proposal now.”
“Mr.
Adkins, I don’t like toting up a relationship this way.”
“I
could not agree with you more!” he cried, and bounded to her side. “But I know
you to be a practical woman and I wanted you satisfied therein before I bespoke
the night’s true message. The night, as the song says, was made for love.” And
before she could take cognizance of his intentions, he had plastered a wet kiss
on her cheek.
She
started up from the chair with such a bounce, she toppled her short-legged
Romeo to the floor. He picked himself up with the most of a very little grace…..”
Okay,
so far, do you sense any Austen echoes lurking in the background? Mrs. Norris
is a woman past the usual age of courtship, as with Jane Austen’s Mrs. Norris,
and she certainly knows the value of a buck, also like Jane Austen’s stingy
domestic management guru. But then, she is subjected to a romantic advance that
catches her offguard, very much the way Fanny Price feels after being cornered
by Henry Crawford at Mansfield Park (before he changes his M.O. in Portsmouth
and tries the soft cell approach). Or even, when you broaden your Austen lens,
the way Darcy surprises Elizabeth with his first proposal.
Okay, I’ll
stop playing games, and just give you the rest of that chapter, and then you’ll
realize why I am certain the name “Mrs. Norris” was not a coincidence, not one
bit:
…“I
feel like something out of a Jane Austen novel,” he said, “and I have never
admitted the only roles in that to which I was suited. You have hurt me deeply,
Mrs. Norris. I am a sensitive man for all that I play the clown. There was
something about you that seemed refreshing after my horrid experience with
that, that wretch. You have disillusioned me terribly.”
“I have
hurt your pride,” she said, “and what is pride to a man who has a sense of
humor?”
His
moment’s contemplation of that seemed to mollify him.
“Yes,”
he said, “I am too sensitive, and I know I take myself too seriously. My dear,
your wisdom is the perfect balance to my wit.”
He
could persuade a bird, Mrs. Norris thought, to nest on a scramble egg. “I’m
going to put on the kettle,” she said, “and we’ll have a nice cup of tea.”
Isn’t
that wonderful? There we have Mr. Adkins as Henry Crawford, player of many
roles. But more aptly, there is an unmistakable sly wink at Pride & Prejudice! Adkins, the cocky
suitor whose pride is hurt by the sharp wit of the woman he is attracted to,
and who must learn to develop his sense of humor. And then finally, again, Mrs.
Norris perceives the Henry Crawford in Mr. Adkins, because Henry could indeed “persuade
a bird to nest on a scramble egg”! And maybe that is a final wink to the four pheasant’s
eggs which Mrs. Norris cadges from Mrs. Whitaker at Sotherton, or maybe Henry
Crawford’s melancholy broken egg shells after Mansfield Park brunch with Fanny
and William.
Whatever
it all means, I’m sorry I did not realize all of the above a few years sooner,
so that I might have been able to ask the author herself what it all
meant. ;)
But
maybe one day I’ll be able to ask JK Rowling whether her choice of the name “Mrs.
Norris” for a cat was in any way influenced by Davis’s name for her housekeeper/detective
a half century earlier.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
onTwitter
No comments:
Post a Comment