Thu 19 Mar 2009
Archived Review: B. J. OLIPHANT – A Ceremonial Death.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[6] Comments
B. J. OLIPHANT – A Ceremonial Death. Fawcett Gold Medal; paperback original; first printing, January 1996.
It was common knowledge, even while the books were being published, that science fiction writer Sheri S. Tepper was also the author of two series of mystery stories, each under a different pen name. The ones she wrote as A. J. Orde featured a Denver CO interior designer and antique dealer named Jason Lynx. There were six of those, starting with A Little Neighborhood Murder in 1989, and ending with A Death of Innocents in 1997.
In between the Orde books, Tepper was also busily writing six Shirley McClintock mysteries. For these she used the name B. J. Oliphant. This is the fifth of these, with one more to follow, Here’s to the Newly Dead, which came out in 1997. Now in her 70s, Tepper is still actively writing science fiction and fantasy. All of her books in that genre appear to be highly regarded, but I think she’s left the mystery field behind her.
In Ceremonial Death Shirley McClintock is living in New Mexico, but references to previous adventures suggest that the earlier mysteries under her belt occurred while making her home in Colorado. She’s tall, in her 60s, has a live-in male friend named J.Q. — I have no other details on what their domestic arrangement is precisely — and together they’re the guardian of a very pretty high school girl named Allison. Shirley seems to have been a rancher lady in her past , but they have only a few animals now and accommodations for tourists.
First to die in this book is a naive sort of woman who’d made a living as a New Age mystic, complete with Native American trimmings. When Shirley finds the body, she discovered that the dead woman had been mutilated in much the same way as some recent slaughtered cattle.
Being close to Santa Fe — and the nest of ultra-believers living there — the all-but-brain-dead (elected) sheriff is convinced that men (if not creatures) from outer space are responsible. Obviously too many people have been watching too many episodes of The X Files.
The next girl to die is a classmate of Allison’s, but she was certainly no friend — rich family, too precocious by far — but with Allison in the mix, Shirley has even more reason to get involved, and involved she gets.
If using this book as a sample of size one can be acceptable practice, Tepper’s prose (as a mystery writer) seems more than a little uneven. Long stretches of strong storytelling are interrupted every so often by a page or two of bad (stilted) dialogue, but then it continues on with looks (much more convincing) into Shirley’s relationships with J.Q. and her surrogate daughter — all combined with a heady brew of western-style philosophies and opinions on popularity, politics, creationists and everything else in the world, and what’s right in it, and what’s not.
That the mystery seems to get short-shrifted should not seem too remarkable. Whatever a shrift is. But when, say, something like someone’s brake lines are found cut on page 120, shouldn’t warning flares go off right then and there, and not over 100 pages later?
In spite of the gory opening, categorize this one as a cozy, an agreeable one, and read it for the good parts, of which there are many — especially if you agree with Shirley.
Bibliographic data: [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]
OLIPHANT, B. J. Pseudonym of Sheri S. Tepper, 1929- ; other pseudonym A. J. Orde. Series character: Shirley McClintock, in all.
Dead in the Scrub (n.) Gold Medal, 1990.
The Unexpected Corpse (n.) Gold Medal, 1990.
Deservedly Dead (n.) Gold Medal, 1992.
Death and the Delinquent (n.) Gold Medal, 1993.
Death Served Up Cold (n.) Gold Medal, 1994.
A Ceremonial Death (n.) Gold Medal, 1996.
Here’s to the Newly Dead (n.) Gold Medal, 1997.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Steve:
Sheri S. Tepper (as B. J. Oliphant) seems to be one of the latter day generation of science fiction writers who believe they can pull off successful mystery genre fiction. After synthesizing an entire universe and its inhabitants, for them a little thing like a detective novel should be a cinch, right?
I assume that SF writers-turned-mystery-mavens have this impulse to offer their cultural/political opinions in detective fiction (which has been standard practice for centuries now) because the milieus they construct in their SF/fantasy works may seem to be more remote from our own here-and-now world.
Steve, can you or any of your readers name other writers who produced fiction in the science fiction/ fantasy genre and then successfully transitioned into mystery? (And to judge from your review, Tepper herself wasn’t exactly an unqualified success.)
March 20th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Mike Tooney raises an interesting question. I guess Fredric Brown is one of the most famous examples of a writer who was successful in both the SF and mystery genres. Not only did Brown write dozens of short SF stories but he wrote a few SF novels that are well known such as WHAT MAD UNIVERSE, THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY ARE STARS, AND MARTIANS, GO HOME.
But he also wrote over 20 mysteries including the Ed and Am Hunter novels and THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT which won an Edgar award. He wrote extensively in both genres.
March 20th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Anthony Boucher was the one that came to mind first to me, but I’d have to concede that Fred Brown might be an even better choice.
I’ll wait and think about the question a while longer, though. Anyone else who wishes to may jump in with other names. I have a few more, but Boucher came first.
As for Sheri Tepper, while I didn’t come right and say so in my review, I think Mike has picked up on my thoughts pretty well.
My general impression is that that she’ll be remembered more for her SF longer than she will for her crime fiction. Even so, after reading my comments on A CEREMONIAL DEATH again, some six years later, I certainly wouldn’t mind giving the book another try.
— Steve
March 21st, 2009 at 12:01 am
There has always been some crossover between the mystery and science fiction genres. Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Silverberg both ‘ghosted’ Ellery Queen novels with Fred Dannay after Manfred Lee retired (The Player on the Other Side, Fourth Side of the Triangle notably). Manly Wade Wellman wrote an award winning novella about Native American sleuth David Return and a hardboiled novel featuring a tough P.I.. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore wrote the Michael Gray mysteries for Pocket Books and Leigh Brackett, aside from screenplays for The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, wrote several well recieved suspense novels, a hardboiled tec novel, and ghosted mysteries for George Sanders and Gypsey Rose Lee (Mother Finds a Body, the first, The G-String Murders was by Craig Rice who also wrote the other Sanders mystery).
Jack Vance wrote a number of mysteries with some critical success. H.F. Heard wrote some classic sf as well as the two Mr. Mycroft novels A Taste of Honey and Reply Paid (both with a touch of sf in their plot). Poul Anderson did three novels and one novella (with wife Karen) about San Francisco privte eye Tygreve Yamamura (half Japanese, half Swedish). Of course Asimov wrote the classic sf mysteries Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun with the tec team of human Elijah Bailey and robot R. Daniel Olivah (sic?)as well as the Black Widowers and Union Club tales and the mystery novels A Whiff of Death and Murder At the ABA.
Conan Doyle was in some ways almost as notable for his science fiction about Professor Challenger as Sherlock Holmes and also wrote the future war story Danger! and others. John Buchan’s Gap in the Curtain has some claim to being sf and E.Phillips Oppenheim wrote a near futuristic novel The Wrath to Come as well as thrillers with sf touches.
Aside from future war novels there’s a good deal of sf in William Le Queux’s novels and stories and the tradition continued with thriller writers like Edgar Wallace, Sax Rohmer, Sapper, Sydney Horler, Leslie Charteris, Edmund Snell, M.P. Shiel, Francis Gerard, Talbot Mundy, Mark Channing, Achmed Abdullah, Ganpat, and others.
Other primarily sf writers who have written mystery or spy novels include Jerry Pournelle (as Wade Curtis), Larry Niven (his Gil Hamilton stories), Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man), Fred Hoyle (Ossian’s Ride), J.G. Ballard, Alec Coppell, Gardner Fox, August Derelith (the Solar Pons and Saulk Prairie tales), Keith Laumer, James Gunn (The Magicians), Robert Heinlien (“The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”), Andre Norton (at least one gothic early on), Frank Belnap Long, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs(The Girl From Farris Island), H. Rider Haggard(Mr. Meeson’s Will), Max Pemberton, John Jakes, Philip Wylie, Philip Jose Farmer, Dan Simmons, and William Gibson.
Reversing the order from mystery to sf: Anthony Boucher, Maurice Leblanc, Donald Westlake, Dennis Wheatley, John D. MacDonald, Milton Lesser (Stephen Marlowe), Philip Macdonald (the novelization of Forbidden Planet), Eric Ambler (his first novel), William F. Nolan (creator of Bart Challis and Sam Space), Ira Levin, Rex Stout (Under the Andes), John Creasey (the Dr. Palfrey novels), C. S. Forester (The Peacemaker), Geoffrey Household, Mickey Spillane (“The Green Woman” ghosted by Howard Browne), Margery Allingham (The Mind Readers), P.D. James (The Children of Men), Robert Ludlum, Hans Helmut Kirst, Michael Crichton (who started in mystery as John Lange and Jeffrey Hudson), and likely someone obvious I’m missing, all crossed genre boundaries.
Sf also frequently figures in the thriller genre in books by Ian Fleming, Philip McCutchan (whose Esmonde Shaw books became as science fictional as Creasey’s Palfrey novels once he left Admiralty Intelligence for SD2), Geoffrey Jenkins, Clive Cussler, James Rollins, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs, Duncan Kyle, Joe Poyer, Douglas Reeman, Andrew Trew, Desmond Bagley, Alistair MacLean (The Satan Bug, The Black Shrike), and many more back to the origin of the genre.
There is also a good deal of crossover with the western genre (Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini, Jackson Gregory, Loren D. Estelman, Elmore Leonard …), historical fiction (Samuel Shellabarger, John Masters, Edison Marshall, Gillian Bradshaw, Van Wyck Mason, Marjorie Bowen, Ellis Peters, Mary Stewart …), romance, and porn (Farmer, Sturgeon, Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Westlake, and others — mostly soft core, but some hardcore). Then too there are mainstream writers who wrote in both genres: Hugh Walpole, Graham Greene, C.P. Snow, Robert Hichens, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, Nigel Balchin, J.B. Priestly, Joseph Conrad (Secret Agent and The Inheritors with Ford Maddox Ford), and Paul Theroux.
But there has always been a close tie between the mystery and sf genre though it hasn’t always been successful. There are a handful of writers who are almost unclassifable like John Christopher, L.P. Davies, Archie Roy, and Gerald Kersh whose work often combines elements of both mystery and sf. And of course in the mystry genre we like to claim Anthony Boucher, but as the founder and editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction science fiction has an equal claim.
March 21st, 2009 at 12:27 pm
To David Vineyard’s catalog
of SF writers who also wrote
mysteries couldn’t we also
add John Sladek, with his
two impossible crime novels,
BLACK AURA and INVISIBLE
GREEN?
In an interview Sladek later
remarked that you could starve
trying to sell locked room
mysteries, which was why he
stuck to SF.
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Yes, of course, Sladek, great writer in both fields. Also Thomas Disch who wrote the gothic satire Clara Reeve and collaborated with Sladek. Actually the crossover between sf and mystery is so common it’s impossible to hit on everyone who has done both. There are a great many European writers who wrote in both fields; Thea Von Harbou, Karel Capek, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, Per Wahloo (before teaming with wife Maj Sjowall), Stanslau Lem, and pulp writers like Henri Viernes, to name a few.
Early on I would even argue that there were no real lines drawn by many of the writers. Certainly Conan Doyle, but also G.K. Chesterton who wrote a great deal of fantasy, and many of the popular writers before the First World War wrote detective stories and much early sf and fantasy. Much of the earliest SF was in the scientific detective genre that as often as not was as much sf as detective story. There is no clean break, but it could be argued that the two genres didn’t really split off until Armageddon 2419 AD (1928) by Philip Francis Nowlan and Trent’s Last Case (1912) by E.C. Bentley when the modern form of both genres were formed.
We problaly can lay the blame on Poe who created the detective genre and was a pioneer of science fiction. Even though he never mixed the two in a single story, the pattern was set at the very beginning, though E.T.A. Hoffman before him came close to writing both.