VICTORIA SILVER – Death of a Harvard Freshman.

Bantam; paperback original; 1st printing, April, 1984.

   Dialogue is an important component of mystery fiction — the most devious plots are often undone by speech patterns that border on either the most stilted or the most incomprehensible, but I am convinced that Harvard freshmen really do talk like the characters in this book. Central Connecticut State (where once I taught) is not Harvard, by any means of comparison, but it is not Outer Slobovia, either, and I think I’m a reasonable person to judge.

   (Mostly I talked to students about courses, grades, and whatever it is that actuaries actually do, and not about personal things like life, sex and whatever else it was that consumed the thinking time of college students back in the mid-1980s, but I still think I’m a reasonable person to judge. Or I was then.)

   Sort of surprisingly enough, this is very much a classical detective story, rather uncommon today, with a limited number of suspects (the fellow members of Lauren Adler’s freshman seminar on the Russian Revolution), a great amount of misdirection in the matter of solving the murder of black student activist Russell Bernard — or rather suspicion directed equally in all directions — and clues derived solely from large amounts of conversation, pieced together from differing accounts of each suspect’s activities and personalities, with very little physical action involved.

   This is also very much an amateur investigation. The police do what they do offstage, and only one faculty member has a major speaking role. Besides the murder — as in the case of Rasputin, perhaps to destroy Russell’s political influence — and its solution, this is also a novel in which each of the characters are seeking their own identity — whether Jewish, black, gay, southern aristocrat, preppie, or L.A. modern.

   I’ll say it again. The characters are real. This is one book I wouldn’t mind reading again, and there are few mysteries I would ever say that about.

Note: Silver’s second mystery, Death of a Radcliffe Roommate (Bantam, 1986), has been published already, and it also features Lauren Adler. Without expanded its borders beyond that of the campus community, this would seem to be a very limited series of books. But as long as I’m nowhere in the vicinity of a school where Lauren’s nearby, I’m really pleased that we haven’t yet seen the last of this fascinating young lady.

[UPDATE] 12-04-08.   Most of the revisions were made to reflect that I’m no longer teaching, so what I know about current students’ speech patterns is rather problematical. What I was comparing, though, were students in the 1980s and they way they talked and the way the students talked in Victoria Silver’s book, which also took place in the 1980s.

   “Victoria Silver,” by the way, is not the author’s real name, and as far as I know, it is not known who the real author was. I suspect that many of the characters in her books were based on people she actually knew. (Googling for more information on her, most of the web pages that came to view were about, you guessed it, Victoria silver.)

   And as I also suspected in the last paragraph of my review, at least between the lines, these were the only two cases of murder in which Lauren Adler ever found herself involved.