Trophies and Dead Things

Marcia Muller

Sharon McCone (in her tenth appearance) has what seems like a routine probate; a well-known Northern California activist and Vietnam War protestor (and acquaintance of her boss), Perry Hilderley, has died. While going through his things, McCone finds a superseded copy of his will, disinheriting his (divorced) wife and their sons, and leaving all of his assets to be divided equally among four people who seemingly have no connection at all to Hilderley. Who are they, and what connection did they have to him?

Muller is often referred to as the founding mother of the hardboiled female detective. All well and good, except there's not much hardboiled here. (My definition: a hardboiled detective is in true physical danger at any point during the story. Otherwise, it's a cozy.) Granted, everyone around McCone is in danger at least once, and some of them wind up dead, but she takes an almost Miss Marple attitude towards this at times; let's get them out of danger, give them a cup of tea, and get back to solving this mystery.

Not that a well-written cozy isn't a lot of fun, and this is a well-written cozy. It does get a bit slow now and again, but like the mysteries of Robert Parker, the McCone novels are that wonderful type of series where the background soap-opera-style info merges so seamlessly with what's going on that you can hop in at any point in the series and be caught up on what's gone on before in a few pages, tops. And it doesn't get in the way of the present story, which is the all-important rule in writing series novels.

If the book does have a failing, and this is something that the individual reader will have to decide, it's in the mystery itself. There really isn't much of a mystery, and Muller lays that on the table from the get-go. The main question here is about what the four beneficiaries of Hilderley's will have in common, and there are enough hints in the opening pages to give you an idea of what will be in the closing ones. But getting there is half the fun, and Muller gives us a wonderful cast of characters to ride with. In other words, with not much mystery and not much danger, Trophies and Dead Things has more of a feel of Jane Smiley than Agatha Christie to it; I had no problems at all with that. Others may disagree. But whatever it is, it's fun.