We have a winner!

A reader in Italy was the first of several DBB respondents who knew that Amanda Cross' real name was Carolyn Gold Heilbrun and that she received tenure at Columbia University (the first woman to be so honored in the university's English department). He wins a copy of Iain Levison's Dog Eats Dog.

Thanks to all who entered.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

It's academic, or, win a book!

I haven't read many academic mysteries, but I always had the idea that they constituted a pretty genteel genre. Not so Iain Levison's Dog Eat Dog (though to be fair, the book is more a caper novel than an academic one).

Levison's chief target is his co-protagonist Elias White, an ambitious schemer who has calculated that his road to academic stardom lies in being seen as a Nazi apologist:

"Elias also wanted the article to be posted on White Supremacist websites, so he could argue furiously against its misinterpretation by evil people with a harmful agenda. This kind of conflict usually resulted in the most prized of all commodities, news coverage."

But Elias was nothing compared with his father, a feckless fraud whose "God-given ability to slither around unnoticed was rewarded each year with a fatter paycheck and a slimmer workload, until, after forty years of teaching, he found himself collecting nearly $100,000 for teaching one class a semester."

I'd say Levison is even harder on academia than that other acid-tongued crime writer/professor, Amanda Cross. You can win a copy of Dog Eats Dog and find out for yourself if you are the first with the right answer to this academic question: What was Amanda Cross' real name, and at which American university did she receive tenure?

Send your answers along with a postal address to detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net.

=========================

As much as I love Bitter Lemon Press, and as much as I enjoy Levison's accurate digs at the psychic toll of being overworked and underutilized in a dead-end, initiative-crushing job (at least, a friend tells me the digs are accurate. I wouldn't know from personal experience), where were the copy editors?

Page 96 contains this mismatch of number: "And he always handed the good ones off to her, rather than finish it." A few pages later, a sentence uses the word attribute when asset was called for: " ... her gender was more of a career detriment that her charm, personality, and positive attitude were attributes."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008