Deadly Meeting, published in 1970.
I don't recall having been as deeply disturbed by this book when I read it decades ago as I was when I re-read it just now. Sexism, sexual harassment, discrimination and homophobia are the accepted social norms of the day, and possibly may have seemed so to me then. Today it sets my teeth on edge.
Set in a small college in New England, the new chair of the English Literature Department runs roughshod over his faculty members, all of whom are male. When they consider hiring new faculty members for the department, all of the candidates are also male. One candidate who may possibly be Jewish is dismissed from consideration immediately. The one brilliant female graduate student in the department is considered fair game for sexual harassment by the department chair, and there is no thought given to mentoring her for an academic career. Indeed, there are some faculty members who still believe that the college should have no female graduate students enrolled.
When the department chair is murdered, suspicion falls on the remaining members of the department, most of whom have been blackmailed by the murdered man who has ferreted out their individual secrets. In a desperate effort to shore up its faculty roster before classes begin, the college invites a distinguished Oxford scholar, Dame Millicent Hetherege, to join the faculty to fill in the term. Dame Millicent turns out to have her own ideas of how a mysterious death should be investigated, and proceeds to do so.
The mystery itself is not particularly difficult; it was the social milieu of the time that brought back memories for me that I found disturbing, and that no one in the book apparently thinks of questioning any part of it. One memory was that my faculty advisor in the history department continuously urged me to get my teaching credential so I could teach high school history, even though I repeatedly told him I had no interest whatever in doing that. He wasn't very encouraging when I decided to go to grad school instead.
I have used the term "department chair" to describe the position of the head of the department; at the time, the term used almost exclusively would have been "chairman". I remember one discussion when I was in law school in the early 1970s--there was a proposal to replace the term "chairman" with the new word "chairer". The oldest member of the law school faculty was outraged that such a term could be considered. He wrote the word on the blackboard and pontificated about how difficult a word it was to pronounce. I wish I had had the nerve to go up and write the word "error" beside it and point out to him that he apparently had no difficulty whatever pronouncing that word, as it fell from his lips with great regularity. Had I done that, I'm sure I would have passed into law school folklore, but alas, I did not have the guts to do it.
Another piece that I found disturbing was that one of the faculty members had been arrested in the past for "importuning" a man whom he believed to be a fellow graduate student, but who turned out to be an undercover police officer who arrested him when he invited the cop up to his apartment for a drink and to listen to some classical music. The sad days when police departments used bogus charges like that to harass gay and lesbian people are not that far distant from today. As it was, the man was not gay but was convicted anyway. I like to imagine what Judge Judy would have to say about a charge like that, something like, "So, let me understand this... he invites you up to listen to classical music and your mind immediately turns to sex? And you're big, strong, trained police officer and you assume he's somehow going to overpower you and have his way with you? Get out of my courtroom!"
It's taken us a long time to get where we are now as a society, where blatant and overt racisim, sexism, sexual harassment and homophobia are no longer routinely accepted without comment. But it's also a short road back to those times, too.
Grade: B.
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