Mystery Monday: Thus Was Adonis Murdered!

Our book today is 1981’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell, the pen name taken by Sarah Cockburn, the witty and delightful sister of famed muckraking journalists Patrick, Alexander, and Andrew Cockburn. She was a London barrister in the eccentric Rumpole mode, and in the down-time from her busy legal profession, she wrote murder mysteries – of which Thus Was Adonis Murdered is the first.

It’s also the first to feature Caudwell’s signature character, Professor Hilary Tamar, prickly, working-omniscient professor of Medieval law who also presides rather informally over an energetic and often hilarious group of young barristers who crack wise, mock each other, and, almost incidentally, solve crimes, with Professor Tamar’s help.

These spirited barristers seek that help – and they confer with each other – in large part through a series of long letters; this is that rarest of rare birds, an epistolary murder mystery. The book pre-dates the Internet Era, or else the device would be hopelessly twee – but as it is, Caudwell not only integrates it well into her tale but also uses it for full effect in perpetuating one of the little gimmicks of this and subsequent novels: we never learn the gender of Hilary Tamar (Caudwell herself had a long personal history of tilting at the sexist windmills of her day, which gives the gender-question trick a little poignancy – although not as much, one suspects, as its author might have thought).

Thus Was Adonis Murdered decamps from England and centers mainly around that always-reliable murder mystery destination, Venice. To Venice has gone young barrister Julia Larwood, a friend of our central group, and in Venice she becomes embroiled in a mystery when a tourist is found stabbed to death within incriminating proximity of a copy of the Finance Act Julia brought with her to Italy for some light bed-time reading. As quick as you can say ‘nothing doing around the office,’ our heroes are off to Venice to snoop around, being guided sometimes in spirit and sometimes in the flesh by Hilary Tamar, who, like Sherlock Holmes, routinely sees deeper into things than anybody else but who, unlike Holmes, is freely willing to admit when she can’t:

It does me no credit – save in showing how little this chronicle is written in any spirit of self-advertisement – to admit that even now I was unable to identify the murderer and the motive for the crime. All the essential evidence was available: except to confirm an hypothesis already virtually assured no further investigation should have been necessary. Certain of my colleagues in the world of Scholarship would perhaps not scruple to omit all reference to their subsequent enquiries, preferring to set forth immediately the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence and to veil in silence their own delay in reaching them. The true scholar, however, should disdain such paltering.

My old Dell paperback of Thus Was Adonis Murdered has an uncredited Edward Gorey cover illustration that doesn’t really fit the book (true, there’s a gondola, but all the characters on the cover are looking at a prim purse-holding woman – a pretty clear indication that Gorey either thought or was told that “Hilary Tamar” was a prim purse-holding woman). The Penguin paperback edition’s cover was scarcely better, a clumsily cut-and-paste collage of typical Venice sights.

I wish I could tell you that the current paperback edition looks better, but there isn’t one – the mystery world has moved on from Sarah Caudwell and Hilary Tamar. This was no doubt made a bit easier by the fact that Caudwell died in 2000, having written only four of these intelligent and impeccable novels. Still, I’m happy to recommend them all – starting with this one.