The late Phil Craig, who died in May of 2007, had a thing for corpses washing up on any one of our scenic shores.
In the story-line, J.W. Jackson, ex-cop, fisherman, overall cool guy (just like Phil!), would set aside his fishing rod for a few days, and kiss his super-supportive wife Zee on the forehead before he dashed off to sort out all this sudden skullduggery on our normally calm and safe little island.
Whenever J.W. needed to stop and eat before he began to feel peakish, he whipped up something divine, always with whatever fresh fish or seafood had magically jumped into his bucket, and with whatever veggies and herbs could be scavenged from his garden.
In real life, Phil and his wife, Shirley, adored the culinary arts, and eventually published a book of recipes – theirs and J.W.’s and Zee’s – Delish! (Vineyard Stories, 2008). There’s a sweet potato soup in there for which you need to Xerox a dozen copies because the minute you serve it, your guests will demand the recipe.
But back to gruesome cadavers. Our other major dispenser of crime fiction is the indomitable Cynthia Riggs of West Tisbury, formerly a geologist, then a boat captain, in fact, this ninth-generation Vineyarder may have very well served as a tinker, tailor and spy. It’s no secret that her fictional detective, the feisty 92-year-old Victoria Trumbull, is based on Cynthia’s revered mother, Dionis Coffin Riggs, writer, poet, and avid gardener, who died at the age of 98 as she snipped peonies (or daisies or dahlias or roses) in her kitchen garden.
So Phil wrote some 27 or so mysteries, and Cynthia’s 11th, Poison Ivy, came out last year. All of Cynthia’s novels, by the way, are titled after some sinister flower or shrub: Deadly Nightshade, The Cranefly Orchid Murders, The Cemetery Yew. Not only are buggy-eyed and bloated corpses showing up with uncanny regularity in her stories, but so are scary species of plant life.
It’s enough to make you think our island could be the next site for a new Survivor series. According to the Riggs and Craig mysteries, there’s a man-eating plant and a guy with a ski mask and a knife in his teeth midway along any given nature path.
And then there’ve been two solo murder mysteries.
I came across one of them on a recent jaunt to the Thrift Store in Vineyard Haven (what a treasure that place is but, shhh! don’t tell anyone; we don’t want the shelves picked clean.)
The book is titled, disingenuously enough, Murder on Martha’s Vineyard (Walker Books, 1981). It’s by Kelley Roos which turns out to be a pseudonymn for two writers, a husband and wife team named Audrey Kelley Roos (1912 – 1982) and William Roos (1911 – 1987) who, at the time of their writing the book, summered on the Vineyard.
Murder on MV is what they call in the dead body trade, a “howcatchum.” This is really the “Columbo” formula where you see the dastardly deed either being transacted or contemplated right up front, the villain’s identity in full Monty.
The rest of the plot involves the sleuth rolling up his or her sleeves to figure out that other catch-phrase of mysteries, “whodunit.” We know “whodunit,” but somehow that doesn’t dampen our excitement as the detective follows the clues.
In Murder on MV, the suspense is gripping – and this is not a spoiler alert because it happens soon in the story arc – as a young bride is kidnapped.
This was too much excitement for me, by the way. I’m so morbidly sensitive that suspense simply, no pun intended, slays me. I know suspense is considered a necessary component for a well-paced story, but for me it’s pure agony. I committed a no-no that few dedicated readers will ever allow themselves: I flipped to the last pages. As soon as I could assure myself that all, in the final analysis, would be well, I returned to the start to read with my blood pressure under control.
Don’t tell me none of you has ever committed this literary faux-pas.
A quick obscurely amusing story about this misdemeanor, and then we’ll get back to dead bodies on Martha’s Vineyard: A long time ago I read Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. I started to worry about Lily Bart, the poor, misguided aristocrat-manqué who was circling the drain, working in a hat shop and breathing toxic fumes, that she simply had to let herself be saved by the noble Lawrence who loved her.
Well, I did the unthinkable and skipped to the final page where I saw, to my inestimable relief, that Lawrence was kissing Lily on the lips! It wasn’t until I returned and read the remainder of the story straight through, thinking God was in His Heaven and all was well with the House of Mirth that I discovered (spoiler alert for real now!) Lawrence arrived at Lily’s side too late, and dealt that last smooch to her dead face! Ouch!
So Murder on Martha’s Vineyard is fun. Obviously, it’s way out of print, but if you find it in a library or the Book Den East, that wonderful barn of old books on New York Avenue just up from the Oak Bluffs harbor, buy it and enjoy. It’s fun to escape back to 1981 on the island where phone numbers were only seven digits long, when Edgartown and its gentry still ruled, and teens broke into summer houses for booze, but none of them had yet tried or even heard of crack cocaine or crystal meth or, heavenly days! iPhones.
The other solo venture into a murder mystery was the late Stanley Hart’s The Martha’s Vineyard Affair (Dell, 1980). Being a socialite, sailor and avid tennis player, Stan wrote about the milieu he knew best, and he served up this inspired line about his characters: “Scotch got them through the day. Sex got them through the night, and money got them out of every jam.”
Stan had a passionate interest in recovery from alcohol. During his lifetime he visited over 100 rehab facilities for research and writing purposes. Consequently the action in MV Affair devotes more time to A.A. meetings than the investigation of random murders. There is at least one random murder, as I recall, but even this had an alcoholic feature: The victim overdosed on a medication called Antabuse which has a special feature of making someone hideously sick should he or she try a drop of alcohol on top of a dose of it.
I also recall, from my long-ago reading of this book, that Stan, clever, smart and a darned good writer, nonetheless spent little time on descriptive narrative of this luscious island. In other words, it could have been set anywhere. I had the feeling that, had Stanley Hart acquired an entrepreneurial urge, he could have marketed this novel with different titles and covers, same characters and plot-line: The Palm Beach Affair, The Beverly Hills Affair or The Big Sur Affair. Anywhere that people use scotch to get them through the day.
So all you wannabe crime detection writers out there, the field is wide open. Other than Cynthia Riggs who is still going strong, earlier authors of island murders have departed to that Great Mystery In The Sky. And here are some title suggestions: Murderous Affairs on Martha’s Vineyard, L’Affair Murder on Martha’s Vineyard and, finally, my personal fave: Dead Bodies All Over The Place on Martha’s Vineyard.
Just don’t make it too stimulating or I’ll have to riffle through to the end.
Oh, listen, big news: Coming next week, your Vineyard Confidential columnist is hanging up her nonfiction holster and changing over to a serialized novel set on the Island. “Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People”, which I’m hoping will be both harrowing and hilarioius in equal measure, will appear every Monday and Thursday on MV Patch, starting May 6. —Holly