With no forensic science to rely upon, the investigation has to be rather more creative than what we are used to these days.

Everyone is drinking to excess and smoking continuously. Professor Fansler and most of the police investigators view each other with a class-based mutual mistrust and incomprehension. Think Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Feminine Mystique, birth control pills, the beginning of the social and economic decay that is to come. What’s fascinating here is not so much the crime itself (as in so many other novels of this sort, the mystery involves a rather improbable and convoluted plot) than the snapshot in time of New York City in the early sixties.

She taught for over three decades, published books and articles with a strong feminist slant, and spoke up about continued discrimination against women, while attempting to change academic culture for the better.Īnd she kept writing detective fiction starring her alter ego as an amateur sleuth.Īs for the novel itself: the heroine is trying to exonerate a dear friend and former lover (a psychoanalyst) who has been accused of the murder of her former student, his former client, who has turned up dead on his couch. She did earn tenure (in 1967), becoming the first woman to do so in her department. What’s particularly interesting about this mystery novel (the first in a series featuring English professor Kate Fansler) is the fact that it was written by an English professor at Columbia University, Carolyn Heilbrun.Īmanda Cross was Heilbrun’s pen name she did not dare publish under her own name, fearing that such a move would prevent her from getting tenure.

In the Last Analysis by Amanda Cross