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Murder By Reference is a refreshing read
Book Review
By Derryll White
Meredith, D.R. (1991). Murder By Reference.
Doris R. Meredith was a legal secretary at her husband’s law firm in Amarillo, Texas, and a prolific mystery writer at night. Her stories are set in the Texas Panhandle.
Meredith is another of the writers emerging from Tony Hillerman’s collection ‘Mysteries of the West.’ The story centres around the Texas Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum which is close to Amarillo. The setting makes the book even more appealing to someone like me who has spent 30 years working in museums. Believe it or not, there is a twisted crew that collects museum mysteries and ‘Murder By Reference’ is a prime candidate for this crowd.
This volume is part Meredith’s John Lloyd Branson series. He is a lawyer who doesn’t lose, driven by a quest for the truth and held in check by his legal assistant Lydia Fairchild. Lydia is definitely a woman of the ‘90s, speaking her mind clearly and holding little back. The museum is a very particular environment and atmosphere to work in, and it works well here. This is a refreshing read from an author not normally encountered in this region.
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Excerpts from the novel:
THE PAST – ‘But that’s in the past; it has nothing to do with now.”
“It has everything to do with now. The past is not some fixed point; on the linear progression of time, it impinges on the present and sometimes the future. Otherwise the superstitious would not believe in ghosts.” John Lloyd released her hand and gestured at the room. “The past can be a prison, Miss Fairchild – as this house is to Monique Whitney, as your memories are to you.”
REDHEADS – …but she wasn’t in the mood to defend her shopping habits, particularly to someone too stupid to realize the only attractive redheads were the ones to the color born, so to speak. Red hair from a bottle always looked false like a cheap print of a Rembrandt.
INSIDE THE MUSEUM – Jenner had a lot of imagination. He could imagine sitting in the sheriff’s office on the buffalo-horn chair beside the pot-bellied stove, searing one side of his body while the other side froze; he could imagine going home to the four-room house, a mansion for that time and place, and sleeping on the uncomfortable bed, with its lumpy mattress, next to a wife wearing a flannel nightgown, whose number of pregnancies was frequently equal to the number of wedding anniversaries celebrated, and who wished to avoid or at least delay another exposure to the joys of motherhood, he could imagine shaving with a straight razor and cutting the hell out of his chin.
Jenner respected the pioneers, if for no other reason than that they survived being pioneers. He had no desire to bring back the good old days of outdoor plumbing, four-legged transportation, buffalo chip heating, pneumonia in the winter and food poisoning from no refrigeration in the summer, long johns and corsets, horsehair sofas and coal oil lamps, diphtheria and smallpox, measles and tetanus.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
