THE WIDENING STAIN

The latest discovery from American Mystery Classics is a brightly waspish account of murder in a thinly disguised version of the Cornell University Library that’s the only novel by the prolific academic, translator, and light versifier Morris Bishop (1893-1973), writing under a pseudonym.

Everyone, it seems, is suddenly very interested in manuscript B 58, the library’s copy of Hilarius’ miracle play Filius Getronis. Professor Belknap (history) plans to publish it with the cooperation of professor Hyett (classics) and professor Francis Parry (dramatics). And now assistant professor Angelo Casti (romance languages) wants to borrow it for some investigations he proposes in his phonetics laboratory. Absolutely not, says Chief Cataloguer Gilda Gorham, believing that now everything has settled down. Her cozy assumption is promptly exploded by the death of assistant professor Lucie Coindreau, a rival of Casti’s for a coveted tenure line, who leaves a reception at President Temple’s house, lets herself into the Wilmerding Collections, and plunges from a gallery to the floor below. As if to prove that her demise is no accident, it’s followed by Hyett’s strangling in the Wilmerding Collections. Gilda must sort through a wide range of decorous secrets her colleagues are hiding—an indebtedness to a predatory lender, a taste for erotica, an affair with Lucie Coindreau, a link to the earlier theft of a valuable manuscript—to identify the duly pedantic killer.

No marvel of plot construction but a wryly amusing look at academic life that’s dated all too little since 1942.