Sleuth and Scholar:
The Mystery Novels of Sarah Stewart Taylor

By Amy Lilly

O’ Artful Death

(St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2003; 277 pages)

Mansions of the Dead

(St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2004; 337 pages)

Judgment of the Grave

(St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2005; 336 pages)

Still As Death

(forthcoming, September 2006, St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Even a reader unaccustomed to mysteries will become helplessly absorbed in Sarah Stewart Taylor’s series, featuring an art history academic with a penchant for solving murders.

We first meet Taylor’s engaging heroine, Sweeney St. George, in O’ Artful Death. Sweeney is a new hire in the art department of a prestigious Boston college with a very hip specialty: social attitudes toward death. She has already published a book at age 28 – a fact that significantly lowers her chances for being granted tenure by an envious chair. But no matter; Sweeney, single and eager for more research, agrees to accompany a friend for Christmas break to the small Vermont town of Byzantium, site of a nineteenth-century art commune where an odd but artistically significant gravestone from 1890 begs her attention. As Sweeney gets to know the living history of Byzantium (the town’s residents are all descendants of either the wealthy artists who moved there a century before, or the poorer townspeople who used to pose for their sculptures), she finds her curiosity leading her from the unexplained death memorialized by the 1890 gravestone to the shocking deaths of people she has just met – and then, to fear for her own life.

The model for the setting of O’ Artful Death, which is so far the only one of Taylor’s books to take place primarily in Vermont, is a New Hampshire arts colony of which her great-grandmother was a member. But in its description, Byzantium presents a familiar picture to Vermonters:

Her first impression of Byzantium was of two separate landscapes, competing with each other for her attention. The first was the idyllic New England scene of calendars and magazines: the gentle, dipping hills, the peaked evergreens against the snow, the red barns and white farmhouses like exotic holly berries, nestled amongst the green.

But as she and Toby followed the narrow, drift-lined dirt roads in her old Volkswagen Rabbit, she noticed another landscape. This one was made up of dilapidated ranch-style houses and trailers, paint peeling, aluminum roofing coming away at the edges. As they drove through one small town, a group of sullen teenagers, cigarette smoke curling above their heads, stood glaring at passing cars. Sweeney watched them in her rearview mirror until they disappeared.

In Mansions of the Dead, Taylor tells through her socially-conscious lens the story of the unexplained death of one of Sweeney’s students, not long after her return to Boston from Vermont.

The student belonged to one of the city’s long-established, wealthy Episcopalian families; the cop Sweeney teams up with to solve his murder is from the Irish immigrant class. For a long time, their only clue is the nineteenth century mourning jewelry, made out of human hair, which the murderer apparently draped around the body of the victim. The American tradition of mourning jewelry was the subject of Sweeney’s class at the time of the murder.

The third book, Judgment of the Grave, finds Sweeney pursuing the murderer of a Revolutionary War re-enactor whose corpse she stumbles on while walking a Concord, MA battlefield. His death appears to be tied to the death of a Minuteman two hundred years before.

By now it should be clear that what engages about Taylor’s mystery novels is that their concern with current-day New England society is matched by historical research, which is undertaken by Sweeney herself, in all manner of libraries, historical societies and newspaper archives, and who puzzles over passages provided for us in Taylor’s pages. The historical research often involves old, well-guarded family secrets, which Sweeney must coax from the living guardians of these clues. Rarely in novels, I suspect, has archival research been made so exciting.

Readers are equally drawn from one installment to the next by the growing complexity of Sweeney’s own life, the dark sides of which she can barely face without a scotch or three in hand – her father’s suicide, her estranged mother’s alcoholism, her fiancé’s recent death in an IRA bombing in London, and the nagging question of marriage. “As the fourth book ends,” Taylor hints by phone from her home in Hartland, Vermont, “Sweeney is headed toward a drinking problem, and someone wants to marry her, but she’s just not sure yet.”

Taylor herself is happily married to Matt Dunne, the Windsor County state senator currently running for lieutenant governor. They have a son, Judson, 8 months. She feels “very lucky to have had a very stable, emotionally secure childhood” in Long Island, New York with frequent visits to the family vacation home in Plainfield, New Hampshire; her father had gone to high school just across the border in Windsor, Vermont and kept up his ties there.

Why did Taylor give her heroine a broken home life and difficult childhood, when she had neither?

“It’s more interesting; there’s more to work with. You need some angst to carry you over the course of ten to twelve books!” she laughs, adding that Sweeney’s character also follows a well-established tradition in crime fiction of the marginalized, hard-drinking investigator. For source material, she observed friends’ experiences and extrapolated from there. “All fiction is a kind of ‘What if?’ game,” she says.

The biggest ‘what if?’ for Taylor in writing her mysteries is how people react to death. “Murder is such a fascinating skeleton to hang things on, because death by murder is the most shocking thing that happens to us. Observing how characters act and react under this incredible strain is what interests me.”

Taylor’s writing also makes it clear that it is sometimes just her characters, varied and complex as they are, who most interest her. The mystery genre has always struck this reader as somehow unethical, an irresponsible refusal to grapple with the real difficulty of death – its aftermath for the living – by focusing instead on the revelation at the end of how cleverly the sleuth unmasks the perpetrator. (For the ethical side of things, readers have a stunning new memoir to turn to, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Taylor’s series, because it is so deeply centered in character, is notable for going some way toward addressing the trauma of death – something which makes her characters all the more memorable.

The Art of Writing Death

Taylor always knew she wanted to write, and as a child she loved visiting graveyards and playing in cemeteries with her brother. She earned her B.A. at Middlebury College, majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing, learning the craft from Julia Alvarez and David Bain. It was during a semester abroad in London that the idea for the character of Sweeney first came to her. She was visiting a special exhibit on mourning objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum called “The Art of Death” when it occurred to her that the perfect sleuth’s job would be researching the very things such exhibits were made of: the paraphernalia of, and cultural attitudes toward, death. After college, Taylor moved to Ireland for a yearlong accelerated M.A. in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.

On her return, she got a job as publishing assistant to a literary agent in New York City. “I thought it would be a good day job that would allow me to write,” she recalls. Instead, she found she was merely helping other people to write. To focus on her own writing, she moved into the family vacation home in Plainfield, NH and began freelancing for the Windsor Chronicle and the Valley News in Lebanon, NH, eventually taking over as editor of the latter. (Another freelancer for the Valley News at the time was Sarah Strohmeyer, who would become author of the Bubbles comic mystery series.)

It would seem that Taylor’s experience as assistant to a literary agent should have given her a leg up in getting her own books published, but that was not the case. It took her two and a half years and “a lot of rejection letters” from agents listed in Writer’s Market before Taylor found representation for her first manuscript. The agent with whom she eventually signed sold the manuscript to St. Martin’s, and obtained for Taylor a two-book contract, which was soon followed by another.

Taylor did learn important lessons at the literary agency. “I learned you don’t make much money as a writer. And that you need to think of writing as a career, not just in terms of the next book but over the long haul. And that you do need an agent.” She also learned that “authors have to promote themselves these days. It used to be that publishers were happy with small successes. Now they’re looking only for huge sales,” something Taylor puts down to the consolidation of the industry into conglomerates much more concerned with the bottom line than small presses. “Publishers no longer have the time or money to arrange author promotions” – except, of course, for their already best-selling authors.

So Taylor began her own campaigns: postcards to her friends, self-supported tours with reading and signing stops around the country. California is a big destination for every tour she makes, since it is home to eight booksellers who sell only mysteries. Other destinations are based on where her friends live. For her second book tour, she covered all of New England, New York, Arizona, and Colorado – at her own expense.

Genre and Gender

The genre of mystery writing keeps Taylor inspired because, as she says, its only limitation is “whodunit,” but also because it allows her to keep delving into and developing her main character, Sweeney St. George. “Most of the time, when you write a novel, you have to say good-bye to the characters at the end. This way, I don’t have to.”

Taylor, who based her character loosely on herself, has grown in ways Sweeney has not. In the beginning, “I knew that I wanted a young woman with the same concerns as I had, so I made her 28, like me” – as well as apt to crash on the sofa with Thai takeout and an old rented movie after a day of teaching. But as Taylor has gone on to marriage and parenthood, she finds that she has become much more aware of the differences between her character and herself, and is exploring those differences through the cop who first appears in the second book, Tim Quinn, a new husband and father.

Is Sweeney feminist in any way? “Absolutely; she considers herself a feminist,” says Taylor. The forthcoming book, she adds, addresses feminism through its investigation of the death of a woman involved in several woman’s organizations. “Like many women of our generation, she’s trying to redefine what it means to be feminist.” In the second book, Mansions of the Dead, Sweeney is attuned even to sexism in portrait painting – and its absence in the portrait of a society woman she views in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts whose gaze is “direct and almost challenging.”

While marriage seems to unsettle her, Sweeney’s career as a professor is always portrayed with seriousness and practicality. Taylor herself admits that she never wanted to face the work involved in getting a Ph.D., but she, like Sweeney, loves teaching, and has taught fiction writing at Granite State College (the adult education wing of the University of New Hampshire), the newly minted Center for Cartoon Studies in

White River Junction, and most recently Lebanon College, where she taught a class on how to get your novel published.

Taylor doesn’t think there is a particular affinity between women writers and the mystery genre, but when she names her biggest influences, they are all women: Mildred Benson (the “Nancy Drew” series); Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Josephine Tey – the last three of whom come from Britain’s “Golden Age” of detective fiction spanning the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Also on the British side, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell rank high; she has only recently come to know Americans like Julia Spencer-Fleming (also published by St. Martin’s Minotaur). Within the genre, says Taylor, “if you like the more cerebral, less gore-filled mysteries, most of these are by women,” although there are a growing number of young women writing “noir” mysteries, the violent kind.

A major source of Taylor’s strength as a writer comes from her membership in Sisters In Crime, a national organization for women crime writers, which was founded in the 1980s because of the then-wide gap between the number of women crime writers getting reviewed and the much larger number who were being published. (Taylor says the situation is better now.) Another organization, Malice Domestic, sponsors the Agatha Award, honoring Agatha Christie’s more “cerebral” mystery form, for which Taylor was nominated for best first book.

For people who are interested in writing mysteries, Taylor advises, joining a group like Sisters In Crime is the best thing for reducing the mystery of publishing; and national conferences are fun and make a good sounding board for ideas and structure.

And there’s always Taylor’s own class on publishing your novel. Her last semester’s students are currently sending out manuscripts. “Hopefully some of them will be successful!” she says.

Amy Lilly is a freelance writer from Burlington.