Claremont, California -- Virginia Crosby is standing in the doorway of the president's office at Pomona College, waving as broadly as she can. The president, David Alexander, is talking on the phone and staring out the window. Ms. Crosby can't catch his eye.
Ms. Crosby, a professor emerita of French, does not have an appointment to see Mr. Alexander, but his secretary barely had time to nod as Ms. Crosby sailed past. Now, abruptly and a bit impatiently, she sits down in a chair just outside Mr. Alexander's door.
"Beulah is vaguely here," says Ms. Crosby, gesturing toward the middle of the outer office. "The dean's office is where the dean's office really is. The Burckhardt Room is there," she says, pointing to the president's conference room. In Fast Death, Ms. Crosby's forthcoming murder mystery, Beulah Taper is secretary to the president of Tipton College. The dean is a suspect. And the police use the Burckhardt Room for interviews.
Ms. Crosby insists that Fast Death is "really not about Pomona -- Pomona has done too much for me, and anyway an expose doesn't make a very good story." She says the mystery, which she is reworking at the request of Council Oak Books, "is about foibles, et cetera, in a certain milieu."
"It's a satire. There's a great deal of distortion and even caricature. Our trustees would never meddle," says Ms. Crosby. "It bothers me when people say, `I can't wait to read it and see who's who.' "
Ms. Crosby admits only to using Pomona's campus as her model when she was plotting her story -- "I don't have the kind of mind that can invent new architecture," she says. But people here are eager nonetheless. Says Ms. Crosby: "I hope everyone will take it in good spirit. Maybe it's a bit prankish here and there, but I hope no one thinks I was mean spirited."
So far, only a few of her Pomona colleagues have read the manuscript, which involves one collection of Chinese antiques, three murders, dozens of plot twists, scores of clues, and the usual number of petty campus intrigues. In reviewers' terms, it's a "good read."
Ms. Crosby is starting to describe a detail that's "not really coopered up" when Mr. Alexander comes out to offer an expansive greeting. "Our Angela Lansbury," he says. "Our Dorothy Sayers."
Ms. Crosby glances sideways at her guest and then tells Mr. Alexander she just wants a minute to point out "where the body was found."
"A body was found here?" Mr. Alexander asks, following Ms. Crosby into his office. He chuckles. "I hope it wasn't someone six-three who weighed a bit too much and had beautiful blond hair."
In fact, it was. Fast Death describes Tipton's president, who slumps over at his desk one evening after a phone conversation with a trustee, as "a tall blond figure" whose "slight increase in girth" was "a sign that he had dropped out of his exercise program yet again." But Ms. Crosby suddenly discovers how late it's getting, and she hustles her guest out the door. All she says to Mr. Alexander, whom she leaves standing in the middle of his office, is a cheery "You're getting close."
Then it's off to a chemistry-department stockroom where ingredients for a quick-acting poison might be found. "I have a tendency, after I've done something for a while, to want to go on to do something else," says Ms. Crosby, who has served Pomona as a dean, as director of public relations, and as secretary to the Board of Trustees. Even now she spends an occasional semester on the campus, filling in for absent colleagues in the French department.
Ms. Crosby says she dropped out of the University of Oklahoma in her sophomore year, going instead to Dresden to study under Mary Wigman, one of the pioneers of modern dance. Later Ms. Crosby became a writer for radio soap operas -- most notably "Dr. Paul" -- and married and started raising two children. Then she earned her degrees in French and began a career in academe. "Mother had the idea that I should do something with my life," Ms. Crosby says.
"When I retired, I didn't want to slip off into AARP-ville. I thought a mystery would be entertaining to do. I thought I could draw on my experience doing dialogue for the radio soaps. I'm no P. D. James, but I knew my book could be a cut above some.
"The basic rule is, Write about something you're familiar with. Some years back, we had a theft of Chinese art objects at Pomona. An inside job, not high level. I just started to noodle around with the thing. And I asked a young colleague in the chemistry department to come up with a poison -- I like things to be tidy and accurate.
"Obviously, it's a constructed piece. There's no time to give characters much depth, but it's the puzzle that counts. And for me, the fun was in the writing, and in trying to get everything straight and remember who was where when."
In the afternoon, sitting in a cafe in downtown Claremont, Ms. Crosby is discussing how much blood would spurt out of a victim assaulted with a mat knife, such as would be found in a picture framer's shop. "I asked my doctor," she says. "I got a momentary look of bewilderment, until I explained I'm a writer of mystery stories."
She says her second book will be set in Paris, where she keeps a small apartment in the sixth arrondissement. The book "will be about Ondine, a retired Tipton French professor, gorgeous, six feet tall."
"She has a Czech lover who owns a frame shop. I have quite a bit of it worked out -- it's based on a real event from a place I used to rent in Paris where they found two feet sticking out from a garbage can. Ondine is essentially the detective in this one, and she has to be murdered herself. I would like it to be in Saint Sulpice, but I have to go back and see if there's a way to lure someone into the organ loft, or to a confessional."
Weeks later, a phone rings in Washington. Two short tones and the static of an overseas connection precede Ms. Crosby's voice. She is back in the sixth arrondissement. "This is Virginia," she says. "I had just finished a wonderful meal and I was watching Saratoga Trunk, with Gary Cooper, when I got this call from my agent." Ms. Crosby sounds pleased. "She's got the contract with Council Oak signed and sealed."
