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About the Author
Gina Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted; Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales; Babes in Boyland; and, with Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, I'm With Stupid. She's written or edited other books on vice, Victorians and sex, American humor, the erotics of instruction, The Sopranos, women's humor, and Italian-American literature. She will blog about teaching, sex, humor, money, publishing, ambition, books, marriage, envy (professional and personal), politics (professional and personal), aging, and cartoons.
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Featured Articles By the Author
An End-of-Semester Murder Mystery: Part One
PART ONE: Death of The Hillborne Mann
Professor Mann was known as The Hillborne Mann by uninspired colleagues and inspired undergraduate students alike. While Mann’s colleagues in the English Department employed the phrase to sum up the narrow, misogynist tendencies of his intellectual and social abilities, the typical undergraduate used it as high praise. Mann’s great height, great breadth and broad features, given to much redness of face after any excess, are all currently rather unimpressive. But this is not surprising. The original Hillborne Man is dead.
Known for his heartlessness, Mann is quite literally heartless, that organ having been removed from his chest cavity. All of this has been rather neatly done, however, so that his appearance does not betray the deeper absence. His heartlessness is obscured by the ratty-nattiness of his Harris tweed jacket.
Who finds the body, as Mann will be known in the future to certain segments of the college and town population? The body is found by Thaddeus Leach, professor of medieval literature, colleague and occasional supporter of Mann in the English department. Leach knocks on the heavy, dark, polished wood of Mann’s office door in the Satis Library and enters, as is the custom in this old and respected institution. Leach, known to his friends but not to his students (or so he assumes) as Winkie, sees Mann, upright and rigid in his enormous leather chair, eyes closed: quite embarrassingly dead. Winkie goes rather pale himself. His fatty 55-year-old medieval heart not used to such shocks. He sits in the small, uneasy chair used by the rare student who has been unable to avoid seeing Mann face to face.
Not that Mann wasn’t popular. Quite the opposite. Fraternities, even some sororities, would make sure that their numbers packed into Mann’s classes on American literature and, to be fair, not only because successful papers were carefully filed in frat house libraries, there to be copied easily and passed in for a good grade. Whoop and holler, these good students would, when Mann pointed out such facts as validated their own central beliefs, the following being a summary of these: women don’t write well and aren’t very smart after all; men of color are useful as characters in literary works (see Twain, see Faulkner, see Wolfe) but not of much use anywhere at a college except on the sports field; foreigners, rich or simply well-off, are vital to the college coffers but nevertheless should be pitied and avoided; big men are better than small men.
He was often given to adaptations of well-known literary clichés. For example, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, Mann would claim that “nobody but a fool ever married but for money.” (Mann was married and divorced). Paraphrasing Eliot, Mann would say that the “world would end not with a bang but with the wimps.” Oh, how the freshman fraternity boys liked that one, hating wimps as they did, wimps being those freshmen boys not in fraternities. Mann was popular among, shall we say, a certain crowd and that crowd was large, visible, and vocal in Arborville.
So Winkie sat in the tiny chair for a few minutes before going back to his own office to phone the college police.
At least it was proven much later than Winkie’s fingerprints were not on Mann’s telephone.
…to be continued…
Posted at 09:29:48 AM on April 22, 2008 | All postings by Gina BarrecaComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Who Were You?
Next: Murder Mystery Part II: Suspects
Seems quite engaging—want to read more!
— David in Darkest PA · Apr 23, 09:45 AM · #
Love it. You write well in this arena. Compared to the non-fiction, which is mostly what we’re looking at, it’s denser, darker, and a little less succinct, meandering quite nicely. I like your writing when it wanders off and around the tracks a little. I enjoy the alliance between the frat boys and an English professor. It’s unsettling and unexpected but not gimmicky. When he opens his mouth it makes perfect sense. His grouch’s wisdom is entertaining, only I wonder how he hasn’t been cut loose by now. Suggestions:
The last sentence of the first paragraph confuses me a bit. The original Hillborne Man is dead. This makes it seem as if there is another Hillborne Man whose death is linked with professor Mann’s. Is there? I don’t know these things.
Also: Winkie goes rather pale himself. His fatty 55-year-old medieval heart not used to such shocks.
Either his fatty 55-year-old medieval heart IS not used to such shocks or make these two sentences one. Probably just a typo.
And obviously I dig the last name.
— Harry Lime · Apr 25, 04:01 PM · #
love the opening. Quite gripping…and also…what a great line: “quite embarrassingly dead.”
— Hannah · Apr 25, 06:01 PM · #
The Hillborne Mann”—a terrific epithet. Reminds me of Java Man or Heidelberg Man, that is Homo sapiens archaic.
— Nevil Parker · Apr 29, 08:03 AM · #