Plain Vanilla—Really?

You have to like China Bayles mysteries and to have been following the series for some time to really like A Plain Vanilla Murder, I think. I did like it a lot, and yet, there are flaws that I think are serious. The most egregious to me is that I don’t think the author, Susan Wittig Albert, played fair in giving enough clues to allow the reader to spot the murderer until the climactic scene starting in the Birkett kitchen.

Don’t read any further if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to read spoilers. This essay is nothing but spoilers!

The most stylistically fatal flaw is the title. After the author spends a lot of time on vanilla, and on how it is anything but plain—she even begins her endnote with a protest against its being a synonym for “bland or generic or plain . . . [u]nflavored, drab, typical . . . [n]o flair, no style, no panache”—then she has the nerve to serve up a plain vanilla murder. It is a slice out of ordinary life, with ordinary policing, and the solution being a combination of luck, coincidence, and that plain, ordinary police work.

Here’s how it unfolds. The first clue comes with the prologue. The prologue is a little vignette of a graduate student trip to Mexico’s Veracruz area to study vanilla in its native habitat. The botany professor, Carl Fairlee, makes a bad decision to follow a laden vanilla-pod truck that is set upon by thieves in the mountains. Then he makes another bad decision to try a U-turn getaway from the robbers, and they shoot the van, killing one of the students. The first real clue is a seemingly random description of the student, Shelley Harmon, with her boy-cut brown hair.

In the next chapter, we might be supposed to match that clue to the seemingly random description of the nurse, Karen Taylor, sitting in China Bayles’s “Not Just Plain Vanilla” workshop, with her short brown hair. But what would make us do that? Is that reasonable at all? I don’t call that a fair clue. Nothing in what Ms Taylor says is a clue.

There is more, though, that maybe should get us thinking about people. Not a lot of people at the presentation get a description. In fact, only Mrs Birkett, the Crockett Street neighbor beside whom Ms Taylor was sitting, and Edith Barlow, an auburn-haired woman, are named. A grey-haired lady gets some mention, but she isn’t identified, even though she is obviously a Pecan Springs resident. Of course, China’s partner Ruby Wilcox is introduced in this scene, and so is an off-stage character, Maggie Walker, the owner of Sonora Garden Center, where apparently you can board your orchid between blooming times. Everybody’s hair gets special mention. I call that hiding the clue with a vengeance. Nothing distinguishes it as a clue, if it even is one.

China introduces the subject of the prologue, and that introduces both Carl Fairlee as her friend Maggie Walker’s ex-husband, and it also introduces the dead college student, Shelley Harmon, as a former part-time employee of China and Ruby. A clue appears in this section, where we’re told Shelley’s mother wanted to sue the professor and the university for wrongful death, but the statute of limitations passed without a lawsuit being filed.

We’re also told that the investigation results were kept secret. Well, that sounds like a definite clue. But it ends up being a side issue, in that it would have revealed, perhaps, that Fairlee had been having affairs with different students and the dead student was going to sue him for sexual harassment when she got home. But we don’t find that out for quite some time.

The police investigation gives the clue that Carl Fairlee has a brand-new lover, a mysterious older woman who drives a green VW bug. The police (and we) get nowhere with that clue until the climactic scene.

If you are a long-time fan of this series, you will have picked up on the clue of the ghost-rung bell in China’s shop ringing the significance to the solution of China going to Mrs Birkett’s house for breakfast. But again, this clue does not lead anywhere until China actually goes.

It is only when China is at Mrs Birkett’s for breakfast to hear about a problem with a renter, that Mrs Birkett reveals all she has seen, which means that the renter is Shelley’s mother, that she drives a green VW bug, and that she has kidnapped the young Fairlee daughter in revenge for her own daughter’s death. She has also murdered Carl Fairlee.

With the aid of hindsight, we might be able to see that all that solid police work put in by Chief Sheila Dawson and her lead detective Dylan Miller has revealed enough of how slimy Carl Fairlee was, especially with regard to pretty female students, that we might think the mother of the girl who was killed because of his bad decisions, learning more about him, decided not to file a mere lawsuit, but to do something more drastic. But remember, the investigation into the Mexican trip was sealed, so presumably she didn’t know. She certainly wouldn’t have had access to the police investigation. We are back to wondering how we were supposed to ever put together the clues to figure out it was Karen.

All that solid police work was useful for the one clue about Fairlee’s new lover and her car. Of course it also provided a series of red herring distractions:

• It looked as if Maggie Walker had an excellent motive and the temperament, until China spent more time with her and told us she wasn’t really the type after all.
• It looked as if it could have been the department secretary, Charlaine Rudolph, who had been Fairlee’s lover for awhile and was dumped in favor of a younger woman student, but she turns out to be an informer working with the news reporter Jessica Nelson.
• It looked as if the wimpy girlfriend, Jennifer Haley, had an excellent motive in being thrown over too, but she turned out to be definitely too wimpy. Besides, she was the one with the older-lover-and-VW-bug clue.
• It looked as if poor Logan Gardner, the research assistant to Fairlee, who both was cheated out of the plant patent and lost his fiancee to Fairlee, had excellent motives, had the means because he was licensed to carry a gun, and had the opportunity because he had the keys and worked in the greenhouse where the murder happened. But he didn’t do it.

The plain vanilla fact (the boring, bland, everyday aspect) is that most people who are cheated, lied to, betrayed, and otherwise mistreated by the slimy Carl Fairlees of this world do not resort to murder, and that is what this murder is supposed to show. I think.

The plain vanilla fact (also boring, bland, and everyday) is that police work often relies on coincidences (China being in the police chief’s confidence in order to learn what clues there are known, and China going to breakfast with the woman who can crack the case) to resolve otherwise unsolvable murders featuring a killer with an extremely tangential relationship to the deceased and no known connection in the present.

What readers of murder mysteries expect (the plain vanilla expectation, if you will) is that given such a set up, the author is supposed to play fair. We are supposed to be given just enough information about the past (which this has), and just enough information about the repercussions of the past (which this lacks), and just enough information about the unfolding of the present to have a chance to crack the case before the resolution. One page before the resolution is not playing fair.

How about, Ms Albert, instead of all that annoying repetition of the problems Chief Sheila Dawson has in being pregnant and working a murder case, which consists almost solely in having to find a toilet every hour, you could have written a half a page here and there from the murderer’s point of view, withholding, of course, her actual identity? You are definitely clever enough to do that without actually telling us, but giving us just enough that the clever readers could figure it out.

You kept telling us how extraordinary vanilla actually is. You could have written one of your extraordinary books to show us that there is nothing plain and ordinary about murder, nor should there ever be.

Vanilla bean orchid

(SecretGardenPlants of Marianna, Florida, on etsy.com)