I think most mystery readers have a particular fondness for mysteries set in academe. Certainly the setting is ideal for mystery writers with a preference for the classic puzzle plot: the crime occurs in an enclosed universe with a sophisticated atmosphere and features a cast of well-educated victims and villains with intricate motives for malice and mayhem. Writers JoAnne Dobson, Amanda Cross, and Dorothy Sayers—whose GAUDY NIGHT ranks as the greatest academic mystery ever—are writers I read and re-read every year with enormous pleasure.
But there’s no denying that academic settings are one step removed from the scarier realities of the outside world, and that fact contributed to the creation of my seventy-two year old detective Austin McKenzie, DVM, Professor Emeritus of Bovine Sciences. There were three college professors in my immediate family before my parents passed on, four if you count my brother-in-law. And although both my parents left teaching and research for the wider world, they had a persistent nostalgia for that way of life (undoubtedly colored by the fact that they weren’t in the middle of it anymore.) So when Austin settled onto my shoulder and demanded my attention, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how he would handle life outside the security of his former university.
Austin sets himself up as a detective because he’s broke. He put his retirement income into Enron stock. He and his wife Madeline live in Summersville, a village located ten miles from the Cornell school of agriculture, where he’s spent forty years studying cows. His immediate response to the loss of his retirement income is to set up as a veterinarian. But a LOT of veterinarians settle just outside Cornell. It’s one of the best vet schools in the country, and that part of New York State is as beautiful as the southern part of England. Austin and Madeline are just making ends meet when his first murder case presents itself. And as one of Austin’s clients points out in The Case of the Tough-Talking Turkey, there’s a ton of vets around Summersville, but only one detective agency. Austin is well-aware that diversification is a hedge against tough times in business, so he opens Case Closed, Inc., as an adjunct arm of McKenzie Veterinary Services, Inc. (Practice Limited To Large Animals.)
Austin’s assistants Joe Turnblad and Allegra Fullbright, are grad students at the vet school. His best friend—and chief nemesis Victor Bergland—has taken over Austin’s former career as Chair of the Department of Bovine Sciences. And most of the cases that make up the series The Casebooks of Dr. McKenzie come from his association with his former university. So, tensions occasionally arise because, while Austin is surrounded by academe, he is not in it anymore. These tensions really help flesh out his character, and make me fonder of him than of any other amateur detective I’ve made up in the course of my mystery writing career.
Claudia explains the genesis of the Hemlock Falls series in Accidental Crimes.