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Popular Culture Review
holding her killer colleague at bay during a late night library session, and sustain
ing injuries during her self-defense.
Beth’s individualism is also depicted in her relations to friends and family both of whom are hardly mentioned, except in The Charles Dickens Murders, when
she solves a mystery that involves her mother’s old college friendships. In her
department and college, she is well-liked, but considered just as strange as she
considers others. She gets along with the secretary, but finds the only other female
academic colleague an unconvincingly strident feminist. When one of her col
leagues becomes the second murder victim, she listens to everyone debating the
value of his research, and wonders: “Livy is dead...and they talk about his re
search. She stood silent, taking sidelong glances at her colleagues. It was as if she
were seeing them clearly for the first time....W hat a bunch, she thought” (211,
214). Generally, Beth is portrayed alone, at home or in the library - in The George
Eliot Murders, she spends a three-week Hawaiian vacation on her own. Like many
of these female academics, she is also sarcastic about her almost non-existent Sat
urday Night Life. When Gil asks about her whereabouts for an alibi, she
“suppress[es] a desire to invent a cultivated man and an evening at Le Francais”
and answers, “ ‘Home and alone.’ ”
Karen Pelletier, the heroine of Joanne Dobson’s novels, comments ironically
on both her lack of relationships and her simultaneous interest in several men. On
the one hand, she takes risks and doesn’t mind admitting to not-so-legitimate de
sires: she likes the investigating police officer on her cases, and, worse, lusts for
the president of her college. They don’t end up acting on their mutual attraction,
although they come pretty close several times. On the other hand, Karen has also
left men behind who stood in the way of her goals: she got rid of her abusive
husband, and then left Tony, a New York police officer, because she couldn’t pass
up a tenure-track job offer in Massachusetts (who can blame her??), and he didn’t
want to give up his job or commute. Compared to Beth Austin, Karen has a more
active social and family life - she has many friends among colleagues and else
where, and her college-age daughter comes to visit regularly. However, she also
lives alone and is estranged from other family members. At work, she is wellliked, but also goes her own way and makes the occasional enemy, despite her
untenured status: in The Northbury Papers, her interest in a “trashy” sentimentalist
woman writer meets with disdain on the par B