Because I Could Not Stop for Death (An Emily Dickinson Mystery)
Named for the first line of one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems, Because I Could Not Stop for Death begins a new series following the contemporary trend of giving historically famous authors a second vocation as amateur sleuths. Shortly after Willa Noble applies to the Dickinson household as a maid, her brother is found dead in the stable where he works, and Emily suspects foul play. Someone in Amherst is using information about the Underground Railroad for profit, luring escaped slaves to the stable as a safe stop, where they are then picked up by slave catchers and returned South.
This is a well-paced mystery with a few twists, although there are readable clues to the culprit. Repeated reference to Emily and her brother and sister, who are respectively 24, 26, and 22 at the time, as ‘children’ threw me, when a word such as ‘siblings’ may have served better. A couple of situations did strike me as unlikely but not enough to worry about, but what slows the narrative in places is dialogue which does not always read as something a person might say in the circumstances. I felt quite at home in Amherst, and there are very interesting details about Washington and the lives of the Dickinsons. Emily is opinionated, aloof, and independent-minded, as one might expect, but she’s likeable enough, and there are a number of other characters who may well feature in future investigations as their personalities are developed. The novel’s main interest lies in the turbulent and unsettling mid-1850s time period, a precursor to the Civil War.
