A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read
There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them. Cornelia Read’s opening line to her debut novel is both a shot across the reader’s bow and the opening salvo of a restless mind at work.
Madeline Dare isn’t the average crime-solving protagonist. Living the life in Syracuse New York, Madeline has a husband she loves in a town where lime Jello with shredded carrots is a perfectly acceptable alternative to endive and arugula, a place where extremes of heat and cold are observed from the pebbled contours of genuine Naugahyde.
A pair of dog tags trigger Madeline’s search for the killer of two young women years earlier. A farmer near Syracuse found the bodies; the staged crime scene had been photographed, the cops had gone through the motions but the investigation ended without an arrest. The dog tags belong to Madeline’s cousin Lapthorne. He is her favorite among a group of wealthy relatives who adorn the north shore of Long Island in graceful decay. Much of the story’s inner workings are a brilliantly drawn portrait of wealth and its effects on the generations born to it. “Really chic Manhattan women smoke their lunch,” says Madeline’s mother. Rail thin women and bizarre WASP eating rituals are integral to Madeline’s perpetual state of flux, of not being happy anywhere, to the manor born but not bred.
Guilt pushes Madeline to uncover the truth about the double homicide everyone else has forgotten. The postindustrial wasteland propelled her ancestors to great wealth and privilege leaving the Rust Belt to fend for itself. “The Rose Girls” died at the hands of persons unknown, their deaths fodder for the local newspapers. Madeline is writing fluff pieces for a Syracuse weekly and from this wobbly perch sets out to find the truth. Anchored by her husband’s relentless common sense, she risks more than she knows in her quest for resolution.
No spoilers here; A Field of Darkness follows Madeline through enough small town corruption and big time decadence to establish the plot’s logic, but the story is secondary to the sheer skill of its teller, or as Madeline puts it, “watching Fellini and Wodehouse drop acid.”
A friend of mine once veered to the side of the road when he came to the border between The Bronx and Westchester. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, pointing across the street. “That’s the Midwest.”
Cornelia Read sets the tension between Upstate and Downstate before shredding this Maginot Line with a fusillade of wit and observation. The result is a terrific read, a dark comedy of crime and deferred punishment, family dynamics and veiled menace.