Review by Dennis Fischman

There’s a trend in the murder mystery genre: take a historical figure, perhaps a writer herself, and make her the detective in your own book. Stephanie Barron did it with her Jane Austen mysteries. Nicola Upson is still writing her series starring Josephine Tey, a Golden Age of Mystery author herself. There have been Oscar Wilde murder mysteries (by Gyles Brandreth) and even an Agatha Christie-as-detective series (by Andrew Wilson).

Edna Ferber was famous a century ago but is now nearly forgotten. That’s a great loss for us. Her 1924 novel So Big won the Pulitzer Prize, and I do recommend it. Most of us will be more familiar with her books that she turned into movie screenplays, like Showboat, Cimarron, and Giant (starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean). 

Ferber herself led a fascinating life, and it makes for an engrossing mystery series.  In Escape Artist, Edna is only 19, a “girl” “reporter” one year out of high school, and still living with her family in her hometown. A German immigrant girl, Frana Lempke, whom Edna knew slightly has been murdered, in a puzzling way.  How did she simply disappear from a crowded and well monitored school? And then, who killed her, and why?

“Escape Artist: An Edna Ferber Mystery” Poisoned Pen Press, 254 pages.

As for the whodunnit, it hangs together, and I liked the double twist at the denouement, but it is exceptionally sad. It’s remarkable that a male writer could get not only young Edna Ferber but other female characters so right, and the book neither exaggerates the difficulties of being a woman in 1904 nor underplays them, at all.

I wrote about the first book in this series that it left me unsatisfied because it did not really tell me who Ferber was. This book more than makes up for that omission, and it makes me want to see who she becomes (and read some of the novels she wrote, herself). 

I would fault Escape Artist only for having too many characters. If the series were going to spend more time in Appleton, Wisconsin, it would make sense for so many of her neighbors to be introduced. They could play a role in future mysteries. It’s clear at the end of this book, however, that she is headed out. The title not only refers to Erich Weiss aka Harry Houdini, another Jew who leaves Appleton to achieve fame – he has an important role in solving the locked room part of the mystery – but to Ferber herself. So, enjoy the cast of characters and the setting for its own sake. 

I would recommend starting the series here, with book #2, and only then reading the entries set in her flashier adult life in Hollywood and on Broadway.

Dennis Fischman is a member of the Somerville Public Library’s Mystery Book Club and an inveterate reader.