Marsha Mildon’s Cal Meredith Books

A puzzle: during the 1990s, two terrific authors of lesbian private investigator series emerged from the bucolic but small city of Victoria, British Columbia.

Both had American publishers, and I’ve described previously how Lauren Wright Douglas was part of the sprawling genre fiction output of Naiad Press, based in Florida.

Marsha Mildon‘s two books in the Cal Meredith series were published by New Victoria, housed in Vermont.

One of the things I need to figure out is whether there was much in the way of lesbian literary community in Victoria in the ’90s. Another question is why the authors elected to publish with U.S.-based publishers: were Canadian presses not interested, or was this a commercial decision? Naiad Press and its imitators did issue a formidable amount of lesbian romance, fantasy, and crime fiction during this era.

Mildon’s first Cal Meredith novel appeared in 1995.

Fighting for Air, like the second book in this short series, draws on the author’s extensive scuba-diving experience in a mystery story revolving around an Ethiopian grad student’s sudden death during a group diving class.

The class was taking place on the small (fictional) Anemone Island, not far from Vancouver Island.

Cal Meredith, who is struggling to overcome her loss of her lover in a tragic diving accident at a shipwreck, is already on edge. The friend who’s teaching the course is soon arrested on charges of negligence in the student’s drowning death, but Cal is convinced that something more complicated than inattention and a hangover were at play in the man’s death. Determined to prove the innocence of the teacher, who also becomes her lover, Cal scrutinizes the motley group of diving students and turns up some unsavoury secrets and surprising prior relationships.

It’s a good read: fast-paced, with a few twists, and strong characterizations. The sense of place is excellent, and Victoria’s geography and cultural peculiarities are brought out nicely.

I’ve just started Mildon’s second book, which takes place a few months after the events described in Fighting for Air.

Cal is asked to investigate the murder of an academic department chair’s wife: she was found off the west coast of Vancouver Island, underwater, and in baffling circumstances.

The “goddess ship” of the novel’s title is a replica that is being painstakingly constructed for instructional purposes by the accused, a feminist anthropology professor who believes that the Minoan goddess culture dispersed throughout the world, rather than being crushed by later arrivals to Crete. This academic research stance has already made her unpopular with her department chair, whose own views are more conservative and conventional.

As in her first Cal Meredith novel, Mildon skillfully manages to weave together the romance and mystery plots that were de rigueur in this particular sub-genre during the 1980s and 1990s. Some remnant of that can be seen in recent fiction by Toronto author Liz Bugg; her PI, Calli Barnow, might even be a tribute to Mildon’s Callisto, known as Cal?

Two books is a very short series, but Mildon went on to pursue varied and interesting writing projects.