Nora Kelly is the author of four novels featuring historian and amateur investigator Gillian Adams. Kelly, born in the U.S., completed a PhD in history at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University. She grants her protagonist a permanent academic appointment at the University of the Pacific Northwest, a fictional school also based in Vancouver.
Perhaps surprisingly, only one of the Gillian Adams novels actually takes place on this Canadian campus. Gillian spends extensive periods of time in the UK with her lover Edward, who works for Scotland Yard; two of the mysteries are set at Cambridge, while she’s conducting research. The additional novel features Gillian in her normally quiet American hometown, caring for her mother. All four of the books are campus mysteries, and they’re excellent–thoughtful, carefully plotted, with a good balance of character development and gender politics.
The first volume in the series is In the Shadow of King’s (1983), and it has recently been reissued with a very retro cover. While I wouldn’t go quite as far as the promotion materials, which boast that Kelly’s novel does “for that ancient seat of learning what Dorothy L. Sayers did long ago for Oxford in Gaudy Night,” it’s definitely worth a look.
My Sister’s Keeper, the second Gillian Adams book, is the one set in Canada and was first published in 1992. Like Gail Bowen’s Burying Ariel (2000), it considers campus gender-based harassment and violence through the lens of the December 6, 1989 murder of 14 women at the École Polytechnique. As these dates indicate, Kelly’s novel was written in the more immediate aftermath of what became known as the Montreal Massacre.
My Sister’s Keeper takes place during the fall term, less than a year after the murders. The engineering students are blithely offensive as they stage their annual “Triumph Day” parade with partially undressed women, sex workers hired for the occasion, riding on soap-box chariots. The procession is interrupted by a feminist protest, and Gillian then hears “one voice braying above the rest . . . ‘Shoot the bitches’”.
One of the female protesters is punched during the subsequent melee. The campus environment is fraught, the “chilly climate” for women on full display throughout the novel. Gillian and others encounter a number of sexist and misogynist attacks, many of which are dismissed by her male colleagues as harmless pranks.
Rita, an outstanding doctoral student, outlines the issues: “This is 1990 . . . and half of all students are women. This is our campus, too. But women are sexually harassed by male professors, and the administration does nothing to stop it. We’ve got date rape. We’ve got pornographic jokes in student publications funded by the university. All these problems are symptoms of the sickness called sexism.”
When Rita loses out on a prestigious graduate fellowship, Gillian looks into a surprising claim that the young scholar had threatened the awards committee. And when Rita dies suddenly in a motorcycle accident, Gillian’s suspicions are further aroused. Although the police conduct the formal investigation, Gillian plays a key role in assessing Rita’s state of mind by talking to her friends and family members.
A distinctive aspect of Kelly’s novel is the engagement with place. Gillian’s English lover imagines her “rotting out there under the rhododendrons”. But east coast-raised Gillian, an American like her creator, has grown to love Canada’s west coast:
“When she got there, she was a stranger. Everything was too big: the forests were too dark, there was no harmony between land and buildings. The trees were the wrong shape–too many evergreens–and the steep-sided mountains rose around her like walls. Now many years later, she had attached herself: to the late golden summers and the long soft springs, to the blue light on faraway islands, to water-worn rocks and the smooth russet skin of the arbutus tree.”
A key distinction between Kelly’s novel and Bowen’s Burying Ariel (set in Regina, Saskatchewan), is the somewhat explicit endorsement of feminist activism. Gillian is not motivated merely by ideology, but she’s willing to be persuaded to join students and colleagues in lobbying a wealthy donor to shift her financial largesse, in hopes of forming a new Women’s Studies department.
In Bowen’s novel, conversely, two young female scholars are hired into a male-dominated political science department. This is shown to be an act of unbalanced and heedless partisanship that instigates a murder. There are subsequent efforts, by a radical women’s group of “Red Riding Hoods”, to politicize the victim’s death by linking it to a broader pattern of male violence. That notion is rejected by Bowen’s professor-protagonist, Joanne Kilbourn, who characterizes the protesters as opportunistic and unhinged. The two novels differ sharply in how they portray student feminist activism.
An intriguing point of comparison is Louise Penny’s A World of Curiosities (2022), in which one plot strand involves a real-life survivor of the December 6th murders. Penny locates the character Armand Gamache as an inexperienced officer back in 1989, who happens to be on the scene just after the eruption of violence:
“The killer had separated out the men and told them to leave. And then he’d shot the women. For daring to believe they could enter a man’s world without consequences. For daring to become engineers.
They were murdered because they were women. For having opinions. And desires.
Oh yes, and breasts, and a sweet pear hidden in my body.
Wherever there’s talk of demons, these come in handy.
Later, years later, Armand would read those words by Ruth Zardo, his favourite poet. And he would know the truth of it.”
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 