‘The Adventures of Isabel’ Introduces a Detective Not Named Isabel

And more queer literary dilemmas from Candas Jane Dorsey

Book review:

Candas Jane Dorsey, The Adventures of Isabel: An Epitome Apartments Mystery (ECW Press, 2020).

Another terrific queer detective!

Candas Jane Dorsey gives us a nameless, self-proclaimed bi- or pan- or ambisexual out of work social worker with a hell of a literary sense. She (the unnamed, whom I’m calling ‘she’ because nobody told me not to) is a grammar nut (like yours truly), a cat lover with an attitude and an empty bank account, gifted with a set of oddball friends.

And it’s Canada! Another gem from the North!

How does this social worker, technically “downsized” but really illegally fired for being not straight, get involved with a dangerous murder case? Ah — the usual way. A friend tells her she’s just the right person to solve the case: a young woman of the same persuasion, out turning tricks, who disappears and then washes up on the riverbank. Nameless’s friend Denis approaches her to take on the search for Maddy Pritchard’s killer. Young Maddy’s grandmother, Maddy the elder, has approached Denis to approach our nameless friend to investigate.

Maddy Senior is commonly called Hep, for her uncanny resemblance to Katharine Hepburn. Denis is a gay man, a crisis worker in his daytime life.

Now enter Jian, a sharp-as-nails homeless Asian woman who often fakes misunderstanding English, for her own purposes. Nameless befriends Jian, takes her home, gets her washed up and re-dressed, and takes her to bed. Mutual happiness ensues.

Jian becomes one of the team that tackles this case.

Because the book is (mostly) written in first person, the namelessness of the narrator doesn’t become a troubling issue. She’s just addressed as ‘honey,’ when the need arises. And when you think about it, the need rarely arises in first person narrative. This is interesting.

Her cat, Bunnywit, is a Manx — a Manx with personality (I know, that’s a tautology). Our nameless heroine renamed her pet when she realized that his original name was causing her visitors some discomfort.

My cat is called Bunnywit. Actually, he’s called Fuckwit, but I realized after I’d had him for a while that whenever what passes for my family these days came over to visit, I had to stifle my yelling at him, and he got away with a lot of crap during those visits, so I Bowdlerised him to Bunnywit. In true cat fashion, he mostly only answers to Fuckwit. It’s been a couple of months now, and we’re still working on it.

Fuckwi — er, Bunnywit is the perfect sounding board. Stupid, feline, Rorschach, he moves in another world. I can pretend to be talking with him and, like the tarot or the I Ching, arrive at truth by impressionism.

— The Adventures of Isabel, “10. Had a cat once — tasted like chicken”

Nameless also has a police friend. This is usually necessary in amateur detective fiction: there must be a police ally or a police nemesis (or a nemesis turned ally. Rarely is there a police ally turned nemesis, except temporarily when the amateur dick has overstepped boundaries).

In this case, the ally is tall Roger. They got to know each other when Roger was working Vice and Nameless was doing social work with young girls.

He hugged me. “Didn’t recognize you looking so femme.” When Roger knew me, I’d had a brush cut and more Attitude. Ironically, it was before I started sleeping with women as well as men, and yet it had taken some time to convince him that I wasn’t a dyke — maybe all of half an hour, as I recall, before he unbuttoned. But that had been a long time ago.

— The Adventures of Isabel, “13. Roger”

It is not hard to persuade Roger to take a closer look at the case. He is already doing that. It isn’t the ‘usual’ hooker murder-and-dump. Maddy wasn’t raped; she didn’t OD; the details are all wrong.

Nameless contacts Vicki (well, Vikki), Maddy’s distraught girlfriend. Now the author/narrator breaks the first-person narrative to allow Nameless to offer Vikki’s reflections on her friend and lover. She explains it this way:

Sometimes in books writers also leave things out to fool the reader. Withholding clues in mysteries and all that. Building up the trick ending. I want to tell you right now that I will never knowingly do that to you. Accidentally, maybe — it’s not easy getting all this stuff in order, especially the stuff that doesn’t do me any credit — but not on purpose. I hate those Jeffrey Archer twist-in-the-tail things.

But if I forget to let you in on the Activities of Daily Living (as the social work trade calls ‘em), it’s mostly because it’s not germane to the issue. “That way is rump of skunk and madness” — in literary terms.

— The Adventures of Isabel, “82. Breaking the fourth wall: a meditation”

By the way, there is a footnote attributing the skunk quote to R. A. Lafferty, with a detailed citation, ending with the comment “(TMI, right?).”

There are additional footnotes like this throughout the text, offering sources, clarifying details, noting changes in persons or places.

There are several other journeys into alternative POV, for the sake of a semi-coherent narrative, according to the nameless narrator.

In fact, the entire book is a literary device with a number of ‘meta’ dimensions. The title itself is from Ogden Nash’s poem “The Adventures of Isabel,” and the book is structured according to the poem. Too hard to explain — you should take a look.

This is just a hugely fun tour de force.

It might not be so much fun if the story weren’t absorbing. The mystery reaches into organized Christian gay bashing, political finagling, and high-level but ultimately tacky fraud, against and through nonprofits. Nameless gets badly beaten up twice and her modest apartment completely trashed. (Bunnywit is mostly fine.) More police get involved. One policeman falls in love and becomes the first out gay married man on the force. At the end, Nameless gets Jian, a talented contortionist, an audition with the Cirque de Soleil (a successful audition, I should add).

And we learn more things, kind of by the way, about our heroine’s life and family. Her despicable parents have recently reached appalling ends. Her evangelical cousin undergoes a marvelous transformation, all within the outlines of her faith. Nameless herself accepts an inheritance that promises to lift her and Bunnywit out of the fish stick level of grocery shopping.

My favorite line in the book, though, is very simple and completely revealing of the protagonist. Policeman Roger is reviewing an envelope of clues that poor murdered Maddy had the good sense to mail to herself, pointing to the trouble she anticipated from the bad guys. The lab has discovered fingerprints on a fake Hong Kong currency bill.

“The prints? No more than the other — less in fact — no overlaps with the database. Nothing useful yet.”

“Fewer,” I said, but very quietly.

— The Adventures of Isabel, “68. Pieces of sky”

Yes! Yes! There are not ‘less’ fingerprints. There are ‘fewer’ fingerprints. Yes!

Candas Jane Dorsey is a much decorated Canadian writer (Edmonton, Alberta) who wanders through genres at will. She has written science fiction, poetry, criticism, and speculative fiction, along with the now three volume Epitome Apartments Mystery series (I’m reviewing the first one here).

South of the United States border (I know — geography is arbitrary) I’d compare her style to that of Elizabeth Sims, and in fact Dorsey’s nameless Epitome Apartments narrator has a lot in common with Sims’s Lillian Byrd. (I’ll get back to Sims in a subsequent essay.) Both heroines are sexually open, feisty, funny, smart, and unpretentious, with a love of language and strange pets bursting off the page.

I’m always thrilled to discover new queer detectives. They go even further back than Laurie R. King’s Kate Martinelli, introduced in the 1990s (I miss Kate so much!). Katherine V. Forrest comes to mind — oh, heck, I won’t get started here. There’s a great resource: Megan Casey, The Lesbian Detective Novel: an annotated bibliography (2022). Check this freebie for a complete exploration of the genre, as well as a reasoned exclusion of any number of books that don’t quite fit.

In a recent dual interview of Dorsey and Gail Bowen, sponsored by their publisher, ECW Press, Dorsey discusses her use of the first person narrator, her demolition of the fourth wall, and her realization that she is “having more fun” with the Epitome Apartment series than she has in her many previous books. We also learn that the unnamed Canadian city where the series is set is pretty much Edmonton. She has a good time referring to local establishments and streets well known to Edmonton residents without committing the books to the named city.

Also in this interview, Dorsey makes a passing reference to writing the fourth installment. Oh joy!

A couple more queer-inclusive (!!) mystery reviews:

Thanks for reading!