Harvard Has a Homicide

So, here we are at the beginning of Fuller's Jupiter Jones series, this first entry published in 1936. Our man Edmund "Jupiter" Jones is a smart-aleck Harvard grad student, with, evidently, plenty of money and, you'll not be surprised to learn, generally the smartest person in the room. Or so he thinks. At any rate, when Jones is the first to discover the corpse of the recently stabbed to death Professor Singer, he can't resist butting in and "helping" the Cambridge police department's Inspector Rankin solve the case. Or, as Jones' girlfriend comments drily to another character, "He thinks he's the Thin Man." Fuller plays this situation nicely for laughs. When Jones early on steps over the line in his comments to Rankin and gets slapped show more down, we are told that Jones thinks to himself, "The situation was now perfect. The policeman was irritated at the amateur sleuth." Happily, Fuller plays this against type somewhat, as the policeman is portrayed at very good at his job, rather than the genial bumbler we've come to expect in these situations.

Anyway, as you'll have noticed by now, I found this mystery to be rather fun, although Jones does get a bit tiresome in his smugness, especially towards the end. But the plotting and the mystery itself are pretty good, so I am, in fact, going to read on in the series, which is five books long, all told. Unfortunately, there is some of the racism we'd expect of this time and place, as Jones' Black servant Sylvester is portrayed cringingly condescendingly, although he is at times smart as anyone else in the room, and is clearly a better craps player than most. However, there are two minor characters whose obviously Jewish names are presented as simply normal rather than as occasion for antisemetic commentary, not something we'd take for granted at Harvard circa 1936, so at least there's that. show less