Morbid Symptoms

Kate Baeier #1

by Gillian Slovo

First edition hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, in very good condition. Jacket is sunned, and edges are a little creased. Page block and page edges are tanned. Pages are otherwise clear, boards are clean and binding is sound. LW

Genres: Mystery

147 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Novelist Gillian Slovo was born in 1952 in South Africa, the daughter of Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist party, and Ruth First, a journalist who was murdered in 1982.

Gillian Slovo has lived in England since 1964, working as a writer, journalist and film producer. Her first novel, Morbid Symptoms (1984), began a series of crime fiction featuring female detective Kate Baeier. Other novels in the series include Death by Analysis (1986), Death Comes Staccato (1987), Catnap (1994) and Close Call (1995). Her other novels include Ties of Blood (1989), The Betrayal (1991) and Red Dust (2000), a courtroom drama set in contemporary South Africa, which explores the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Reviews

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The tagline on the cover of my copy says 'Feminist sax-playing sleuth investigates death of leftish playboy' which is at least accurate, if somewhat lacking in punchiness?

This novel takes place in that most fantastical of worlds, a London where people can comfortably own houses and flats and cars on seemingly tenuous incomes. My first frame of reference for this is always Bridget Jones (she owned her flat!) but Anabel Donald's heroine is much the same, and any number of English novels of the 80s and 90s all have this outrageous concept in common. Kate Baeier spends most of her time at her boyfriend's place, but she likes having her own flat to get some space every now and then. What a world!

Other than that, this is a decent detective novel. There's a lot of threads that don't get pulled until a bit late in the piece, and Kate gets a lot of leads just from describing people to other people and then doing what they suggest, but the setting in a collective building (Quaker-owned and rent-free due to guilt) and her occasional feminist discussions make it a solid entry in the feminist detective fiction category.

[Dennis Fischman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enter the world of radical politics in 1980's London: anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear activism shaken by feminist challenges to both Old and New Left style male leaders. Kate Baeier (who's constantly annoyed that people can't remember her last name) is a freelance journalist and stepmum working for a journal called African Economic Reports when one of its staff, a wealthy leftist, is found dead at the bottom of the stairs.

Did he kill himself, as the police would like to think for convenience' sake? Or was he murdered because of his love affairs, his money, or his place in a whirl of spy against spy? His colleagues hire Kate to figure it out.

It's not surprising that I enjoyed this book. I remember 1980's leftist circles (on this side of the pond!), and I recognize the quotation from Antonio Gramsci from which the book's title is drawn. In other words, I am a near-perfect audience for this book (which I came to after reading Gillian Slovo's historical novel Ties of Blood about a white, Jewish family and a Black family in South Africa, which is clearly somewhat autobiographical for her).

The reasons I didn't rate it more highly are, first, that she introduces us to many, many characters mainly to set the scene rather than to move the plot along. Second, most of those characters are underdeveloped. Third, while I enjoyed the references to certain kinds of political groupings, someone who lacks my life experience might be puzzled by them. This is one of those rare books about which I think, "It's too short, and she should have taken more time to fill the reader in!"

That being said, I will happily read the next two books because I think Kate Baeier is a good hero, and I want to see where she goes next.