Top review from the United States
P Christensen
5.0 out of 5 stars I strongly recommend it!
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2023
Andrea Tonty’s latest whodunit A Tale of Two Auctions departs from this writer’s frequent juxtaposition of ballet and murder. The novel is set in fictitious “Oxton,” a community on the outskirts of Boston where New England charms are giving way to the efficiencies of urban renewal: “the more you straightened the streets the more traffic there would be … straight streets were now becoming parking lots” (11).
Tonty’s husband-and-wife detectives, “Carlotta” and “Charles,” share names even closer than Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, though the husband is known to his wife and colleagues as “Gerry,” after his family name Gerould. Both are academics. Gerry, reflecting Tonty’s interests in ballet has launched his academic career with a major publication: Ballet Versions of Shakespeare’s Plays. He is distinguished by his sartorial splendor, whether sporting light gray flannel trousers and a navy-blue blazer, blue-striped shirt, and dark blue silk tie (“with the slightest suggestion of deep red striping” (124) for a meeting with the police department or “a three-piece gray pinstripe suit with a lightly starched spread collar, blue shirt, sporting a Windsor-knotted blue tie with tiny purple dots” for his Poirot-like reception with suspects at the close of the novel. Gerry is T. S. Eliot’s classicist in art and a Protestant who, according to Carlotta, is disturbed by “inadvertence,” that is, “having a happy result from negligence” (397).
Gerry, who abhors the indefinite, is commuting between their home in Massachusetts and Long Island, where he has signed a one-year contract at the fictitious Poquott campus of New York State University in hopes of negotiating a full professorship at his home campus back in Oxton. He recognizes the unique brilliance of his wife Carlotta, who edits catalogs of antique books and manuscripts, and Gerry tries “to absorb life . . . through his wife’s syntax.”
In the final analysis, A Tale of Two Auctions hinges on the clever juxtapositions of pairs: two detectives (with complementing skills), two approaches to scholarship (“connoisseurship” of artifact vs. textual analysis) two auctions (the first chaotic, amateurish; the second professional), and, most important, two forms of evidence. I found A Tale of Two Auctions absorbing and unpredictable, a whodunit with more than a fair number of suspects and a plot that is skillfully woven, and fair. I strongly recommend it!
