Ann Waldron

• Born: December 14, 1924
• Birthplace: Birmingham, Alabama
• Died: July 2, 2010

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: McLeod Dulaney, 2003-

Contribution

Ann Waldron admits to being inspired by the detective novels of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. Like Christie’s amateur detective Miss Marple, Waldron’s McLeod Dulaney has an advantage over professional detectives and police officers in that she can simply follow her intuitions and curiosity. The crimes committed in her community interest her precisely because they touch on her relationships with friends and colleagues. Dulaney differs from Miss Marple in that she is a trained journalist with a tough hide who does not mind being rebuffed by those she wants to interview. Like Stout’s Nero Wolfe, Dulaney works best in conversation with others, especially George Bridges, assistant to the president of Princeton, and Lieutenant Nick Perry, both of whom challenge her surmises and also build on her understanding of the cases she is determined to solve.

Dulaney may be an amateur sleuth situated in the comfortable—indeed self-congratulatory—ambiance of an Ivy League institution, but her southern take on her surroundings and years of experience at the Tallahassee Star make her a highly alert and shrewd observer of the criminal behavior lurking under the genteel veneer of university life. In other words, she does not take her environment for granted.

Biography

Ann Waldron was born on December 14, 1924, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Eric Watson Waldron, a bookkeeper, and Elizabeth Roberts Wood. Waldron’s parents and older sister lived three blocks from the Vine Street Presbyterian Church, where they attended services every Sunday and prayer meetings on Wednesdays. Waldron, still a member of the Presbyterian Church, is a lifelong Democrat whose southern roots are reflected in much of her writing.

Waldron’s interest in journalism began when she became coeditor of her high school newspaper and then editor of the Crimson-White, the student newspaper at the University of Alabama. After graduating from college in 1945, she worked as a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, where she met Martin Waldron, whom she married on October 18, 1947. The couple raised four children while working on newspapers in Florida and Texas.

When Martin Waldron accepted a New York Times offer, the couple settled in Princeton, where Ann Waldron concentrated on raising her family and writing children’s books. Soon Waldron was attending classes at Princeton University and working for the school’s publications. She interviewed professors and reported on life in Princeton, a valuable experience reflected in her rich evocation of the Princeton milieu in her mystery novels.

When Martin Waldron died in 1981, Ann began working full time for the Princeton Campaign Bulletin. An understanding boss allowed her to do library research that led to the publication of her first biography, Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance (1987). Acclaim for this biography and another of southern newspaper editor Hodding Carter established Waldron’s credentials as a researcher and investigator of lives—not unlike her heroine McLeod Dulaney.

Waldron’s work on an unauthorized biography of Eudora Welty perhaps sharpened her sense of the reporter/biographer/crime solver who often has to go against accepted opinion and deal with hostility and rebuffs from establishment figures. Despite her established reputation as a writer on southern subjects, Waldron faced considerable opposition from Welty and her supporters who wished to nurture a certain myth of the writer. Like Dulaney, whose ability to solve crimes is based on both her empathy for others and her innate inquisitiveness, Waldron persevered, investigating the roots of Welty’s personality and creativity.

After writing the Welty book, Waldron wanted a change of pace and turned to mystery writing. Although her turn to mystery novels may seem to mark a departure from her other writings, in fact it represents a return to a first love. She grew up reading the novels of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout, and in 1965 she wrote a mystery novel that she could not get published. In 2003, she published the first novel in the McLeod Dulaney series, The Princeton Murders. She has continued to produce novels in this series at the pace of one per year.

Analysis

Ann Waldron’s career as a journalist and long association with Princeton has helped her create a remarkable mystery series surrounding McLeod Dulaney, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who teaches at Princeton University. The Dulaney series bears some resemblance to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series. However, Dulaney is a harder, tougher version of Miss Marple, partly because of her training as a reporter, and the series departs from the conventions of the cozy mystery in that Dulaney’s work, in her unabashed but sometimes clumsy quest to learn the truth about crime, is not always superior to that of Lieutenant Nick Perry. Dulaney can be fooled, be seriously misled, and in one case be downright wrong about the perpetrator of a murder. However, even when she does not solve the crime—and she sometimes puts herself in harm’s way because she does not realize who the real murderer is—she creates the conditions that make it possible to solve the murder cases. Dulaney’s law-enforcement partner, Nick Perry, seems credible not only as a detective but also as a person with whom Waldron is deeply familiar, probably because the author learned a good deal from talking to police officers while she was a reporter and later in life. Waldron’s Princeton experience is most visible in her large cast of supporting characters, including a writer-in-residence, a university president, professors from various departments, members of the press, and the staff (principally women) who keep the departments running smoothly.

Waldron’s personal history is apparent in southerner Dulaney’s acute observations on the northern climate and mentality. Another element brought into the novels from Waldron’s personal life is her obvious relish for good meals. One of her editors suggested that she append to each novel recipes of the dishes in the meals that Dulaney prepares. These are all dishes, tried and true, that Waldron has made herself. In sum, Waldron has created a series of novels that provide both a cultural and a culinary delight while creating precise evocations of characters and locales that harbor unsuspected opportunities for murder.

The Princeton Murders

The first novel in the McLeod Dulaney series, The Princeton Murders, has Ann Waldron’s amateur sleuth/journalist teaching her first writing course as a visiting professor. New to academia, Dulaney finds the array of characters: a radical feminist, a prickly pan-African studies scholar, a Marxist, a queer theorist—just to mention a few of the memorable members of the supporting cast—almost stupefying in their feuding and preening behaviors. When does eccentricity lead to murder? she wonders. There is no shortage of suspects when Professor Archibald Alexander is found dead, and Dulaney (to the consternation of her academic colleagues) resists the notion that his demise is the result of natural causes.

Waldron makes clear at the beginning of this novel that this is not a roman à clef; that is, she has not created characters who are only thinly disguised versions of real people. Instead, she has exploited the Princeton setting itself, the institution’s pride in its probity and high standards, to introduce events that challenge the community’s belief in its own rectitude. Certainly the world of academic politics is exposed in this novel, but not in a malicious way. Dulaney is bemused with the quirky professors and even develops a certain affection for them. She loves the Princeton milieu, which is palpably evoked in descriptions of restaurants, university buildings, and environs.

In Waldron’s mystery series, one murder always begets another, a pattern that is introduced in The Princeton Murders.

Death of a Princeton President

When the president of Princeton goes missing in Death of a Princeton President, no one expects foul play, but leave it to McLeod Dulaney, who finds President Melissa Faircloth dead in a closet in her office. The Princeton provost would prefer to prevent this ghastly turn of events from becoming a huge news story, but Dulaney, a tireless quester after the truth, keeps both the Princeton administration and the police hard at work. As usual, she runs up against Lieutenant Nick Perry, who is conflicted about her efforts. On one hand, he warns her not to interfere with his investigation; on the other, he cannot help but rely on the valuable testimony she is able to elicit from the people she interviews.

Dulaney’s life is complicated by a romance with George Bridges, assistant to the president. Although he admires Dulaney, he also tends to discount her theories about murder and is surprised when her hard work exposes the unseemly side of university life. Indeed, Dulaney puts herself in harm’s way by refusing to stop her investigation.

Clarence Brown, a Princeton professor emeritus of classics, observed in the Trenton Times that Waldron’s evocation of Princeton is one of the great pleasures of the novel even as her believable characters create the sense of intrigue indispensable to a work of mystery fiction. Her deft handling of the plot kept him guessing about the identity of the murderer, spreading “suspicion around in the very best tradition of the whodunit.”

Unholy Death in Princeton

In Unholy Death in Princeton, McLeod Dulaney is in Princeton not only to teach a writing course but also to research the life of an abolitionist newspaperman, Elijah P. Lovejoy. While walking along the tow path beside the Delaware and Raritan Canal, she stumbles across a naked corpse in a garment bag. Because she is the one who finds the body, Dulaney becomes a suspect.

The setting for this novel, perhaps the most fascinating of all Waldron’s works, is the Princeton Theological Seminary, which Lovejoy attended and where his personal papers are now housed. Waldron re-creates the seminary in enticing detail. The personalities of the students and their teachers, the debates over doctrine (how to view the historical Jesus, for example), and the tensions between faith, belief, and scholarship are deftly dramatized.

Waldron, however, does not base her work on actual events or characters, preferring to explore the nexus between individuals and institutions by creating her own characters. The murder victim—in this case a fundamentalist type who angered many of his contemporaries—provides Waldron’s detective with a perfect opportunity to explore how issues such as the roles of gays and women in the church might have not only affected merely the life of the institution but also have influenced the motives for murder.

A Rare Murder in Princeton

In A Rare Murder in Princeton, visiting professor McLeod Dulaney is working in the university’s rare book collection—a serendipitous result of her meeting Nathaniel Ledbetter, director of Rare Books and Special Collections.

McLeod is staying with George Bridges, and although their romance is over, they have become fast friends. When Ledbetter comes over for dinner with George and McLeod, he suggests she might be interested in the papers of Henry Van Dyke, a nineteenth century clergyman, novelist, and political figure. Now that she has completed her biography of Lovejoy, she needs a new subject.

Just as McLeod is beginning to work with the 179 boxes of Van Dyke material, however, one of the prime benefactors of Rare Books and Special Collections, Philip Sheridan, is found dead—right in the department. Having met and liked Sheridan, McLeod has trouble understanding why anyone would want to kill him. Even more troubling, the police cannot find a murder weapon or come up with credible suspects.

Lurking in the background is the fact that George Bridges lives in what Ledbetter calls the “murder house.” The house used to be owned by longtime Princeton resident Jill Murray, whose murder has never been solved. Although Dulaney does not tie the two murders together, her natural inquisitiveness leads her to explore both the past and present crimes simultaneously.

This time Dulaney makes some rather costly blunders that almost end her life, and yet her very openness—she is far less focused than the professional detective, Nick Perry—ultimately means that she gathers a comprehensive group of suspects and evidence that helps Perry put together a solution to crimes past and present.

The Princeton Imposter

In The Princeton Imposter, one of McLeod Dulaney’s brightest students, Greg Pierre, is suddenly arrested right before all the students in her class. The stunned visiting professor learns that he is an imposter—a parole breaker whose real name is Bob Billings and who has been convicted of a drug charge in Wyoming.

In spite of much evidence to the contrary and the skepticism of Nick Perry and George Bridges, McLeod sets out to vindicate her student, who tells her he was framed. In surprisingly quick order, she is able to contact one of her former students, who discovers that Greg is indeed telling the truth. Then a student is murdered on campus, and Greg becomes a suspect because the victim was a student from Wyoming who alerted Princeton authorities that Greg was an imposter.

Still believing in her student’s innocence, Dulaney forges ahead into the world of chemistry labs and graduate students, the environment in which the murder has been committed. The plot becomes even more complicated when a second student is murdered off campus, and Dulaney begins to suspect that one of the chemistry professors is the culprit.

Believing too strongly in her own surmises, Dulaney almost makes a fatal mistake. In the end, she has to be rescued by a professional. Thus Waldron neatly balances the strengths and weaknesses of the amateur sleuth while paying her respects to the law enforcement personnel she has come to admire while doing her own journalism.

Principal Series Characters:

• McLeod Dulaney is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is invited to teach a course once a year at Princeton University. Trained as an investigative reporter, she feels compelled to solve mysterious crimes that baffle the police and disrupt the placid life on the Princeton campus.
• Lieutenant Nick Perry is a Princeton detective who is called on to investigate cases in which Dulaney becomes involved. Although he objects to her meddling in crime scenes, he also relies on her inquisitive nature and her ability to elicit testimony from witnesses and suspects.
• George Bridges , the assistant to the president of Princeton University, provides Dulaney with inside information concerning the crimes that occur on or near campus. Initially involved with Dulaney romantically, he later becomes a friend and sounding board for her speculations about the guilt and innocence of criminal suspects.

Bibliography

Brown, Clarence. Review of Death of a Princeton President, by Ann Waldron. The Times of Trenton, April 25, 2004. A book review by a former Princeton resident discusses Waldron’s fiction in terms of its real-life setting.

Cotterell, Bill. “Princeton Mystery Is a Tasty Mix of Food, Fun.” Review of The Princeton Murders, by Ann Waldron. Tallahassee Democrat, August 10, 2003. Notes the recipes at the end of book and praises the novel for its entertainment value.

Waldron, Ann. Ann Waldron. http://www.annwaldron.com. An excellent author’s Web site, including an extensive biography, summaries of Waldron’s books, a comprehensive interview with the author, and links to other sites.

Waldron, Ann. “Murder, She Wrote.” Interview by Sharon Krengel. New Brunswick Home News, March 10, 2004, pp. 6-7. An excellent interview with Waldron, exploring her interest in writing mystery stories, her experience as a journalist and biographer, her work at Princeton University, and how she chooses the settings for her crime novels.

Waldron, Ann. “Whodunits? Whydoits? Princeton’s Ann Waldron Turns, Belatedly, to Mystery Writing.” Interview by Clara Pierre Reeves. The Times of Trenton, June 5, 2005. An interview focusing on Waldron’s decision to write mysteries and set them in Princeton.