Dorothy Gilman

• Born: June 25, 1923
• Place of birth: New Brunswick, New Jersey
• Died: February 2, 2012
• Place of death: Rye Brook, New York

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; comedy caper; espionage; private investigator; cozy

Principal Series: Mrs. Pollifax, 1966–2000

Contribution

Dorothy Gilman’s novels featuring the eccentric and charming Emily Pollifax appeal widely to young and old, having developed a considerable following since their introduction in 1966. The first novel in the series, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, became a film starring Rosalind Russell under the title Mrs. Pollifax—Spy in 1971. A second adaptation, the CBS television movie The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, was released in 1999 with Angela Lansbury cast as the aging sleuth.

Gilman earned wide acclaim for the quality of her storytelling. Blending humor and intrigue, her works are rooted in the Cold War era and explore topics such as international espionage, life in behind the iron curtain, the emerging nations of the third world (then used to refer to nations aligned with neither the Soviet Union nor the United States and its anti-communist allies), terrorism, political assassination, aid to endangered dissidents, and the role of double agents.

Despite their subject matter, Gilman’s novels are not violent. Reviewers have commented on their wholesome and upbeat entertainment value. Evil is defeated; good (and Mrs. Pollifax) prevails over very real danger. The direct quality of the prose makes the characters and the plots plausible. Mrs. Pollifax knows that dedicated and determined individuals can make a difference and that the discovery of one’s true self produces deep reservoirs of endurance and courage to meet the most unexpected challenges.

A prolific writer of fiction for young and adult readers, Gilman contributed to numerous publications during her life, including On Creative Writing (1964). Her short fiction appeared in such magazines as Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan and Writer. Gilman received the Catholic Book Award for A Nun in the Closet (1975). In 2010 the Mystery Writers of America awarded Gilman the Edgar Awards' Grand Master award for career achievement.

Biography

Dorothy Edith Gilman was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on June 25, 1923, to Essa Starkweather and James Bruce Gilman. The daughter of a clergyman, she was reared in a parsonage. Early in her life, she felt a need to express herself in writing, so she created a six-page magazine that she circulated among parishioners. Educated as an artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Gilman was awarded the William Emlen Cresson European Scholarship in 1944. During this time she also audited writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania whenever time permitted, and her love of writing was nurtured.

In 1945 Gilman married Edgar A. Butters Jr., a teacher, with whom she would have two sons. During their twenty years of her marriage, Gilman taught as a drawing instructor at the Samuel Fleischer Art Memorial for a time, but she enjoyed her greatest success as a writer of juvenile fiction (as Dorothy Gilman Butters) that examined a wide array of subjects. A year after her divorce in 1965, she began publishing novels for an adult audience, starting with The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. When her younger son left for college, she purchased an old house and acreage in Nova Scotia and embarked on a new phase of life, pursuing her own serenity and self-knowledge; this rewarding and refreshing experience became the subject of an autobiography in 1978.

Gilman continued writing her Pollifax series until 2000, ending with the fourteenth book in the series, Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled. In 2002 she published her final novel, Kaleidoscope, a sequel to her1975 book The Clairvoyant Countess that features the return of Madame Karitska, the earlier volume's titular countess.

Dorothy Gilman died of complications caused by Alzheimer's disease on February 2, 2012, at her home in Rye Brook, New York. She was eighty-eight years old.

Analysis

Humor is a vital component of both Dorothy Gilman’s mystery fiction and her young-adult writing. “Humor is essentially distortion or exaggeration of reality to create an effect that appeals to the sense of the ludicrous or the absurd,” Gilman wrote in a 1978 article for the Writer magazine. In the article, she admits that there are some things that cannot be treated humorously, that simply are not amusing. Gilman used humor to avoid violence. Sometimes described as too gentle for the genre, her novels never contain clinical, detailed descriptions of murder, though some violent episodes do occur. In essence, Gilman found humor to be “an escape from pain, a stepping back from the hurt to observe it and defend the self by turning the pain into something else.” Despite its limitations, and the necessity of abandoning some efforts, Gilman’s final advice in the article is that “if one has an eye for the absurd, one should put that talent to work instead of ruing it.”

Gilman used her considerable sense of humor to good effect in A Nun in the Closet (1975), a non-series novel noted as much for its humor as its plot. The story features two cloistered nuns surrounded by a tangle of likable leftover people from the 1960s: members of the Mafia, a crooked sheriff, migrant workers, and a mysterious stranger found wounded in the bedroom closet of a deteriorating estate. Add a guru, drugs, and thousands of dollars in a suitcase, and one has all of the ingredients for a puzzle that Sister John, another of Gilman’s strong, resourceful women, must resolve. The potential for humor in having two nuns leave a cloister after twenty years to enter a world they never knew, coping with experiences and language entirely alien to them, is limitless.

Gilman’s sense of humor is obvious in her writing. In her article for the Writer, she states that writing humor is neither easy nor natural. Because humorous novels are “constructed” rather than written, she argues, the use of humor complicates the construction process. “Humor is 95% craft, and at least 50% of that is timing,” Gilman wrote. It is an undertaking that is, at best, “laborious.” Because humor cannot carry a novel without a story line to sustain it, the author may virtually write the story twice. Gilman was aware of the differences in quality of humor: subtle or broad, whimsical or black, satirical or witty. Her favorite devices were contrast, incongruity, distortion, and exaggeration, as when an elderly widow prevents a political assassination or nuns confront hired killers in the act of murder.

In all of her work, Gilman’s style is simple, direct, and often dramatic, perhaps a result of her long apprenticeship in children’s literature. The key to teaching children is often the use of clear, simple, and dramatic statements. Her books may be read quickly because her sentences follow one another in compact paragraphs that are built one on another.

Gilman began to develop her characters when she was very young, although she later described herself as lacking the insight and experience to bring them to completion. In another brief piece for the Writer magazine, published in 1972 under the title “A Particular Bent,” Gilman reveals that she conceived the pattern for Mrs. Pollifax at the age of eighteen, when she created a character she called Miss Crispin. Miss Crispin, in turn, grew from her childhood experiences with the interesting elderly women she knew in her father’s church, whom Gilman describes as “dowager types, feminists, matriarchs, soft little comfortable busybodies, and a few who were gently mad.” Many of them, she writes, were eccentric and “strikingly uninhibited and liberated for their time.” They were, according to Gilman, her “babysitters,” who brought her “strange little treasures and tall tales” from overseas. Gilman’s characters sprung from her own experience, informed and completed by long practice at the exacting craft of writing.

The Tightrope Walker

One of Gilman’s strengths as a writer was her tightly constructed plots, nowhere more satisfactorily achieved than in The Tightrope Walker (1979). In this book, a young woman named Amelia Jones, who has experienced emotional problems and is searching for inner peace and self-knowledge, finds a clue to a possible murder that may have happened years earlier. In the best tradition of the amateur sleuth, Amelia unravels the tragedy step by step. At the end, a lucid account of the murder, the participants, and the motive leaves the reader with no nagging questions or unanswered frustrations. A final, desperate effort of the murderer to silence Amelia makes for a thrilling conclusion in which all the loose ends are nicely tied. Not only has the hero solved the case, she has solved many of her own doubts and difficulties and found love as well.

A New Kind of Country

In her autobiography A New Kind of Country (1978), Gilman shares with her readers her personal odyssey for self-knowledge and her discovery of another kind of life. Leaving behind her old life and habitat, she shook off all the nonessentials after her divorce. On the stark but beautiful coastline of Nova Scotia, a landscape of lighthouses, sand, seaweed, and weathered cottages, she went through a period of self-testing as well as self-discovery. In searching out her neighbors—lobster fishermen and townspeople—she yielded years of seeking privacy to a new sense of community and belonging.

Despite the hard work of growing and gathering food, the simplicity of long walks along the beach and the time away from former distractions heightened Gilman's awareness of and sensitivity to the treasures of nature. She had time for introspection and for reading, for contemplation of philosophy and new points of view. The book, simply written, is revealing of the author and her interests. It is also extremely useful for an overview of the author’s work, as many of her interests are reflected in her fiction.

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

Gilman had already achieved success as an author of twelve books of juvenile literature when she produced her novel for adults. The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (1966) introduced Gilman’s best-known protagonist and established Mrs. Pollifax’s career as a part-time agent for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mrs. Pollifax is a very strong woman and very much her own person. Possessed of charm, a splendid sense of humor, sympathy for the human condition, and an ability to rise to unforeseen challenges, she is a highly entertaining character.

Mrs. Pollifax has had a full life. Now widowed, she has a grown son and daughter who live far away, and although good relations evidently exist, her children no longer need her vigilant attention. Her life could be pleasant and tranquil with her flowers, friends, and good works, but that is not enough. Because as a girl she had longed to be a spy, she offers her services to the CIA, which accepts her reluctantly but continues to give her assignments as a result of her impressive successes. Although Mrs. Pollifax’s activities cause her superiors some concern—she always manages to become involved in circumstances and with people beyond the scope of her specific objectives—her accomplishments are always remarkable.

White-haired, a grandmother, yet indefatigable, Mrs. Pollifax seems an unlikely figure to serve as a special agent. It is a tribute to the author that her role is made convincing. Her improbability becomes an asset to the organization she serves; no one is less likely to arouse suspicion than this amiable woman whose life is devoted to her clubs and to environmental concerns. Even her penchant for large hats of ornate design contributes to Mrs. Pollifax’s success. On one courier mission, ten documents are hidden in such a hat and handily smuggled into a totalitarian country.

It seems inevitable that Mrs. Pollifax should be compared to Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple. Although both are older women whose lives and experiences give scope to their analytical powers, they are quite different. Miss Marple rarely leaves her quiet village except for brief holidays. Mrs. Pollifax may be kidnapped in Mexico and land in an Albanian prison. She may find herself in a convalescent hospital in Switzerland, on safari in Africa, or on the Silk Road in China. Mrs. Pollifax is involved in official espionage activity, while Miss Marple is an amateur sleuth. Mrs. Pollifax is more active physically than Jane Marple; after her Albanian adventure, she even studies martial arts and earns a brown belt in karate.

Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled

In Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled (2000), the fourteenth and last installment of the adventures of Gilman’s grandmotherly superspy, Mrs. Pollifax forsakes her garden club to recover Amanda Pym, a young American who foiled an airline hijacking and subsequently disappeared in Damascus, Syria.

Posing as the young woman’s aunt, Mrs. Pollifax joins forces with her sometime colleague John Farrell to uncover Amanda’s whereabouts, following the thinnest of clues and evading cohorts of unknown enemies along the way. When Farrell is captured and tortured, Mrs. Pollifax must carry on alone until she enlists the help of an American archaeologist who proves to be unexpectedly resourceful.

The unlikeliest of field generals, Mrs. Pollifax manages her assets masterfully to extract Amanda from the sniper-training compound where she is being held. Getting the young woman, and herself, safely out of the desert, however, proves much more challenging. Gilman adds considerable depth to the mystery by including meticulous details about local Arab culture, political analysis, and even Babylonian verse.

Kaleidoscope

In Kaleidoscope (2002), Gilman returns to her intrepid and mystically minded protagonist Madame Karitska, who was first introduced in the 1975 novel The Clairvoyant Countess. In the earlier novel, the divinator-turned-detective overcame hostility and skepticism to become a valued consultant to her friend Detective Lieutenant Pruden through her skill at psychometry—acquiring knowledge of a person simply by touching an object connected to that person.

Kaleidoscope finds the countess once again teamed up with Pruden and at the center of numerous mysteries to be solved. The numerous characters that fall under the countess’s magical touch include the ruthless murderer of a young violinist, a Maine-based madman with apocalyptic ambitions, a young deaf girl wrongly accused, a socialite struggling against chronic apathy, and a timid young artist in search of confidence.

For Gilman, art followed life. Unattractive human traits of cruelty, greed, jealousy, and violence may exist in the world as in literature, but in her suspense stories they are balanced by humor, skill, self-mastery, tolerance, and decency.

Bibliography

Cargill, Ann Sanders. “Dorothy Gilman.” Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Modern, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 126–29. A study of Gilman’s life and writing. The larger work contains discussions of many similar authors and a list of Internet resources for mystery and crime-fiction enthusiasts.

DellaCava, Frances A., and Madeline H. Engel. Sleuths in Skirts: Analysis and Bibliography of Serialized Female Sleuths. Routledge, 2002. Briefly discusses Gilman’s work in the context of the changing roles of female detectives through the last century and in relation to the works of similar authors.

Fox, Margalit. “Dorothy Gilman, ‘Mrs. Pollifax’ Novelist, Dies at 88.” The New York Times, 3 Feb. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/books/dorothy-gilman-spy-novelist-dies-at-88.html. Accessed 3 Aug. 2017.

Giffone, Tony. “Disoriented in the Orient: The Representation of the Chinese in Two Contemporary Mystery Novels.” Cultural Power/Cultural Literacy: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, edited by Bonnie Braendin, Florida State UP, 1991, pp. 143–51. A cultural study of ethnic depictions of Chinese in Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (1983) and Ruth Rendell’s A Speaker of Mandarin (1983).

Gilman, Dorothy. “Humor in the Mystery Novel.” The Writer, July 1978, pp. 13–15. A brief article in which Gilman discusses the use of humor in writing mysteries, with examples drawn from her Mrs. Pollifax series.

Gilman, Dorothy. A New Kind of Country. Doubleday, 1978. Gilman’s autobiography looks at her life from a new perspective, after moving to a small house in a lobstering village. Provides insights into her writing.

Gilman, Dorothy. “A Particular Bent.” The Writer, July 1972, pp. 9–10. A brief article in which Gilman discusses her evolution as a fiction writer.

Herbert, Rosemary, et al., editors. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford UP, 1999. Encyclopedia-style reference work on detective fiction includes several references to Gilman in relevant entries. Bibliographic references and index.