Joan Hess

• Born: January 6, 1949
• Place of Birth: Fayetteville, Arkansas

TYPES OF PLOT: Cozy; amateur sleuth

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Claire Malloy, 1986-2015; Theodore Bloomer, 1986-1988; Arly Hanks, 1987-2010

Contribution

The Arly Hanks novels are Joan Hess’s finest achievement, blending wit, crime, character development, deft plotting, and social satire. In both the Hanks and Claire Malloy series, Hess is ruthless toward predators, whether creative, sexual, religious, or medical, but her satiric approach to everyday life is otherwise gentle. In “A Tribute to Joan Hess,” M. D. Lake compares her approach to that of ; they share common qualities in their visions of the absurdities of life. In the Hanks series, Hess is perhaps closer to in her ability to create a community of odd people performing improbable actions made believable for the moment by the warmth and compassion with which most of the characters are developed. Hess accomplishes this through shifts in points of view. Although most events are seen through Arly’s eyes, many other characters narrate sections, revealing their views and often proving themselves intelligent, resourceful, and imaginative. They sometimes rise to heroism. A single point of view dominates the Malloy novels, but the relationship and conflicts between mother and daughter add a realistic note often absent from depictions of female sleuths, while Claire’s warmth and sympathy for other women allow the development of many believable characters. The Theodore Bloomer novels are workmanlike. In the hands of a lesser writer, they would be noteworthy, but readers expect more of Hess, and the Bloomer novels have been less successful than the others.

Biography

Joan Hess (1949-2017) was born Joan Edmiston on January 6, 1949, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the daughter of Jack D. Edmiston, a grocer, and Helen Tidwell Edmiston, a building contractor. She received a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Alabama in 1971 and a master’s degree in education in 1974 from Long Island University. She returned to Fayetteville, married Jeremy Hess in 1973, and was divorced in 1986. She was the mother of two children. Hess was teaching preschool art and raising her children when she and a friend began to write romances, hoping to make money. The romances were not published, but Hess learned that she enjoyed the creative process. At her agent’s insistence, she turned to mysteries, which she had been reading since childhood.

Hess wrote Strangled Prose (1986), her first Claire Malloy novel, very quickly. Her agent was nervous that too many novels, published too quickly, would hurt sales, so she published her two Theodore Bloomer novels under the name Joan Hadley. Returning to her own name, she began the Hanks series.

Besides her mysteries, Hess wrote two young-adult novels, Future Tense (1987) and Red Rover, Red Rover (1988). She contributed columns, articles, and stories to Mystery Scene, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Clues. Her short stories appeared in a number of anthologies including Malice Domestic, Sisters in Crime, and Cat Crimes, and she edited a number of collections, including Funny Bones (1997), The Year’s Twenty-five Finest Crime and Mystery Stories: Sixth Annual Edition with Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (1997; reprinted 1999 as Crime After Crime), and Malice Domestic 9 (2000). In 1995, she published To Kill a Husband: A Mystery Jigsaw Puzzle Thriller; the reader is instructed to read the book and then to assemble the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle to discover the mystery’s solution. Her twenty-first-century novels include Damsels in Distress (2007), Mummy Dearest (2008), Merry Wives of Maggody (2010), Deader Homes and Gardens (2012), and Murder as a Second Language (2013). She also published short story collections, including Death of a Romance Writer and Other Stories (2002) and Bigfoot Stole My Wife and Other Stories (2003). Her final work was completing the last of Elizabeth Peters's (1927-2013) Amelia Peabody novels, The Painted Queen (2017), which she completed using Peters's notes. She also collaborated with Peters in writing several early works, including Murder to Go: Mysteries (1999) and Elizabeth Peters Presents Malice Domestic (1992).

Strangled Prose was nominated for an Anthony Award and was selected as the best first novel in a poll of Drood Review readers. Mischief in Maggody (1988) was nominated for an Agatha Award. A Diet to Die For won the American Mystery Award for Best Traditional Novel of 1989. In 1993, O Little Town of Maggody was nominated for both Agatha and Anthony Awards. Her short story, “Too Much to Bare,” received both Agatha and McCavity awards in 1991; “The Last to Know,” was nominated for both awards in 1993. In 1995, Miracles in Maggody was nominated for an Agatha Award.

Analysis

Joan Hess was the fifth generation of her family to live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on which the town of Farberville in the Claire Malloy series is loosely based. She possessed a strong sense of community, which is one of the dominant themes in her novels. In the Malloy novels, however, the community is one of women, especially of the vulnerable and the old, who exist within the larger community but are not fully understood by that community or protected by it. In the Theodore Bloomer novels, the communities are outside the United States and must be understood by Bloomer if the crimes are to be solved. Maggody is an isolated community, frequently invaded by a variety of human predators.

Claire Malloy Series

In Claire Malloy, Hess created a complex and believable amateur sleuth. Claire, first-person narrator of the novels, is a widow. Her husband taught at Farber College. Unknown to his wife, he was among the professors who seduced female students and coerced them into having sex. While driving on an icy road to a nearby motel with a female student, his vehicle was rammed by a chicken truck, and he died amid bloody feathers. The student survived, and her father kept her name out of the news and police reports. Left on her own, Claire has worked hard to establish a business. Her Book Depot brings in an adequate income. She has protected Caron, her daughter, from the circumstances of her father’s death. Caron envies the luxuries possessed by her wealthier peers and sometimes launches imaginative money-raising schemes. In their impulsiveness, their imagination, and their independence, mother and daughter are more alike than either wants to admit.

The Claire Malloy series is comprised of twenty novels, including The Goodbye Body (2005), Mummy Dearest (2008), Deader Homes and Gardens (2012), Murder as a Second Language (2013), and Pride v. Prejudice (2015).

Strangled Prose

In Strangled Prose, Mildred Twiller, who writes romance novels under the name Azalea Twilight, talks Claire Malloy into hosting an autograph party on publication of her new book, Professor of Passion. Claire is reluctant, but she feels sympathy for Mildred, whose husband is one of the campus’s more active womanizers. Once Claire gives her word, she will not break it, even though she mildly sympathizes with members of the Farber Women’s Organization (FWO), who threaten to hold a violent protest against the sexism of the romance genre. Instead, at the reception, one FWO member reads select passages from Professor of Passion. The novel exposes the sexual antics of Farber College male professors and contains a barely disguised account of the death of Claire’s husband. Claire, embarrassed, flees and becomes a suspect when Mildred is murdered. Farberville police lieutenant Peter Rosen investigates. He becomes a series character and romantically interested in Claire, but Claire, independent and understandably made wary by the betrayals of her marriage, resists commitment.

Other women, vulnerable like Mildred, often lure Claire into investigations. In Dear Miss Demeanor (1987), Caron and her friend Inez Brandon (later Inez Thornton), insist that Miss Emily Parchester, a dithery, ladylike veteran high school teacher, be exonerated when Parchester is accused of embezzlement by a high-handed and unpleasant male principal. When the principal is murdered, Parchester is a logical suspect. In Roll Over and Play Dead (1991), Claire is pet-sitting Parchester’s bassets when they are stolen, and she tries to find them. In Busy Bodies (1995), Miss Parchester invites Claire to tea. Claire discovers that Parchester’s quiet neighborhood is being wildly disrupted by a performance artist whose displays feature noise, coffins, and near nudity, ending in murder. In Tickled to Death (1994) Claire’s best friend, Luanne Bradshaw, becomes infatuated with a man who may have killed his former wives. In A Really Cute Corpse, Claire reluctantly takes over the Miss Thurberfest beauty contest, despite her feminist misgivings, when Luanne is injured. In Poisoned Pins (1993) and A Diet to Die For, vulnerable women are exploited in a very odd sorority house and an equally odd diet center.

The Night-Blooming Cereus and The Deadly Ackee

As a result of a 1985 trip to Israel with an extended family of in-laws, Hess wrote The Night-Blooming Cereus (1986), the first of two works featuring Theodore Bloomer and his self-obsessed, spoiled niece, Dorrie Caldicott. To the horror of her wealthy parents, Dorrie is living on a kibbutz; Bloomer is sent to retrieve her. In Israel, he finds that Dorrie inexplicably refuses to leave until her college roommate returns with her, and the roommate, from a less privileged background, has resolved to stay there permanently. In the second novel, The Deadly Ackee (1988), Bloomer is coerced by his sister and niece into chaperoning a college-break trip to Jamaica. Murders follow. The novels are well-constructed, and comedy is provided by a larger-than-life intelligence agent. Bloomer, however, must necessarily view both the kibbutz and the Jamaican community of The Night-Blooming Cereus as an outsider. The third-person narration adds further distance between the reader and the communities, and few members of the community come to life as they do in the other series.

Arly Hanks Series

Maggody is an Ozarks town, its streets lined with closed shops. The building of highways and shopping centers outside the town’s boundaries have devastated it. About 755 people remain. For most, full-time employment means working for minimum wage at the poultry plant in nearby Starley City. Arly Hanks has returned to Maggody, embittered and weary, after college and divorce, although she matures and changes as wounds heal and the series progresses. The only qualified applicant, she has become Maggody’s chief of police. Her mother, Ruby Bee Hanks, owns Ruby Bee’s Bar and Grill and Flamingo Motel; a motherly figure, she is nonetheless a successful bouncer when necessary. Ruby Bee’s best friend, Estelle Oppers, once a lounge singer in Little Rock, now operates Estelle’s Hair Fantasies. Her own monumental red beehive hairdo is a reminder of decades long past. The two, both curious, involve themselves in Arly’s investigations.

Much of the area’s population is made up of inbred Buchanons. In Maggody’s terms, the most successful of these are Mayor Jim Bob Buchanon, owner of the Kwik-Stoppe Shoppe, later Jim Bob Buchanon’s Supersaver Buy 4 Less. Obsessed with sex, he is married to the overly pious Barbara Ann Buchanon, who stresses purity, cleanliness, and traditional values. Known as Mrs. Jim Bob, she is president of the Missionary Society of the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall. There, she joins forces with the mail-order minister, Brother Verber, whose alcoholic battle against sin requires the purchase of pornographic magazines and other research materials. The most cunning Buchanons live on Cotter Ridge, which towers over the town. There, Robin Buchanon sells ginseng and sex to support her large brood of feral children. She has been, in her own way, a conscientious mother. Somewhere on the ridge, Roz Buchanon has a still, producing moonshine, and he is devoted to his sow Margie, but he sometimes conducts rescue missions. Least intelligent are obese Dahlia O’Neill Buchanon and her husband, Kevin, but even they fully understand the duties of matrimony and parenthood and will risk their lives for each other.

Residents make trouble for themselves, as in the first book, Malice in Maggody (1987) when Jim Bob and his cronies try to keep an agent from the Environmental Protection Agency from approving a sewage treatment plant that they think will ruin their fishing. Most of Maggody’s woes, however, are caused by outsiders. The villains who come to Maggody are not successful evildoers; if they were, they would not need a town like Maggody. Their bungling creates the crimes and often adds to the comedy. In The Maggody Militia (1997), self-appointed General Sterling Pitts and his survivalists intend to perform paintball maneuvers at the beginning of hunting season, when anything that moves becomes a target. In Martians in Maggody (1994), odd geometric designs appear in Roz Buchanon’s pasture. Media descend, as do two professors, and Dahlia Buchanon becomes convinced that she has been kidnapped and impregnated by aliens. In Mortal Remains in Maggody (1991), pornographic filmmakers arrive, and Dahlia is convinced she has a future in Hollywood. Televangelist and faith healer Malachi Hope intends to establish a permanent theme park in Maggody in Miracles in Maggody, while a native son, turned country music star, returns in O Little Town of Maggody because his publicists believe a well-publicized country Christmas can cancel out reports of his erratic behavior. In Malpractice in Maggody (2006), a questionable therapist attempts to set up a treatment center for just this type of celebrity. In each case, murder follows. Arly, working with other area law enforcement officers—sometimes lazy, stupid, or corrupt—must solve the crime while helping her fellow townspeople out of the messes they have made.

The sixteen-book Arly Hanks mystery series concluded in 2010 with The Merry Wives of Maggody.

Principal Series Characters:

• Claire Malloy owns a bookstore in Farberville, Arkansas. When the series begins, she is thirty-eight years old; her daughter, Caron, is fourteen. Both have copper-colored hair, green eyes, and freckles; both are highly intelligent, verbal, and witty. In the course of her work, Claire is drawn into situations where crimes occur. She envisions herself as a modern, logical version of Nancy Drew or Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple, but she is impulsive, often exposing herself to danger.
• Theodore Bloomer is a tall, balding, sixty-one-year-old retired florist with a background in intelligence work. Whatever his strengths, he cannot withstand his domineering sister, Nadine Caldicott, when she orders him to rescue or chaperon her daughter Dorrie, a college student. Bloomer’s quiet, logical approach to crimes in different cultures allows him to protect the young woman.
• Aerial “Arly” Hanks is police chief of Maggody, Arkansas. Raised there, she has gone away to college, married, lived a luxurious life in New York, and divorced her unfaithful husband. She returns to Maggody, where her lack of interest in her appearance and in finding another husband are the despair of her mother. Arly’s education and New York life allow her realistically to assess Maggody and its eccentric inhabitants, but her sympathies lie with these people, their hopeless dreams, and their muddled efforts simply to survive.

Bibliography

“A Tribute to Joan Hess.” Mystery Scene no. 75, June, 2002, pp. 14-19.

DeMarr, Mary Jean. “Joan Hess/Joan Hadley: Separating the Voices.” Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995.

Hess, Joan. “Tickled to Death: An Interview with Joan Hess.” An interview by Charles L. P. Silet. Armchair Detective 28 (Winter, 1995): 10-16.

"Joan Edmiston Hess (1949–2017)." Encyclopedia of Arkansas, 13 Dec. 2023, encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/joan-edmiston-hess-2749. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Severson, Marilyn Sparks. “Joan Hess/Joan Hadley.” Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Greenwood Press, 1994.