Margaret Maron

• Born: Unknown
• Place of Birth: Greensboro, North Carolina

TYPES OF PLOT: Amateur sleuth; police procedural; cozy

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Sigrid Harald, 1981-2017; Deborah Knott, 1992-2015

Contribution

Margaret Maron won the hearts of a vast readership and the continued praise of critics. Her Deborah Knott series started with Bootlegger’s Daughter (1992), which won the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity Awards for best novel. To win all four major mystery and detective fiction awards in the United States was an honor that no other writer had accomplished. She continued to receive awards for many of her works, including an Agatha Award in 2000 for Storm Track. Before the Deborah Knott series, Maron was already known for her mystery short stories and her Sigrid Harald series. She also published nonseries detective novels and collections of short stories. She was known especially for her sharp creation of characters, her effective use of dialogue and regional dialect, and her insightful depiction of rural North Carolina.

Maron was a significant influence on other mystery writers. Following her creation of Judge Deborah Knott, several other series featuring a female protagonist and by southern female writers appeared. They benefited from Maron’s model of an independent, professional woman who is competent and likable. Maron also incorporated important social issues in her works, a trend increasingly followed by other writers.

Maron was an active leader in promoting the mystery genre. She was a founding member of the Carolina Crime Writers Association, serving on its steering committee (1988-1998); president of the international organization Sisters in Crime (1989-1990); president of the American Crime Writers League (1997-1998); and president of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) in 2005. She encouraged other writers and worked to increase the visibility and prestige of the genre.

Biography

Margaret Maron was born Margaret B. Brown in rural North Carolina and grew up on a farm near Raleigh. She was the daughter of C. O. Brown and Claudia Stephenson Brown. She said that from the time she was eleven years old and discovered the poetry of , she wanted to be a writer, but it was many years before she began her professional career. Shortly after high school, she moved to the North. In 1959, she dropped out of college to marry Joseph “Joe” J. Maron, an officer in the U.S. Navy whom she had met while working in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. They lived for a time in Italy, where he was stationed, and then in New York. Her time in Brooklyn later provided the setting for her Sigrid Harald series. They moved back to her family’s homeplace in North Carolina. They had a son, John, and although Maron says her life was full, she realized that she needed to start writing if she was ever to fulfill her childhood dream.

Maron’s first interest was poetry, but when she began writing seriously and selling her work, she wrote short stories, mostly mysteries, starting with “The Death of Me” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1968. She says that short stories seemed to be her natural form, and for twelve years of writing, it never occurred to her that she could write novels because she was intimidated by the long form. However, the short-story market was not strong in the late 1970s, and she kept adding to one of her stories until she finally had enough pages to call it a book. Her first novel, One Coffee With (1981), introduced Sigrid Harald.

Maron continued to write short stories, most of which were first published in anthologies and later collected in Shoveling Smoke (1997) and Suitable for Hanging (2004). The story that was to mark the most significant development in her career was first published in A Woman’s Eye (1991), edited by the well-known detective-fiction author . When Paretsky invited Maron to contribute a story to the anthology, Maron reported that suddenly, Deborah Knott strolled into her head and began telling a story. Deborah made her first appearance in “Deborah’s Judgment.” The next year, 1992, Deborah was the protagonist in the novel Bootlegger’s Daughter. The Deborah Knott series greatly expanded Maron’s readership. Deborah is a fascinating and developing central character, and the series struck a resonating chord with readers in terms of place. The American South was epitomized in the fictional Colleton County, North Carolina. Maron commented that the mystery form is the framework on which she can hang her concerns for the passing of a culture, the despoliation of a region, and the issues of the time. She said that if her books had a strong sense of place, she learned it all from the poet Millay. Maron died in 2021 from complications due to a stroke.

Analysis

Margaret Maron’s Sigrid Harald novels are best read in order of their publication. The reader who starts with a later book in the series does so without the benefit of considerable backstory regarding Sigrid Harald and her motivations for her actions. When Maron began her series about the New York Police Department (NYPD) homicide detective with One Coffee With, she portrayed her as an awkward and painfully shy young woman, inept at dealing with her emotions, thus allowing Maron plenty of room to show her character’s personal growth. The solitary Sigrid grows into a more confident woman who dresses differently, views herself differently, and has a new understanding of her parents’ influence in her life. She has a lover as well as friends.

After One Coffee With, Maron wrote six more Sigrid Harald novels between 1984 and 1991, then let four years lapse before publishing Fugitive Colors (1995). That novel included a tragic accident involving Oscar Nauman, a major character in the series, leaving Sigrid despondent and readers shocked. By that time, Maron had already started her second series. Maron completed one additional Sigrid Harald novel, Take Out, in 2017.

Although Sigrid is a police officer in a big city, the novels are not typical police procedurals. Maron has referred to her character as a sleuth with a badge, one who has much in common with an amateur detective but who has a legitimate reason for being involved in solving a murder case. The emphasis in Maron’s novels is on character development, mood, and setting rather than on the investigative process followed by the police in identifying and finding the murderer, and the presentation of the solution to the crime is like that in classically plotted puzzle mysteries.

One Coffee With

The primary setting of One Coffee With is the campus of the fictional Vanderlyn College in the middle of New York City, specifically in the art department. The cramped departmental office always has people coming and going. One morning, someone has put a spoonful of poison in Professor Ripley Quinn’s coffee, killing him. Lieutenant Sigrid Harald, the only female homicide detective in the precinct, interviews faculty and staff and learns that Professor Quinn and Professor Oscar Nauman, the department chair, both used sugar in their coffee. Their cups were placed next to each other, so the intended victim is not clear. Almost certainly, the perpetrator was someone involved with the department. The puzzle is which of the limited suspects, all of whom potentially had motive, means, and opportunity, actually committed the murder. Sigrid must use her insights into the psychology of those involved and deduce which clues are relevant.

The Deborah Knott Series

Maron’s style throughout the Deborah Knott series is much more relaxed than in her Sigrid Harald series. The language is colloquial, the emphasis on place more dominant, and the main character is easy for most readers to identify with and enjoy. The murder mystery plot is less dominant than the depiction of the lives of those living through changing times in the South.

Judge Deborah Knott frames the Old South through the eyes of a modern professional woman. The series traces southern family relationships, traditions, and social attitudes, repeatedly demonstrating the inseparability of language, geography, and history in creating cultural norms. Like Maron, Deborah grew up on a farm in North Carolina, left for the North for several years, and then returned to her home and family ties. A persistent theme throughout the series is Deborah’s search for autonomy and for a way to promote her own sense of justice in an area still entrenched in patriarchal control and its own long-standing brand of justice.

Judge Knott’s official cases range from the more serious to the hilarious. They form a recurring backdrop in the novels to establish her as a good judge of character, fair-minded, and lenient, when possible, but harsh on such matters as spousal abuse or violence against others. The courtroom is also the place where the two Souths meet, the Black and the White, and Maron uses it to show the continuing problems that result from a long-standing White supremacist, patriarchal culture. Even more, however, the view that Maron presents of the South is shown through Deborah’s everyday life and the murder cases she becomes unofficially involved with throughout the series.

Deborah is the youngest in a big family, the only girl with eleven older brothers. Her widowed father, Keezie Knott, is traditional in his view of himself as the patriarch of the family, and her brothers, although they differ in degree, for the most part, assume a similar superior-because-male attitude and, in general, think they can tell Deborah what to do. This becomes less pronounced as the series continues, both because Deborah insists on doing things her way and because of changing social attitudes toward women. Most of the brothers still live in Colleton County with their wives and children, and a sizeable network of relatives lives in the community. Deborah can rattle off the precise genealogy of her family with the fluency of the traditional southern belle. Maron eventually decided to provide a diagram of the family tree at the beginning of the novels. The diagram changes when new characters appear.

Deborah’s extended family and community are a microcosm of the larger society with its racial and gender stereotypes and class attitudes that remain mainstream images of the American South. However, that image is being altered as population changes force the intersection of the Old South’s past with its high-tech nonagrarian future. The new South, with its advantages and problems, becomes more evident during the course of the series.

Bootlegger’s Daughter

Maron’s most highly acclaimed novel, Bootlegger’s Daughter, establishes Deborah Knott’s stance on the always problematic relationship between means and ends when it comes to politics. She is running for the office of district judge. If she wins, she will be the first woman to do so. Her campaigning is disrupted when Gayle Whitehead, whom Deborah has known all her life, begs her to investigate the murder of infant Gayle’s mother eighteen years earlier. Deborah reluctantly agrees to try. Things escalate dramatically as she investigates, and two people are murdered. Just before election day, Deborah has not only solved the murder of Gayle’s mother but also has been in a gunfight, saved Gayle’s life, exposed the outcome of prejudice against homosexuals, identified the killer of the two people murdered during her investigation, and identified the culprit in another past murder. The newspapers do not get the story right in time, and Deborah loses the election. However, a judge has had a heart attack, and the governor will appoint someone to finish his term. In a complicated ending, Deborah’s “daddy,” Keezie, the former bootlegger, helps Deborah get appointed, even though he considers a judge’s job to be inappropriate work for a woman.

Winter’s Child

In this twelfth novel in the series, Winter’s Child (2006), Deborah, whose wedding to Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant was the highlight ending of the previous novel, The Rituals of the Season (2005), becomes embroiled in a case involving her own new family. Her husband’s eight-year-old son, Cal, is living with his mother in another town. Just as Dwight is starting to investigate a local murder, Cal anxiously calls to remind his father that he promised to talk to his class at school the next morning. Dwight reluctantly goes but soon realizes Cal’s situation is serious: His mother has not been home for the past few days and Cal does not know where she is. Deborah comes to help. Both Dwight and Deborah are emotionally unsettled as they delve into his former wife’s personal life for clues to her disappearance. As the search expands, Cal too disappears. Both his and Deborah’s lives are in danger, and Dwight is being regarded as a suspect. The end of the novel reveals that violence and darkness often lurk beneath surface appearances.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sigrid Harald, a police lieutenant in New York City, is at first essentially a loner, not sharing her personal information or her emotions. As the series continues, she begins to develop close personal relationships and becomes more open in dealing with others. She is somewhat idealistic and remains dedicated to her work. She is efficient and thorough in solving the cases to which she is assigned.
• Deborah Knott is a defense attorney running for election as a judge in the first novel, and in the following novels, she is a district court judge in North Carolina. The only daughter in a large family, she becomes involved as an amateur sleuth in most of her cases because they involve relatives or friends in her rural community. The first-person narrator in most of the novels in the series, she gives vivid descriptions of the area, which, like Deborah herself, changes and develops throughout the series.

Bibliography

Ashley, Michael. Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction. New York: Avalon Publishing, 2002.

Bleiler, Richard J. Reference and Research Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2004.

Buchanan, Harriette C. “Sigrid’s Saga: Text, Subtext, and Supertext in Margaret Maron’s Sigrid Harald Series.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 17 (Fall/Winter, 1996): 33-42.

Calweti, John G. “Reregionalizing America: A New View of American Culture after World War II.” Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 4 (Spring, 2002): 127-144.

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000.

Genzlinger, Neil. “Margaret Maron, Acclaimed Mystery Writer, Dies at 82.” The New York Times, 2 Mar. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/margaret-maron-dead.html. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Grape, Jan, Dean James, and Ellen Nehr, eds. Deadly Women: The Woman Mystery Reader’s Indispensable Companion. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.