Harvard Professor Solves Princeton Murder

Assistant Professor of Economics Veronica Chase joins an illustrious league of fictional Harvard professors who leave their ivory tower perches to solve a murder mystery. The most famous protagonist in the genre is no doubt Harvard symbiologist Robert Langdon, hero of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. Langdon achieved international renown a quarter century after philosophy professor Homer Kelly graced the pages of Jane Langdon’s 1978 Murder in Memorial Hall. Chase’s economics department colleague Henry Spearman plays amateur investigator extraordinare in the 1986 novel Fatal Equlibrium. But smart and sassy Nikki Chase shatters gender and color barriers to become the first fictional African-American female Harvard professor-cum-sleuth.

Author Pamela A. Thomas-Graham ’85, whose day job is chief executive officer of CNBC, first introduced readers to Chase in A Darker Shade of Crimson (1998), and she brought Nikki back for an encore performance in Blue Blood (1999). In Thomas-Graham’s latest novel, Orange Crushed, (released next month) an older, wiser Nikki leaves her Cambridge stomping ground to investigate a possible murder at Princeton University. The setting offers a perfect opportunity for Thomas-Graham to contrast her alma mater’s virtues with the New Jersey safety school’s vices.

Despite her aversion to all things Princetonian, Chase heads south to New Jersey for a weekend-long economics conference and—at the behest of her mentor, Princeton Afro-American Studies Department chair Earl Stokes—agrees to linger in town to guest-lecture in his undergraduate class Monday morning. Nikki’s long weekend quickly turns nightmarish after Stokes dies in a mysterious blaze. As she hunts for Stokes’ murderer, Nikki finds that blacks and whites in Princeton are related by blood ties formed through a slew of adulterous trysts.

Nikki tells readers she normally teaches two sections of “Intro Economics” at Harvard on Monday, but that she has cancelled class to give her students time to work on a term-paper. None of the novel’s contrived plot twists approach the absurdity of the suggestion that a Harvard professor on a tenure track would ever see the inside of an Ec 10 section—much less saddle students in that class with an assignment as onerous as a term paper. Thomas-Graham’s business background—she earned an MBA from Harvard and worked on Wall Street before joining CNBC—heavily influences her writing, and not always positively. In Orange Crushed, she indulges in digressions on the relative merits of the Gini coefficient as a measure of inequality and the application of the Herfindahl index to emerging Eastern European economies. At some point, readers will likely need to consult their Ec 10 notes to keep pace with the characters’ academic repartee.

The novel reaches its literary high-point when Nikki returns home to Harvard, and Thomas-Graham’s prose captures the character of Cambridge. Her vivid descriptions pay homage to Café Algiers, Brattle Street Florists, and the Spare Change hawker in the center of the Square. But in reaching out to a larger audience, Thomas-Graham must unravel the intricacies of Harvardia, and at times these explanatory passages will likely prove tedious for readers in-the-know. Thomas-Graham’s caricatures of Princeton socialites are priceless, but one wonders whether the author has adopted her subjects’ name-dropping tendencies. The acknowledgments at the beginning of the book include shout-outs to Jack Welch, the former General Electric CEO; Tina Brown, the celebrity journalist who edited The New Yorker; Vernon Jordan, a trusted adviser to President Clinton; and—of course—University President Lawrence H. Summers.

Perhaps the only institution to emerge sparkling clean from Orange Crushed is The Crimson, which Nikki Chase lauds for its “tightly argued editorial” on the living wage issue. In the novel, Butch Hubbard, the flamboyant, hyperactive chair of Harvard’s African and African-American Studies Department, grants this newspaper an interview. We can only hope that Thomas-Graham—who pulled out of a telephone talk with The Crimson scheduled for last Thursday morning—will follow Hubbard’s lead.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.