Questions abound in ‘Mulch’

THE MAINE MULCH MURDER, A. Carman Clark, The Larcom Press, 2001, 228 pages, $22.

“The Maine Mulch Murder” opens with a mundane errand done by a seemingly ordinary woman. Sixty-year-old Amy Creighton goes to the local mill to help herself to the free sawdust she plans to use to mulch her strawberry beds. To her dismay, while she is shoveling, the pile shifts to reveal the body of a young man.

From that moment on Amy begins to ask questions. What is the victim’s name? Who murdered him and how did his body end up in the sawdust pile? How did he get to the small town of Granton, Maine, where everyone knows everything about everyone else and their business? Why would the man come to town in May during black-fly season, before tourist season, before summer-job time? How is he connected to the town of Granton and to whom?

These are just a few of the questions propelling Amy out into the community to get the facts; for Amy is a questioner. When she has questions, she must have answers and will not stop until she gets them. Sometimes, to aid her thought process and to get the physical kinks out of her body, she hangs from an exercise bar in her back yard.

Amy is no gun-toting, hyperactive, life-jaded detective. In fact, she has no previous experience solving mysteries and is more likely to carry a gardening spade. She has a keen interest in life, including art, swimming, people and dogs. By profession, she’s a free-lance editor. She lives a contented life going for walks with her dog, Chutney, baking bread, tending her garden, and living the life of her community.

Amy’s partner in solving the puzzle of the man’s death, along with all the proper police authorities, is her former high school sweetheart, Dort Adams, Granton’s constable. Everyone in Granton assumed Amy and Dort would marry when they finished college. But their lives spun them out onto separate paths and they married other people. Now that both are single again, the murder and the task of solving it make their paths cross anew. The love they once had for each other is rekindled. But this is not the kind of love that flashes like lightning, an electric brilliance, descending to a deepening dark with rain in the offing.

No, theirs is a devotion based firmly on the shared history of their youthful escapades and the workings of their minds, which suit one another wonderfully well. Dort knows his way around a kitchen, too, as does Amy, and many of their conversations about the murder take place at the dinner table. This ritual creates a safe, comradely environment allowing them to reconnect emotionally while they work toward discovering the identity of the murderer or murderers.

“The Maine Mulch Murder” unfolds at stately pace. Amy doesn’t hurry into things. She thinks first, then moves with deliberation. A woman of wry humor whose worst epithet is, “fidgets,” or “double fidgets,” she is compassionate toward others. Dort is solid as a rock and stalwart of purpose. They count on and complement one another.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that suspicion is cast on three members of the same family. Amy is terrorized by one of these nasties, but escapes by jumping into a pond and swimming underwater to a rock where she and Dort used to swim when they were young and newly in love.

At heart, this is a book for gentle readers. We are not thrown into gory descriptions of the victim’s body, jolted by scenes of bloody violence, or made queasy by graphic depictions of overheated sexuality. The story’s focus is firmly on the business at hand, the process of solving the murder, and analyzing the events that unfold from it, including a second murder.

Reading “The Maine Mulch Murder” was of great personal interest because I interviewed A. Carman Clark for a Bangor Daily News story in 1986; we talked at length about her gardening and uses of mulch. Her children, she said then, once gave her a load of manure as a Mother’s Day gift. One of her favorite mulches was junk mail and students’ completed English grammar workbooks. As I read Clark’s book, I could see the parallels between the workings of Amy Creighton’s mind and that of the author’s, how Clark synthesized the facets of her broad gardening knowledge and her sense of the roundness of life to create her story.

I was caught up in the challenge of finding answers to Amy’s questions, but I never guessed, though I had my suspicions, who the killer was. At the end of the book, in an Agatha Christie plot device, all of the suspects are rounded up in Amy’s living room and the identity of the murderer is revealed.

Much of the background information in “The Maine Mulch Murder” is delivered as conversation between the characters. As a reader, I wished for more narrative description, not only of the physical settings, but of the characters. I wish Clark had given the story another 50 pages to allow the reader more time to linger on the workings of Amy’s mind. Plus, and I just gotta say this, I REALLY wanted Dort and Amy to move from respectful adoration to much warmer intimacy.

“The Maine Mulch Murder” is the first mystery written by 84-year-old Clark, who lives in Union. She is a veteran garden columnist for the Camden Herald and author of “From the Orange Mailbox,” a collection of essays about country life in Maine, published in 1985 by The Harpswell Press. In a recent telephone conversation with Clark, she said “The Maine Mulch Murder” is the first book from The Larcom Press, publisher of a literary magazine, The Larcom Review. The Larcom Press, Clark said, chose her book to launch its publishing venture because it does not contain the violent content typical of many mystery novels.

Clark is at work on a second mystery, “The Corpse in the Compost,” in which I’m hoping the Dort and Amy characters are deepened and their connectedness as sweethearts grows.

Clark’s daughter Kate Flora is the author of the Thea Kozak mystery series.