What could be more wicked than taking “something loving, procreative, and by most standards highly harmonious, and making it into a murder weapon,” asked mystery writer Alfred Alcorn in a recent interview. “I love that kind of thing. I love turning things like that upside down.”
Alcorn does just that in his new mystery novel, “The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man” (Zoland Books, $14.95). The plot begins when two arch-rival academics are found interlocked in a position that is compromising to the extreme. It seems they have mysteriously expired while in the act of passionate sexual intercourse. Everyone who knows them is astounded, not only at the lack of decorum that is clearly evident here, but at the victims’ interacting intimately at all. It was well known that they despised each another, both professionally and personally.
The task of getting to the bottom of this incident falls mainly on the victims’ colleague, Norman de Ratour, a museum director who made his first foray into murder investigation in Alcorn’s debut mystery novel, “Murder in the Museum of Man” (Zoland Books, $14.95). The museum in question is located in a city called Seaboard, which is modeled after Portland, Maine.
“I chose Portland because it’s a small, sophisticated city with a good, long maritime history. It’s a very compact place, with an old downtown seafront, too,” Alcorn said.
A resident of Belmont, Mass., Alcorn said his fictional museum has elements of the Peabody-Essex Museum in Peabody, Mass. Some physical details, he said, are borrowed from the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Mass., where Alcorn once headed Harvard’s travel program.
It’s fair to assume that de Ratour’s observations of academic life have some basis in Alcorn’s experience. Using de Ratour as a spokesperson for himself, the author said he aimed to provide “a fairly sharp parody about how universities operate, with their layers, upon layers, upon layers of bureaucracy” and their increasing dependence upon what Alcorn calls “ostentatious benefaction.”
While investigating a scheme to create a love potion so potent that it is capable not only of overcoming low sexual function but of making enemies mad to engage in intercourse, de Ratour finds time to comment on the state of the world around him. His engaging asides include dismayed remarks about benefactors “who pay for the right to put their names on buildings,” his disdain for a restaurateur and the foodies who frequent his uber-organic dining establishment known as The Green Sherpa, and on de Ratour’s own confused and sometimes shocking emotions as he goes through the trauma of seeing his wife succumb to a fatal illness.
Meanwhile, Alcorn doles out liberal sprinklings of literary allusions, including the gem, “This case was loud with silent hounds.” This refers to a Sherlock Holmes solution based on the fact that a dog did not bark in the nighttime.
Much of this book is outrageous. And that’s the point. “I use broad strokes to make some subtle comments,” Alcorn said. By turns laugh-out-loud amusing and darkly thought-provoking, “The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man” is a mystery that could only be written in our anything-but-cozy age — a time when academic halls can be “bought” by benefactors and when the act of love itself can be manipulated through chemicals instead of interpersonal chemistry.