An Esteemed Author
Willa Cather is a key figure in American literature. Be it O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, or The Song of the Lark, her novels have earned a favored place on the bookshelves of many readers, and her short stories — which include “A Wagner Matinee,” “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” and “Paul’s Case” — are often anthologized. In 1922, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours.
I’ve personally been especially interested in her tales of Bohemian (think Czech) immigrants on the plains, works such as “Peter,” My Ántonia, or Neighbor Rosicky. Those characters remind me of my roots, even though my forebears settled in Chicago, not Nebraska. And in my Vera Van Slyke chronicles, there’s a recurring character named Eric “Rick” Bergson, who moves to Chicago from Nebraska and who seems to have stepped straight out of Cather’s novel about Swedish newcomers on the plains, O Pioneers!
Did She Wet Her Toe in Occult Detection?
While hunting for occult detectives, I read one of Cather’s early short stories. It’s called “The Affair at Grover Station” (1900). I had a very mixed reaction to it. First, I was delighted to find out that Cather not only dabbled in murder mystery — she also dabbled in occult detection! I had known the author only for her works of realism, but since discovering this story, I’ve learned that at least two of Cather’s other stories have a ghostly quality to them: “The Fear that Walks by Noonday” (1895) and “Consequences” (1915). She liked to tell a spooky story on occasion, it seems.
Collecting Evidence
“The Affair at Grover Station” features a character named “Terrapin” Rodgers, who becomes an amateur detective while confirming that a fellow railroad employee was the victim of murder. Though the investigation proper doesn’t start until well into the story, Rodgers is assigned by his dispatcher to find out why a station agent has gone missing. He surveys the station. He then questions the missing agent’s landlady. He questions a little girl who’d seen him with a stranger whose “eyes snapped like he was mad, and she was afraid of him.” Rodgers next finds blood on the pillow where in the agent slept. All very detective-y.
But the “smoking gun” that solves the mystery comes not from the tangible world. No, that crucial clue is exactly what places this character on my Chronological Bibliography as a novice-detective. Enough said about that. No spoilers.
A Story Spoiled
I do feel prompted to spoil the story in another way, though, if Cather doesn’t go ahead and do this herself. “The Affair at Grover Station” has a prime suspect who makes this story very much a part of the Yellow Peril movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s. That suspect is a man named Freymark. Cather is far from subtle at signaling him to be the criminal. She has Rodgers say of Freymark:
He was a wiry, sallow, unwholesome looking man, slight and meagerly built, and he looked as though he had been dried through and through by the blistering heat of the tropics. His movements were as lithe and agile as those of a cat, and invested with a certain unusual, stealthy grace.
We learn that Freymark’s father was French and his mother Chinese. Though this makes him bi-racial, of course, we later read that “he was of a race without conscience or sensibilities.” Freymark’s criminal nature is attributed to his Chinese heritage. Though such bigotry was widespread in the U.S. when the story appeared, I was sorry to see it in Cather, especially given that Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce were writing stories that — while perhaps not directly sympathetic to Chinese immigrants — were certainly critical of the racism aimed against them. Cather, it seems, could paint immigrants from Bohemia or Sweden as admirable additions to the national landscape. But, in this story, a half-Chinese immigrant is portrayed as inherently evil.
Needless to say, this is not one of my favorite Cather stories. My hunt for early occult detectives has yielded many surprises, and the fact that Cather is now among the many authors who explored this cross-genre of fiction is certainly intriguing. The fact that it’s made me reassess my appreciation of Cather, though, is disheartening.
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