Mysteries of Winterthurn
Joyce Carol Oates



About The Book

A paperback reprint of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel originally published in 1984. Oates’s detective-hero, Xavier Kilgarvan, is confronted with three baffling cases, all in late 19th-century Winterthurn, the place of his birth. As a background to these mysteries is a growing romance between Xavier and the beautiful, enigmatic Perdita.

Praise for the Book

“The best of Oates’s Gothic novels allowing full play to the author’s style and story telling skill.”
Alan Ryan, Washington Post Book World

“A writer of vision…a prolific and distinctive talent…”
Robert Nye, The Guardian

“A tour de force of mischievous proportions…an accomplished piece of subversion…the subtleties of Joyce Carol Oates’s autocritical feminist perceptions will take their place alongside the out-front challenges of the feminist presses.”-
—The Listener

From the Book

Editor's Note

It is frequently observed by our self-righteous critics that we amateur "collectors" of Murder are antiquarians at heart: unapologetically to the right in matters political, moral, and religious: possessed of a near-insatiable passion for authenticity, down to the most minute, revealing, and lurid detail: impatient with the new (whether it be new and untried modes of murder, or new and untried modes of mystery), and enamored of the old. Studying the history of crime, as, indeed, history more generally, with the hope of comprehending human nature, —or failing that lofty ambition, comprehending the present era —cannot interest the purist. For, as the outspoken De Quincey has argued, —Is not Murder an art-form? And does any art-form require justification?

Herewith, I am happy to present that perennial favorite of aficionados of American mystery, The Virgin in the Rose-Bower; or The Tragedy of Glen Mawr Manor, which albeit most informally, introduces young Xavier Kilgarvan to his destiny as a detective sui generis. (In Winterthurn City itself the case has long enjoyed a variety of appellations, amongst them, most bluntly, "The Glen Mawr Murders" and "The Glen Mawr 'Angel' Murders," etc. Not one person—including even that exploitive scribbler of murder mysteries, Mr. Mountjoy Price—has had the wish, or the audacity, to refer to this controversial episode of Xavier Kilgarvan's life as "Xavier Kilgarvan's First Case": nor is it this editors intention to do so.)

How to best describe this old, much-analyzed, yet still tantalizing mystery of more than a century ago! Though it would seem at first blush to declare itself a classic of the locked-room variety, and though, doubtless, numberless collectors prize it for that reason, I have always believed that its fame (or notoriety) resides in the fact that, despite heroic effort, it was never satisfactorily solved. Or, at any rate, the solution to the mystery was never made public; and the murderer, or murderers, never brought to justice.

And for good reasons,—as the reader will doubtless agree.

The unexplained murders at Glen Mawr Manor, and in its vicinity, aroused great terror in the inhabitants of Winterthurn, somewhat out of proportion (it seems to us today) to the actual number of violent deaths involved. For a liberal count of corpses, so to speak, yields but four outright murders; and one self-inflicted death. (The deaths, mutilations, victimizations, etc., of a miscellany of animals in the vicinity being of less significance, though, doubtless, still a potent factor in the arousal of fear.) Yet it might be considered that there is such a phenomenon as soul-murder, of as great a moral harm as murder of the body: in which case, one, or perhaps two, or even three, additional "deaths" might be acknowledged. (For instance, it happened that as a consequence of their horrific experiences, Mrs. Abigail Whimbrel and Mrs. Roxana Murphy were plunged into the abyss of hopeless insanity, from which no physician could rescue them. Though it fall somewhat beyond the scope of this history, I should like to record that Mrs. Whimbrel lived to a sickly old age,—well into her ninety-seventh year, it is said—at the Mt. Moriah Hospital for Nervous Invalids, where her grieving family had seen fit to place her; while the fortune hunter Mrs. Murphy,—or Mrs. Kilgarvan, as she might legally be called—suffered an extreme abreaction to a sedative dose of belladonna, administered by Dr. Colney Hatch, and died within twelve days of her husband.)

Superstitious the inhabitants of Winterthurn doubtless were, to have feared, for decades, "angels," or "angel-figures," loosed in the night and frequently in the day: and naïve in their stubborn belief that a preternatural force emanated from the Manor. Yet it were well for the contemporary reader to withhold judgment; and to reflect that our ancestors, though oft appearing less informed than ourselves, were perhaps far more sensitive,—nay, altogether more astute, in comprehending Evil.

ISBN 13:998-0-86538-120-9  $17.95 deluxe paperback