Death Comes: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery
| Article number: | HALLGARTH DC |
| Availability: | In stock (367) |
A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery
Following On the Rocks, Sue Hallgarth's first Willa Cather and Edith Lewis mystery, Death Comes gives us another glimpse into the life and work of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Willa Cather and her talented life partner. The year is 1926. Willa and Edith return to Mabel Dodge Luhan's pink adobe in Taos, New Mexico. Willa is writing Death Comes for the Archbishop. Edith is sketching Taos pueblo and hoping for a visit to the nearby D.H. Lawrence ranch. The previous summer they had stumbled on a woman's body. Now the headless bodies of two women add to the mystery. Sue Hallgarth presents an intimate portrait of Cather, Lewis, the spectacular New Mexico landscape, and the famous artists and writers Mabel Dodge Luhan gathered in Taos.
Arbor Farm Press: 2017 | Paperback: 268 pages
About the Author
Sue Hallgarth is a former English professor. She has written scholarly articles on Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, and this is her first book of fiction, followed by her second Edith Lewis and Willa Cather mystery, On the Rocks (2013). She lives in Corrales, New Mexico. For more about the author, visit: www.SueHallgarth.com
Over a decade after writing her first "Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery" in 2013, Hallgarth shared the following in 2024:
"After attending the 1983 Willa Cather International Seminar, I began to publish academic papers on Cather, introduced her novels to my college students, and even took one of my classes to Red Cloud for a Spring Conference. I was hooked. But prompted by unchallenged errors and omissions in Cather scholarship that produced a Cather I did not recognize—essentially solitary, homophobic, and finally, misanthropic—my focus shifted. I began to do biographical research on Cather and immediately met Edith Lewis, Cather’s partner of nearly forty years, followed by the ladies of Whale Cove. I was, in fact, standing in front of the Cather/Lewis cottage on Grand Manan when I suddenly envisioned a body falling of a nearby cliff and decided to write a mystery rather than a biography: to show their lives from the 'inside' and make it clear that Cather was never really alone, homophobic, or misanthropic but partnered, curious about human nature, and wise."
Reviews
''They re back! If you loved On the Rocks, you ll be thrilled to have this new adventure of Willa and Edith. This time they're in New Mexico tracking down the unsolved murders of too many women. Sue Hallgarth has done it again: the combination of deep knowledge of the geographic terrain, its history, Cather's literary preoccupations, and Hallgarth's feminist sensibility have brought us another suspenseful, terrific read.'' —Joan W. Scott, author of Gender and the Politics of History and The Fantasy of Feminist History
''My new favorite book is Death Comes! It made distant memories real and simpatico. What a delight to see them. And the beautiful Taos you let me walk through. I especially want to thank you for including Spud. He was always there, so it's nice to have him recognized. I only knew him as an old man who always stopped to listen to a child. You showed me a young man who would become the one I knew and loved.'' —Claudia Smith Miller, great-granddaughter of Mabel Dodge Luhan
''Death Comes is a clever play on the novel that Willa Cather worked on in Taos, New Mexico, in the summers of 1925 and 1926, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Hallgarth has done serious historical and cultural research, cleverly highlighting Willa Cather's virtues as a strong-willed sleuth.... This is a very good read: as a story of 1920s Taos -- including race and class relations, as a portrait of the Mabel Dodge Luhan circle, and, last but not least, as a murder mystery.'' —Lois Rudnick, author of Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds
''Willa Cather is traveling in northern New Mexico while polishing her manuscript Death Comes for the Archbishop when she and her companion Edith Lewis are caught up in the mystery surrounding the deaths of three women near D.H. Lawrence's ranch. An intriguing story for those of us who always wished we had been there when Mabel Dodge Luhan held court in Taos for luminaries of art and literature.'' —Judith Ryan Hendricks, author of Isabel's Daughter and The Laws of Harmony
''The second book in Hallgarth's Willa Cather and Edith Lewis mystery series captures the vivid and compelling landscape of the Taos, NM territorial west. A historical mystery with real people—think Mabel Dodge and Tony Luhan, Long John Dunn, Arthur Manby—and everyday life in the settling west. Compelling and richly imagined by a masterful storyteller. I didn't want it to end.'' —Betty Palmer, Events Coordinator, op.cit books, Taos, NM
''Our favorite literary sleuths are back! And this time Willa Cather and Edith Lewis are summering in Taos, New Mexico. Guests of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the amiable pair are planning for nothing more taxing than a month's worth of writing and painting. Then an unsettling excursion to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch changes everything. Entertaining and edifying, Death Comes is a compelling mystery set in New Mexico, that place Cather described as a 'landscape one longed for when one was away.''' —Sharon Oard Warner, co-director D.H. Lawrence Ranch and author of Sophie's House of Cards
