On The Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery
| Article number: | HALLGARTH OTR |
| Availability: | In stock (84) |
A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery
"...one of the top ten Titles to Pick Up Now." —recommended in O, The Oprah Magazine, February 2013
The year is 1929 and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Willa Cather and her partner Edith Lewis are summering on Grand Manan, an island in the Bay of Fundy. In their cottage's sparsely-furnished attic room, Cather is at work writing Shadows on the Rock, her tenth novel. Relaxing after a hectic winter of working at a New York City ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, Edith is painting watercolors from the cliffs two hundred feet above the rising tides of Whale Cove. Out of the corner of her eye, Edith sees a body plunge from the edge of a cliff to the rocks below...
Solving the mystery, first-time novelist Sue Hallgarth's intimate view of village politics and the goings-on of two women s communities long lost to history is also a suspenseful and surprising crime novel. Hallgarth draws the reader into a unique retreat, stimulating conversations about literature and art, and an inside glimpse of the lives of a great American novelist and her talented life partner.
Arbor Farm Press: 2013 | Paperback: 262 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, Death Comes. 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
"Hallgarth’s debut mystery takes readers to Grand Manan, an island in the Bay of Fundy, which is on the Atlantic coast between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In 1929, the island is home to a number of feminist artist colonies. Among the residents are Willa Cather and her partner, Edith Lewis. While Cather is ensconced in her attic studio writing her tenth novel, Shadows on the Rock, Edith is up on the cliffs of Whale Cove painting watercolors. As she works, she glimpses a body plunging from the edge of the cliff onto the rocks 200 feet below. The dead man is a stranger. Was the fall a suicide or a murder? Willa and Edith are drawn into the investigation. Cather fans will enjoy the atmosphere, and Hallgarth captures the local color well, providing a look at the eccentric island residents, the small-town politics, and the life of the women’s communities. A good read-alike for fans of Ed Ifkovic’s series starring writer Edna Ferber."
—Barbara Bibel
''…Cather fans will enjoy the atmosphere, and Hallgarth captures the local color well, providing a look at the eccentric island residents, the small-town politics, and the life of the women's communities.''
—Booklist, February 1, 2013
