The Broken Teaglass

In the thousands of mystery novels written over the years, I'm going to venture that none of them ever featured, as their amateur sleuths, a pair of lexicographers. But Emily Arsenault has ingeniously set her mystery, The Broken Teaglass, in the offices of a dictionary publisher. It's a wise move--fans of mysteries tend to be fans of words in general, the type of people who read dictionaries for pleasure, and for them this book is catnip.

It's not really a whodunit, though, but more of a melancholy puzzle. Billy, a recent and directionless college graduate, gets a job at Samuelson, a preeminent dictionary publisher, in Claxon, Massachusetts. This is clearly modeled on Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Mass, made more evident when I looked in the front of a Merriam-Webster dictionary at work and found Arsenault's name in the credits. Clearly she followed the dictum of "write what you know."

Billy is a kind of wayward soul. He works as a "definer," but he is want to utter words like "Allrighty," and "yup." He befriends the feisty Mona, and together they uncover a mystery. It seems that dictionaries keep files of citations on every single word. Editors read a wide range of publications to find various uses of words, and file them away for when they are defined. The editors call them "cits." Billy and Mona, quite accidentally, find that there are cits that are plucked from a novel called The Broken Teaglass. But the cits are abnormally long, and seem to have been written by someone who worked at the dictionary. Then Mona discovers there is no novel by that name, and the cits, once they find more of them, may be a confession to a murder.

As I said, there's not much of a revelation in the book, it's more of a character study. Our heroes are never in any peril--the crime was committed fifteen years earlier. In some ways it reminded me of the The Daughter of Time, which had an invalid solving the murders of the Princes in the Tower that was hung on Richard III, centuries after they were committed.

But if the book doesn't offer a standard detective-novel plot, it also doesn't have the cliches, either, and gives a fresh take on the mystery novel. It is also impossible to read this book without consulting a dictionary. Did you know that the words "nerd," "nebbish," and "maven" were all coined within a few years of each other?