In Blunt Instrument, her first outing with a murder mystery, best-selling author, former writing professor, and psychotherapist Amy Bloom takes readers on quite a psychological ride inside the head and heart of her main character, Dell Chandler. A 40-something former English teacher turned private investigator, Dell, bulls her way through academic and police procedural murk to solve a Connecticut campus mystery. Unless you think that smacking the head open of despised Professor Oliver Bullfinch with a statue of Nathaniel Hawthorne was suicide. Still, it’s obvious from the ending that Dell will be back; readers can assume that any romantic involvements are not permanent, and Bloom is having fun.
So is Dell, as she barrels through red tape. An engaging, fast-mouthed, smart-aleck heroine with anger issues, who hasn’t figured out yet how to give or receive love. But she knows how to move in on an investigation, ahead of the police, and mostly controlling the impulses that got her in trouble when she was a college teacher. Who knew you had to grade papers? Show up sober?
On her father’s recommendation, he’s a well-respected former detective. Dell’s been called in by Cromwell University’s president to solve the mystery of Bullfinch’s death, or as Dell shrewdly translates, save Cromwell’s reputation.
She’s lying on her office floor, minding her own "g.d. business,” listening to a favorite r & b singer, and “thinking about sex and death”. She reminisces a bit about her teaching days, when she became unemployable, recalling a comment by a colleague that she’d have to “win a Pulitzer to get hired at the worst school in the country.’ She admits she doesn’t have “the skillset to be an assistant manager of anything.”
She’s honest about herself: “I’m built fairly big and very solid. I look best in smooth, tailored clothes or in jeans. I look my very best stark naked. In ruffles and florals, I look like a pale side of beef with ribbons around it.”
Once she takes the job, she manages to tick off the police, university staff, media and what friends she still has left, not to mention a very sexy Black detective. Though she has taught herself how to be a P.I. with the help of her father and a beloved uncle, she often maps her challenges and responses to various episodes she’s seen of “Law and Order.” The suspects pile up, though the plot isn’t really suspenseful. It’s mainly Dell’s character and lively lingo that give Blunt Instrument its attraction.
In interviews, Bloom is often asked why she set the murder at a University. Her reply is vintage Bloom: Only those who have worked in academia don’t ask!
As for mysteries, she’s loved them “since I could read,” she says. “I admire the precision and grace of great mystery writers – the balance of suspense and revelation, the use of plot not as a cage but as scaffolding, as a powerful unfolding and sometimes as in kintsugi.”
Now there’s an odd but telling word: Kintsugi is an old Japanese pottery repair technique that highlights rather than hides cracks, ”treating breakage and repair as part of the object’s history.” The perfect metaphor for restoring a trying time for Amy Bloom when she became a widow, and how she has now channeled it into a new direction as a writer of fiction.
