I found A Masculine Ending in the 25p box at the front of my local secondhand bookshop. I was intrigued by the fact that it was dedicated to Francis Wheen.
The book turned out to be a murder mystery in which at first it isn't wholly clear whether a murder has been committed. The action takes place almost entirely in Paris, Oxford and London. The central character is a feminist academic who belongs to a feminist writers' collective that during the course of the novel meets twice in Paris in order to argue about whether masculine endings to plural verbs describing groups of people ought not to be abolished in the languages where masculine and feminine endings exist - and, indeed, whether all masculine endings ought to be dispensed with in those languages, (the solution of course would be for the entire world to switch to Hungarian, which is the only language I've ever come across that is utterly without gender of any kind - but I am straying from the matter of the novel in question.)
The feminist academic - who, incidentally, does not support the masculine ending proposal - borrows a friend's apartment in Paris to stay in, while attending the first meeting of the collective. She arrives late at night and only as she is leaving the next day discovers that the second bedroom contains a corpse. For various reasons, she cannot stop to find out what has happened, and so begins a well-plotted mystery story that whizzes along nicely and works very well on its own terms - assuming those terms are to create something easy to read.
After I finished the book, I looked up the author. When she dedicated the book to Wheen, he was her husband. On the back cover of A Masculine Ending, PD James is quoted as saying that "Joan Smith is a new and welcome addition to the Faber stable of crime writers, with a feisty and original heroine, of whom I suspect we shall hear more." Sadly, no more was heard of that heroine, so far as I can tell. Whether the silence had anything to do with the end of the author's marriage not long after the book's publication, who can say? Perhaps, without a fellow writer in the house to encourage her, Smith no longer had the impetus. It is a pity. A Masculine Ending is entertaining and well made.
CORRECTION: I have just learned that this is the first in a series of five books - so much for my silly imaginings about the author’s heartbreak. As my children often complain, I have a tendency to whip up a story where there is none.
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