Scholar and writer Jim Carse divides his time between Rowe and New York City. He retired from teaching at New York University more than 20 years ago to concentrate on writing books. Until recently, those books have been mostly nonfiction work in his basic academic fields of philosophy and religion.
His newest volume is a departure. Released a little over a month ago by Opus Book Publishers, “PhDeath” (320 pages, $19.95) is a murder mystery set in an urban university not unlike NYU.
The book’s plot revolves around a series of murders of prominent professors. The murderer emails word puzzles to all students and faculty members. Those puzzles, when solved, give clues to the reasons for the murders.
The book’s narrator, Professor Carmody, was scheduled to meet with the first victim on the morning of his murder and is thus one of the first few people at the scene of the crime.
The university’s president quickly appoints Carmody, a rhetoretician, to head up a committee to try to solve the puzzles and eventually identify the killer. That enigmatic figure is soon given the nickname “The Puzzler.”
The novel features colorful fictional characters as well as some high-profile real-life figures, including Lady Gaga, Bernie Sanders, and “New York Times” puzzle master Will Shortz.
“PhDeath” deftly combines suspense, intriguing puzzles (I’m not a puzzle person, but I could solve parts of them), and a sense of humor with a critique of academia in the United States.
The narrator’s wry observations — and the Puzzler’s violent actions — expose numerous flaws both in the individuals who are murdered and in the university as a whole.
I recently spoke with Jim Carse and asked him how he ended up writing a novel after a career in nonfiction.
“I think basically, at bottom, every writer wants to write a novel,” he told me. “That’s the peak of one’s writing talent: being able to create something out of nothing, rather than study something that’s already sitting there and waiting to be looked at.”
The book’s genesis was slow and, in his memory, a bit murky. “I just got going. I don’t know exactly why or how,” he said. “I don’t really remember when.”
He observed that the process of writing “PhDeath” differed radically from that for his academic books.
“It was a lot more experimental. I would try something, just out of the blue — just go ahead and write a sentence, write a character, and see how it worked … There was a lot of putting my fingers to the keys and seeing what was going to come out.”
Carse explained that the germ of the book came from a line that popped into his head: “I didn’t know the dean was dead until I met with him yesterday morning at 8:30.” That line, he added, is still somewhere in the book.
The choice of an academic setting came naturally to him after his many years of teaching. “I had a great supply of models, having spent 30 years in one institution, really involved in the university. I did a little administrative work. I was a chairman. I was in three different departments.
“That’s a colorful crowd. You might use the word ‘weird,’ too,” he said with a smile.
Carse is an avowed puzzle lover. He noted that he wouldn’t call himself a mystery fanatic but that he does read crime novels in a variety of different languages as a pleasurable way to keep up his language skills.
He knew who the Puzzler would be fairly early on in the writing process, he told me — and he loved writing this story. “It was a hoot. It was challenging. It was absorbing … I enjoyed the freedom of going anywhere I liked.”
He hopes the book will appeal to a variety of readers: “the puzzle audience, the mystery audience, and the academic audience.”
Despite the fun involved in writing and reading his story, Carse emphasized that he hopes readers will heed the Puzzler’s assessment of American institutions of higher learning.
“The book is at bottom as much a critique as it is a mystery,” he pronounced. “It’s a real assessment of some of the things that are going wrong in the academy.”
Much of the trouble he sees in American universities has to do with funding, he explained.
“The role of money is very big in the academy in several ways. The funding from both private and public sources tends to guide research in one direction or another, meaning that the knowledge that we have is pretty much shaped by those interests.”
This leads to the prioritizing of fundable work over non-fundable work and, “a limitation on the creative and original work of thinkers … At NYU, this was pretty obvious when it came to the big sciences, especially the Applied Mathematics Institute, which was largely funded by the Department of Defense.”
Carse went on to posit that the interests of students have changed over the years, in ways that can also be traced back to money. “The university now seems to serve more as a training institute than it does as a community of inquiry. Students go to college to make a better living.
“There’s an acceptable value in that, but it should be something separate” from the main purpose of learning, he suggested.
He recalled that in his last years of teaching “students were looking to some kind of graduate or professional school, and they were designing their undergraduate program to fit that model.”
“I noticed that their natural curiosity was diminishing and that they were way more interested in grades,” he said.
Finally, Carse shares with the Puzzler a sense that colleges and universities need to be more about the art of teaching and less about research that does little but compete with other research.
“The whole body of research tends to be detached from the world … Scholars are addressing each other rather than their students or the world. I call it ‘a tornado that never touches down,’” he concluded.
Jim Carse will share his knowledge and his puzzles when he reads from “PhDeath” on Sunday, Jan. 22, from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Arms Library in Shelburne Falls. For more information, call the library at 413-625-0306.
Tinky Weisblat of Hawley is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” For more information about Tinky, visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com