Elizabeth Topham Kennan '60 (left) and Jill Kerr Conway speak to a packed house in the Stimson Room, October 16.

Murder, self-discovery, and fractious committee meetings were among the topics touched on during a lively book reading and discussion October 16 in the Williston Library's Stimson Room. As an attentive, standing-room-only crowd of students, administrators, and faculty munched on cucumber-and-watercress sandwiches and petits fours, authors Elizabeth Topham Kennan '60 (Mount Holyoke's president from 1978 to 1995) and Jill Kerr Conway (president of Smith College from 1975 to 1985) spoke about their experiences coauthoring their new mystery novel, Overnight Float, recently published under the pen name Clare Munnings.

Set on the lovely (but entirely fictional) campus of Sanderson, a women's college in Vermont, Overnight Float tells the story of Rosemary Stubbs, a recent divinity school graduate and Sanderson's newly hired chaplain. After she discovers the body of the treasurer floating in the college's new Olympic-sized pool, Rosemary begins to investigate both the murder and evidence of fiscal impropriety at high levels of the school's administration. In short order she finds herself at the center of a frightening series of events.

Following an introduction by MHC's current president, Joanne Creighton, Kennan and Conway took turns reading, then answered questions from the audience. The idea for Overnight Float, Kennan said, originated during a casual lunchtime conversation, when, in the course of grousing about their grad school days—and particularly about their studies of the Oxford historian William Stubbs—she and a few other historians amused themselves by inventing a murder mystery set in academia. But, though it began as “a lark,” once she and Conway commited themselves to the project, it acquired a more serious significance. They hoped that, by writing in the popular genre of detective fiction, they could introduce readers unfamiliar with women's colleges to the strong bonds that form between students, professors, and staff and to the many opportunities for teamwork, leadership, and intellectual and spiritual growth that a women's college offers.

The authors said they wanted the story to be more than a good mystery yarn—they also wanted to portray a woman's spiritual and emotional development. Following the accidental drowning death of her husband, Rosemary had abandoned a successful career as a chief financial officer and enrolled inYale's divinity school. Now that she's embarking on her first post-career-change job, she's not entirely certain where her vocation lies. But in the course of discovering the murderer's identity, she also discovers how satisfying it is to work with Sanderson's talented and enthusiastic
students.

Kennan and Conway began work by deciding on the overall plot and major characters, then took turns writing. One of them—whoever had the time—would write a chapter, then send it along to the other. If one couldn't finish her section on time, “there was total forgiveness,” and the other would finish it for her. In this way, the most tedious part of writing a book—revision—never became drudgery for either of them, because the other would always take care of it.
They were continually surprised and delighted by each other's writing. Said Kennan, “There was such joy in seeing what Jill did with my prose. Receiving her work was like getting a gift.” She recalled how Conway—who worked on the book during long plane trips—would phone from such faraway places as Melbourne and Sydney, exclaiming, “Lizzie, you haven't any idea what's happened to Rosemary this time.”

One audience member suggested that Overnight Float is a rather generous portrait of an academic community. Had the authors cut any “ungenerous” scenes? Not really, Kennan and Conway replied, although an additional murder (of a trustee) and a number of rancorous faculty “interactions” wound up being cut. They were told by their editors—much to their surprise and that of the audience gathered in the Stimson Room—that the average reader “cannot keep more than six principal characters straight.” Creighton elicited laughter from the audience when she asked the question on everyone's mind: Had any real-life faculty and administrators served as models for the Sanderson characters? Kennan assured the audience that the novel was truly “an act of the imagination” and that none of the characters was based on a particular individual.

Overnight Float is the first in a series of mysteries involving Rosemary Stubbs. The next book, the authors said, will focus on research and library stacks, giving them the opportunity to show faculty and graduate students “under some stress.”