SOURCE: Robinson, Lillian S. “Postmurderism.” Women's Review of Books 12, nos. 10-11 (July 1995): 32.

In the following review, Robinson notes the dislocation of structure and content in An Imperfect Spy.

The distinguished feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun has been publishing mystery novels under the pseudonym Amanda Cross since 1964. So it was by design that, in 1991, the names of both Heilbrun and Cross appeared on the program of a Texas conference called “Feminist Practice: Representation of Women in Law and Literature.” (I was on the same panel as Cross.)

Ten years earlier, in Cross's Death in a Tenured Position, Professor Kate Fansler, tired of teaching Middlemarch (“even Middlemarch”) at her Columbia-like university, took off for Harvard to untangle the events surrounding the appointment, mistreatment and death of the first tenured woman in that institution's English Department. Now, in 1995, Fansler is still tired of teaching Middlemarch—tireder, perhaps, since there's not even an...