A Hollywood Murder in Cordova

Murder on Location by Cathy Pegau

Cathy Pegau brings back Charlotte Brody for another starring performance as journalist-cum-detective in the small, thriving community of Cordova. In Murder on Location, Pegau returns to politics to drive her plot and fuel character interactions. In Brody’s first outing the suffragette movement and overall women’s rights played a prominent role as a backdrop to the resolution of the murder of one Cordova’s sporting girls. In her latest venture, Pegau uses institutional racism targeted against the Eyak people–an indigenous group who lived in and around Cordova–to root her tale into the critical social realities of the early twentieth century.

This time out Pegau interjects a Hollywood flair into the plot–a smart move that ties the illusory excitement of the Lower 48 with the realism of Cordova’s gritty frontier. The story opens with the town’s community gathered at the dock awaiting the arrival of the SS Fairbanks, a cruise ship which is carrying a bevy of film-makers who plan on shooting a silent film in Cordova. Naturally, this does not go smoothly. Apparently, word leaked out that the Eyak people will not be represented accurately; they will be depicted in a negatively demeaning, stereotypical manner, reminiscent of Hollywood’s treatment of indigenous people.

A local group representing the Eyak’s interests (AEC) somehow learns about the script’s flaws and they shoot off a letter to the producer and director, insisting they modify it to more accurately represent their people. This theme of repugnant discrimination quickly becomes one of the plot’s essential conflicts. By adding this issue to the mix of other conflicts within the book, Pegau gains the freedom to use it as a potential motivator in the murder and as a gut check that gives Cordova more depth and complexity.

All of this comes to a boil when the movie crew, members of the AEC, various townsfolk and of course Charlotte, convenes at the shoot location in Chitina, about 65 miles north east of Cordova. On the first night there, after a rocky start to the filming, the pugnacious director of the film is found dead, face up in a crevice. At first it appears that he may have slipped and fallen accidentally into the cracked glacier. That initial guess is quickly dispelled when it’s determined that his death was due to strangulation.

As in all “closed circle of suspects” mysteries (Agatha Christie refined this genre to a fine science) there are a host of suspects, all who had ample motivation to knock this guy off. Pegau does an admirable job of parading them all out, creating in the reader’s mind ample reasons to suspect any of them of committing the murder – from his wife to his lover to his producer to the AEC’s lead attorney. All of them had good reasons to see the guy dead. But, and this is important, Pegau relegates the solution of this crime to the exploration of the interplay between her characters. The mystery of who-done-it is just the skeleton upon which she hangs the rest of the story. What makes her book such an enjoyable read are the characters and how we end up feeling about them.

It’s abundantly transparent that Pegau wanted Murder on Location to stand apart from her first two installments. She decided it was far more important for us to develop attachments to her cast than to simply be fixated on solving the mystery. What was the biggest change she deployed? Heart. *Murder On Location* sparks to life this time round because Charlotte and her fellow players display a lot more heart. I found myself caring a whole lot more about Pegau’s characters than I had in her previous incarnations. She achieves this warmhearted breakthrough in a number of ways. For those with a romantic impulse, she cranks up the sexual tension between Charlotte and her paramour, James Eddington, Cordova’s very available Deputy. Tapping into family bonds we see Charlotte expand her emotional reach when she becomes the guardian of Becca, a young girl suddenly without any family. And, on a broader level, there’s the perfervid angst ignited by the pervasive, blatant discrimination the local Eyak people are forced to grapple with. Stir all of these together and we’ve got more than a simple, cozy murder mystery – we’ve got a story that tugs at our heartstrings as we all figure out “who-did-it.”

Pegau’s broken through here. She’s successfully intertwined cozy mystery elements with compelling characters, pretty much leaving us with only one mystery – when will we see Charlotte Brody again.