Can’t remember how this popped into my head while we were having lunch at Boo Bird after our meeting on Friday. Nice time chatting about books and and assorted bits with Tricia Breau, Selena Evans, Judy Lloyd, and Leslie Schoenherr!
In any case I mentioned a book that might interest our group but cannot be one of our nominated books (there are zero copies in the MVLC system for the reason that it is a self-published book). I mentioned it because there is a great potential for a fun field trip… to Mt Auburn Cemetery. Not that any excuse is ever needed to visit that lovely place!
The book is A Stranger’s Tomb by Robin Hazard Ray. According to the Amazon blurb….
An enslaved woman in South Carolina is stripped and photographed. A night watchman in Cambridge is assaulted. An extra corpse turns up in a tomb. How are they connected—and who’s next?
Cambridge, Mass., February–April 1858. Civil war looms in the United States as scientific frontiers are rapidly expanding across the globe. Harvard botanist Asa Gray is discerning odd patterns among his new botanical specimens. Gray’s findings set him at odds with Louis Agassiz, the most celebrated man in American science, who believes that the races of humankind represent separate species—a popular notion in the slave-owning South. Gray, in contrast, fervently supports Charles Darwin (whose On the Origin of Species will be published the following year) in believing all humans are variants of one species. The conflict is particularly acute because in Gray’s employ is Darius Jacobs, a fugitive slave. Gray and Jacobs expect the worst when Cambridge anticipates a visit from amateur botanist Robert Claridge, the South Carolina owner from whom Darius fled with his sister Roxanne.
An attack on a night watchman at nearby Mount Auburn Cemetery coincides with the disappearance of Claridge. When Claridge turns up dead in a tomb at Mount Auburn, botanical clues lead the cemetery superintendent, Sumner Bascomb, to his friend and colleague Gray. Bascomb, a melancholic bachelor who once hoped to marry Gray’s wife, Jane, strives to unravel the mystery of this assault and a series of murders that threaten the peace of his cemetery and community. But first the embattled superintendent must contend with his eccentric intellectual mother, Adelaide, and his strong attraction to the cemetery’s genial arborist, Tom McMead. Roxanne, meanwhile, finds love when she can least afford it.
As Bascomb, Gray, and Roxanne work their way to a solution, the bodies pile up. A pregnant girl drowns herself in a frozen pond; a Southerner is found in the Charles River estuary. Behind the Boston murders lie shadows of family secrets, lost siblings, and connections of blood, love, and vengeance.
But is the book any good?
I have no idea. Someone would need to buy a copy and try it. That won’t be me… at least not in 2023. If it looks like it might be a fun read, start making a list of specific locations (“sites”) mentioned in the book.
Then what?
If someone can vouch for the book, then an organizer is needed. To do what?
- Set a date for interested people to complete the book and to have a field trip to the cemetery and any nearby “sites” in Cambridge/Boston.
- Promote the opportunity. I can help with that. For those familiar with the term as we have used it in the past, this is a single-book “sub-group.” To “sign-up” means to commit to buying the book, reading the book by the field trip date, and participating in the activity. It is understood that this is in addition to the club’s regular monthly book (hopefully not instead of).
- Once 3 or more have committed it is a “GO!”
- Who can drive a few people in their van or large car? Depending, you might need two drivers.
- Use the list of “sites” as a basis of research to determine how many of the sites can still be seen today. Use maps, historic materials, the Mt Auburn web site and other resources to select a few sites in the cemetery and perhaps outside the cemetery to visit.
- Include a planned location for late lunch to eat, share, and discuss the book.
- Bring pre-selected passages from the book to read at the sites.
- Consider timing, and perhaps time to enjoy some of the beauty of the cemetery in addition to the planned sites
If you buy and read the book. Let me know! Also leave a comment (“reply”) below.
PS: I believe Robin, the author, is a docent at Mt Auburn Cemetery. I discovered that she has a lengthy video called a PRIDE Tour of Mt Auburn Cemetery – Celebrated, scandalous, and unknown: meet some of the fascinating figures of Boston’s LGBT past on a walk led by Volunteer Docent Robin Hazard Ray. We will visit the resting places of sculptor Harriet Hosmer, actress Charlotte Cushman, Byzantine scholar Thomas Whittemore, and Gloucester collector Henry Davis Sleeper, among others, in recognition of Boston Pride Week 2020. View the Presentation Here.
PS: #2 — When to do a field trip to Mt Auburn? Probably we think of spring most often. How about autumn?
