Murder, They Wrote

By NADYA LABI

Sherlock Holmes drew out a fine case, puffing leisurely at his calabash while pondering each clue until he deduced the culprit. Detecting, in the quintessential sleuth's day, required more than an agile mind; it took time. Of course, times change. Two of fiction's newest detectives have the necessary brainpower: they're young (in their 30s) African-American professionals (a professor and a doctor). These women, however, are so upwardly mobile that they can barely pencil murder into their crammed calendars.

The same profile fits their creators. Pamela Thomas-Graham, 33, a three-degree Harvard alumnus (B.A., J.D., M.B.A.), has taken a break from her career as a management consultant to write A Darker Shade of Crimson (Simon & Schuster; 286 pages; $23), a mystery set at her alma mater. Similarly, Margaret Cuthbert, 34, a Stanford graduate and ob-gyn, has mined her experiences for a medical whodunit, The Silent Cradle (Pocket Books; 353 pages; $23).

Black sleuths aren't new. But from Chester Himes' Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins and Valerie Wilson Wesley's Tamara Hayle, they've usually dealt with gritty murders on streets where the living ain't easy. Thomas-Graham and Cuthbert share a different m.o. "There have been very few protagonists that we've seen who are young black women operating in rarefied environments intellectually," says Thomas-Graham.

Her heroine, whom she likens to Ally McBeal, is Veronica ("Call Me Nikki") Chase, a flirtatious economics professor who knows how to make Adam Smith go down easy. Chase ghost-writes articles for the Times, crunches numbers for a prestigious campus committee and still finds time to swoon over her dishy ex, Dante. But she wields her entitlement with refreshing honesty, describing herself as a light-skinned "bourgeoisie" black who "had grown up and gone to white schools and didn't believe in unduly upsetting white people."

When Chase stumbles upon the body of Ella Fisher, a black dean, dead from an apparent fall, she's sure that the wrong kind of invisible hand is at work. She investigates the victim's death with two weapons: an analytical mind and an unabashed use of her feminine wiles. Flattering and flirting, she makes her way through the suspects: the playboy university president who promoted Fisher from the secretarial ranks, allegedly thanks to her talents between the sheets; a slimy comptroller with a repertoire of bilingual--but still awful--come-ons (as in, "You're looking recherche this evening"); and a black bookseller stuck in a '60s time warp who is the dead woman's ex-husband. Some of their secrets go stale by the time Chase finds the murderer, but readers can be forgiven for getting caught up in the snappy repartee and libidinous diversions scattered throughout the book.

Cuthbert's Dr. Rae Duprey rivals Chase for sheer determination. In The Silent Cradle a killer is targeting unborn babies en route to Duprey's San Francisco hospital, sending expectant mothers into trauma and the good doctor into overdrive. It's a promising start, but then Freud fouls the action--on page six, no less. Turns out that Duprey's mother died in an ambulance while giving birth to a stillborn baby, leaving behind our neurotic protagonist, whose mantra is "Save the life! Save the life!"

The book is at its best when Duprey is elbow-deep in amniotic fluids. But take her out of the E.R. and she founders, and so does the story. The detective work is clumsy (case in point: Duprey leaps into an ambulance to steal an IV bag right in front of two paramedic suspects), as is the dialogue (one amorous cardiologist declares his intentions by saying, "I'll tell you why I came to Berkeley Hills Hospital, damn it! Marco told me about a beautiful, unattached, female obstetrician who needed this!" This! is a whopper of a kiss that leads to great sex).

Pocket Books, its eye on the same audience that made Waiting to Exhale a best seller, reportedly paid Cuthbert $2 million for two books after reading only a partial manuscript of The Silent Cradle; she has retired her practice to work on her next medical thriller, set in New Orleans. Meanwhile, Thomas-Graham has scouted out Yale for her sequel, Blue Blood. Both are hoping for movie deals. Cuthbert says her fantasy is "to sit in the front row of a movie theater, which I never do, with a big box of popcorn, which I don't eat, and to see the credit 'Based on a novel by Margaret Cuthbert.'" Thomas-Graham says she's begun discussing the role of Nikki Chase with some black actresses, but if she had her druthers, "I'd play her myself." For her, it'd be elementary.