Spring came along, and thoughts turned naturally to baseball—the crack of wood against horsehide, the sight of a fresh green infield, the annual return after a long winter of sentimental chatter about the National Pastime. Brimming with seasonal spirit, I read a mystery novel that uses the game (and the sepia-tinted memories of it that come easily to middle-aged American boys of a certain kind, of which I am one) as its background. The book, rather like a typical spring, fell somewhat short of its promise.
TROY SOOS. Murder at Fenway Park (1994).
The perils of a superficial approach to historical fiction are vividly on display in this sojourn through the summer of 1912, when Fenway Park was brand-new and the Red Sox were on their way to a pre-“Curse” World Series victory. As hero and narrator Mickey Rawlings tells the story, that golden summer was a blood-tinged affair. A utility player recently acquired by the Boston Americans (the team’s official name back then), Rawlings no sooner arrives at Fenway than he stumbles upon the freshly dead body of a Detroit Tiger, its face turned to pulp by a baseball bat. Other incidents, among them an ominous warning to keep quiet—a favorite bat appears on Rawlings’s hotel-room pillow, suggesting that his head might be next in line for a not-so-sporting clout—place the tale firmly in the genre of hokey melodrama. The characters that surround Rawlings, meanwhile, are as stale as yesterday’s open bag of ballpark peanuts. There’s a plucky suffragette who helps Rawlings play detective; a matronly Irish boarding-house keeper who serves him hot stew and stern, worried looks; a beef-brained police captain, ready for his next take in a Keystone Cops short; and a crew of snuff-spitting teammates, each one as pure of type as when Ring Lardner first envisioned him. Most disappointing of all is Rawlings himself, an ingenuous 19-year-old who lacks credibility both as an observer of life and as a solver of crime. The crimes in question have their roots in an actual scandal that involved Ty Cobb, the 1910 American League batting title, and efforts by gamblers (in a kind of warm-up to the Black Sox scandal of 1919) to throw that title to Cobb nemesis Nap Lajoie. Baseball in those “deadball” days was more innocent yet also more corrupt than it later became, and Soos’s lone achievement is to bring that paradox into focus.
