The name Marlowe, however spelled, is already a moniker of literary significance — and soon to be even more so.
There is Charles Marlow, Joseph Conrad’s intrepid protagonist, who makes his way up the Congo River searching for the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness.”
There is Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s famed fictional cynical, hard-drinking private eye.
Behind the page, there was Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, famous English playwright and translator.
And now there’s Marlowe Benn, pen name of Bainbridge Island’s own Megan Benton, whose debut novel, the historical murder mystery “Relative Fortunes,” will be released Thursday, Aug. 1.
Benn, a former editor, college teacher and letterpress printer, will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company in downtown Winslow at 7 p.m. that day to mark the occasion, read an excerpt and sign copies.
Visit the events calendar at www.eagleharborbooks.com to learn more.
Though her first novel is a mystery, it was neither Conrad nor Chandler’s similarly named truth-seeker who inspired her pseudonym, according to the author.
“Marlowe is a name I’ve always really liked,” she said. “It was the name of one of my mother’s college friends and I always thought she had the coolest name.”
However, there was an existing literary inspiration for Julia Kydd, the star sleuth of Benn’s novel (and at least one sequel, already slated for release next year). At a young age the author was fascinated by the works of mystery novelist S. S. Van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) and his most famous creation.
“They featured a detective named Philo Vance, who was a very sophisticated, urbane tuxedoed kind of guy who lived in Manhattan and just lived this very glamorous life,” Benn said.
“I was fascinated by that, but as I was reading the books it slowly dawned on me there were almost no women in the books. I honestly didn’t realize it at first, but when I did I had this little glimmer of a thought, even as a kid, that it would be fun to put a female into his world to kind of shake him up. And so I came up this notion of a sister for this detective, and in the process of writing my own books very, very much changed about that, from the initial idea, but that was really the spark of it.”
But where Vance is a kind of foppish dandy, an upper crust bon vivant, Benn’s Kydd takes the case with more practical motivations.
The year is 1924 and the suffrage movement is celebrating having recently won the right for women to vote. Not that it matters much to 24-year-old Kydd, back in New York after a stay in England. Kydd loves only books and dreams of founding her own publishing company.
There’s only one problem: As a woman, she’s been denied access to her own inheritance by her estranged half-brother, who is in charge of the family trust. She is, after all, just a woman and money is serious business, you know.
Then, the mysterious “suicide” of a prominent women’s rights leader, the sister of a friend, presents Kydd with an opportunity. She makes a wager with her half-brother: If she can use her wits to prove the death was in fact murder, she’ll control her own money.
But the danger proves greater than even Kydd ever guessed as she investigates familial strife, secret loves, hidden jealousies and political machinations.
Though set in a distant yesteryear, in many ways the story is ripped from the headlines.
“The 1920s have always, always sort of been my go-to era for fascination — the music, the art, the literature, everything about it,” Benn said. “But in writing the book I became more aware that partly why I’ve been drawn to it is the big issues, the meaty stuff that was going on is so similar to what’s happening right now.
“From my experience as a teacher, I always was sort of surprised, but also it was gratifying, to be able to point out to my students that what seems to them natural life, that they can go into a bank without a problem, to point out to them the kinds of things that women faced just as a matter of course,” she added. “It was just absolutely the way things were done not that long ago.”
Rather than a blatant screed against the patriarchy, though, Benn’s characters are more subtle and realistic than simple avatars of opinions, good and bad.
“It was important to me that this accurately depict the way people felt,” she said. “They weren’t necessarily good people and bad people, they were just a variety of ways of understanding things.
“It’s also trying, I hope, to portray it as stages of discovery and realization,” Benn added. “Rather than that [Kydd] starts out kind of with this whole-cloth value system, but rather as she encounters stuff she thinks about it for the first time.”
Originally from the Boston area, Benn moved to Bainbridge with her husband from Tacoma about 15 years ago. And though “Relative Fortunes” has already been praised by the likes of Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, among others, she said she’s wary of reviews.
“You have a kind of guarded attitude toward reviews because you can’t allow your attention to wander too much in that direction or you’re paralyzed — at least I would be,” Benn said. “When you’re writing it’s sort of you and your keyboard, or your screen, and it all makes sense in that world. But then you have to be reminded, sometimes rather abruptly, that after you’re done with it it has an entirely public life.”
In light of the imminent release party at Eagle Harbor Book Company, Benn said she’s living with just such a reminder now and is excited to share the story, and possibly even inspire some future authors à la her own reading of Van Dine years ago, with like-minded mystery lovers.
“Writing fiction — well writing anything, but certainly with fiction — you spend so long just sort of in solitude. The notion of suddenly bursting into anybody else’s attention is kind of disconcerting. But it comes with the territory.”
