December 30, 1922

Jane Langton (December 30, 1922 to December 22, 2018) was an American author: a recent obituary reminds us:

'Jane Langton, a prolific New England author who evoked a palpable sense of place in her mysteries and children’s books, and who illustrated many of her works, died Saturday in hospice care near her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She was 95.

'Her son David Langton said the cause was complications of a respiratory condition.

'Jane Langton’s home, about half an hour’s drive northwest of Boston, was adjacent to the historic town of Concord and a stone’s throw from Walden Pond, places she considered hallowed ground. In her more than 30 books, most of them mysteries and children’s books, she frequently summoned the revolutionary past and the transcendental spirit of Emerson and Thoreau in Concord, a picture-postcard monument to Americana that Boston magazine has called “the world’s quaintest town.”

'The titles of Langton’s books reflect her devotion to the region: “The Transcendental Murder” (1964), “Dark Nantucket Noon” (1975), “Emily Dickinson Is Dead” (1984), “God in Concord” (1992).

'“A novel grows out of a sense of place,” Langton told The Boston Globe in 1995. “A story might have some pompous theme but, really, its meaning must come from an organic relationship with its setting.”

'In “The Transcendental Murder,” she wrote that in Concord’s “simple houses noble as Doric temples there had flamed up a kind of rural American Athens.”

'In “The Dante Game,” a character contemplating the miracle of the famed Duomo in Florence, Italy, notes, “Nothing in Concord’s rural landscape was miraculous except in the profoundest natural way, in the sense that miracles abound in the unsullied sky, in the purling of water over rocks.”

'Langton received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award last year for a series of 18 books, published between 1964 and 2005, whose central character, Homer Kelly, is a tweedy Harvard professor and erstwhile police lieutenant. The fifth in the series, “Emily Dickinson Is Dead,” received an award from the Nero Wolfe Society.'

Langton’s husband, a physicist, died in 1997. Their several sons survive her.

And her literary output is bequeathed to us all. This site includes a bibliography though I am not sure if it is comprehensive. It includes of course one of her most prominent works, Dark Nantucket Noon (1975). a detective story set on Martha's Vineyard. Herein Homer Kelly, a police man and Harvard student, defends a crazed poet accused of using an eclipse as cover for murder. For all her life, poet Kitty Clark has waited to see a total eclipse of the sun. Now she is found beside the body of her former lover's wife, holding a bloody knife.

Her circle of friends includes Alice, Nantucket landowner and fervent conservationist: Alice lets her cats on the table, we deduce, because we read, 'She picked up a couple of cats from the table and dumped them on the floor.' No mysterious goings-on with the cats.