If bounty hunter Stephanie Plum[1] had grown up on the Main Line instead of in Trenton, New Jersey, she might have become Nell Pratt, the fundraiser turned amateur detective at the center of Sheila Connolly’s account of murder in the musty stacks of the Philadelphia Antiquarian Society. The whodunit provides an insider account of security, technology, staffing, organizational and financial issues faced by cultural institutions, of institutional politics, and the care and feeding of big donors and board members, who are not necessarily one and the same. There may be TMI and not enough action for readers disinterested in the arcana of museum operations.
The preface to Connolly’s book attributes its creative inspiration to a crime that took place in a “Center City cultural institution” where she worked for several years, and was successfully detected and prosecuted. It’s likely that the cultural institution was the Philadelphia Historical Society, and that the crime was the theft of artifacts in 1998. Fast forward to 2011, and the society, and at at least one other major East Coast cultural institution, are currently involved in prosecuting document theft of significant scope. Fundraising's plot revolves around the female bonding behavior of Pratt and the Philadelphia society matrons who join forces with her to bring to justice the president of the antiquarian society, who uses his amorous conquests to purloin papers and bibelots to fund his scheme to build a world-class historic research center, which he, of course, will run. Pratt, as surrogate for the author, muses on the hardscrabble life at nonprofit cultural institutions, which court the same grant-givers, lack funds to install the security and technology to protect, catalog and make their collections accessible to the public, sometimes store documents in closets, and don’t insure artifacts because they’re invaluable, and there’s no money for insurance, anyway. There’s also a nice subtext, available to close reading, on history and culture, and their tangible manifestations, as consumables in the consumption society.
The secretary to the president of the antiquarian society did it.
[1] Stephanie Plum is the heroine of a series of murder mysteries, flamboyantly titled in numerical sequence (e.g., Three to Get Deadly), written by Janet Evanovich, and avidly read by women of a certain age, among others.
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