My life in books

Ungrateful Dead: Murder at the Fillmore, Patricia Kennealy Morrison

Morrison is primarily known to science fiction and fantasy devotees such as myself as the author of the Keltiad sequence of books, in which many of the great themes of Celtic tradition, from the story of Arthur to the Book of Invasions, are recast in a science fictional setting.

However, her first professional writing gig was as a rock critic during the late 60s – one of the first women to break into the predominantly male world of music journalism – and in Ungrateful Dead: Murder at the Fillmore, the first of the Rennie Stride Mysteries, Morrison goes back to those roots in great style.

Rennie Lacing, neé Stride, is a young woman who has it all – at least the pre-feminist version of “it all.” She has a devoted husband - the youngest scion of a wealthy San Francisco family - who loves her and is very, very tolerant of her idiosyncratic desire to “be herself” as long as the important things, like living up to his mother’s expectations of how a Lacing bride should act, come first. But Rennie is more ambitious for herself than that. She has a degree in journalism and a passion for the powerful new music that’s filling the airwaves, and nothing is going to stop her from being a rock ‘n’ roll critic. But when she is assigned to interview rising star Prax McKenna, it’s not just music she ends up investigating, but murder.

There is so much about this book to love, and the murder mystery, as interesting as full of plot twists as it is, is just the beginning. Morrison lived through the hey-day of the San Francisco music scene, and in this book she recreates the feel of what it was like to be hearing the new sounds of cultural revolution all over again – the excitement, the surge of creativity, the passion for a new way of thinking and seeing the world and expressing that through the power of music.

Even more potent for me, however, was Morrison’s spot-on portrayal of what it was like to be a woman just as the lives of women in North America were starting to change forever. What Rennie experiences - either in her own life or through the experiences of others – is nothing short of a catalogue of the epiphanies of the 60s women’s liberation movement: the clash between ingrained traditional expectations of women’s roles and the growing awareness among women that taking care of home and family wasn’t all there was for a woman to do; the casual sexism and chauvinism of men of all classes, races, professions; the ever-present spectre of sexual and domestic violence; even the sexist foundation of the supposed sexual revolution. It’s all here, and it’s important to remember how recently it was that women like Rennie Stride took the first steps into a world that had no place for women other than what they fought for with all their heart and soul.