Last October, over 40,000 knitting enthusiasts crowded into the annual New York State Sheep and Wool Show. The online knitting and crochet community Ravelry has grown to five million members in as many years. It is no surprise, then, that knitting has invaded the contemporary detective novel with writers including Maggie Sefton, Monica Ferris, Susan Goldenbaum, Mary Kruger and Anne Canadeo picking up the yarn of Miss Marple and updating the craft for the hipsters, Goths, and grannies among today’s knitters and readers. While few subsets of detective fiction remain so exclusively female, few of these novels are snugly coded in the specialized language of the craft: K1, P2, K2tog, tbl, yo, C8B. While a typical knitting dictionary enumerates stitch names such as lynx eye, Eiffel Tower, terrapin, chevron, and wasp nest, few of these writers exploit the poetry suggested. My paper examines why these modern mysteries too often lack the vigorous detail and insider knowledge common to the genre. To explore this question, I reach back to the origins of this skeining together of stitchery and murder, recalling the three early 20th century works by Jennette Lee, The Green Jacket, The Mysterious Office, and Dead Right. Written between 1917 and 1925, Lee’s urbane novels feature Millicent Newberry, a detective running her own agency in New York, wearing only grey and, like the Fates, measuring and snipping a thread that determines the future of her clients. By following the thread from her neglected tales I wish to reclaim her work and critique her modern knitting progeny. I plan to illustrate the talk from popular knitting sources.
About the presenterCecilia Macheski
Cecilia Macheski is Professor Emerita at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. She is the author of several articles on Edith Wharton, and textile history. A three-time Fulbright Senior Scholar, she is an avid reader of detective fiction.