Mysteries of Winterthurn
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 First edition | |
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | E. P. Dutton |
Publication date | 1984 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 482 |
| ISBN | 978-0525242086 |
Mysteries of Winterthurn is a Gothic- detective novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1984 by E. P. Dutton and reprinted by Berkley Books in 1985.[1] Oates blends the detective genre with Gothic elements in the three mysteries that comprise the novel.[2] It is the third novel in her Gothic Saga, following Bellefleur (1980) and A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) and followed by My Heart Laid Bare (1998) and The Accursed (2013).
Mysteries of Winterthurn is set in the fictional Winterthurn City in upstate New York near the turn of the 19th century. Xavier Kilgarvan is featured in three mysteries as the detective, who in his teens first investigates macabre homicides at the estate of his wealthy relatives. The solution to these bizarre events reveal lurid family secrets. He falls in love with his distant cousin Perdita.
Xavier embarks on another case in his late twenties which raises questions as to his moral fitness to conduct the investigation. Xavier takes his last case at age forty, now the height of his renown. Xavier mysteriously withdraws from the profession of crime detection—after his obsessive struggle to solve the mystery of "The Bloodstained Bridal Gown." In a number of surprising twists, he manages to unravel the grisly triple murder—and to resolve his long standing passion for the enigmatic Perdita.[3][4]
Reception
Calling the work "essentially an entertainment," reviewer Bruce Allen recommends Mysteries of Winterthurn despite its "fruity period style, weighted with apostrophic excesses." Oates sprinkles the novel with sly literary and historical references: "Jack the Ripper, the Rosenberg case, Emily Dickinson, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), and Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852).[5]
Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times gave her assessment:
One assumes that Miss Oates set out, with Mysteries, to write a book that at once satirizes a popular genre and fulfills its own storytelling requirements. If she is heavy-handed in achieving her first objective, however, she is even clumsier with the second.[6]