Study in Red, A

A Study in Red
by Connie Gault
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Brandon Fick
$24.95 ISBN 9781771872904

A Study in Red is aptly named. It evokes Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel. Literally, the novel is a study of red emotions like lust, anger, and jealousy. Edgar Degas’ painting, Combing the Hair, nicknamed “the big red monster,” is a subject of fascination for one of A Study in Red’s protagonists, the painting’s ambiguity and eroticism key to understanding the novel’s aims. The word “study” is also well chosen, as this is a highly intelligent work of fiction that circles a crucial event in the past, putting its two female leads under the microscope. Summer is the perfect time to read this mystery that generates considerable suspense without resorting to genre-specific tropes.

There are two narrators in A Study in Red, Amy and Carol, and part of the suspense comes from the alternating nature of their narration. Connie Gault renders their voices with precision and considerable difference. It is a masterclass in psychological writing. Amy is introduced first, on the run, speaking in terse sentences: “I left Hattie’s place after everyone else. I left the cabins empty, the pool drained. I’d like to say I took off without a backwards glance. But I did turn and look one last time before I drove away.” Carol comes next. Seventy-one years old, afflicted with long COVID, she’s drifting into the past, the summer of 1962. At that time, Carol, her mother, aunt, and younger sister were guests at the northern Alberta summer place of a successful romance writer, Hattie. After receiving news of Hattie’s death, Carol, now a writer herself, indulges in romanticized memories of youth: “I nearly died of rapture when the girls took me out in the canoe. Just the feeling of gliding through the cushiony water, my fingertips an inch from the lily pads that floated on its surface, the pastel petals, pale pads, silver shimmer of it all.” In the beginning, there are gaps in the story the reader gropes to understand. But sooner than one would think, facts become clear: Amy and Carol briefly encountered each other, ages twenty-two and thirteen, at Hattie’s summer place in 1962. An act of violence ruptured the idyll. Then in the present, a gloomy 2020, these two women in the winter of life are drawn back together.

There is no shortage of themes in this tightly written novel. I could see it being discussed in a literature class, Amy and Carol being compared and contrasted. Memory, trauma, isolation, identity, desire, aging, femininity, and sisterhood are all given their due. There are three sets of sisters at the northern Alberta oasis, the relationship between each a variation, informed by age. Disrupting this peaceful world is Amy, a wild card. After the violent act, Amy ends up living an isolated life in southern Saskatchewan, in a cottage on a small lake. The banality of her life over decades allows Gault to say a lot between the lines. There’s an eerie distance to Amy, and Amy isn’t even her real name. When she’s young, some think she looks like Marilyn Monroe. In Carol’s recollection, on first sight Amy was “very Jackie Kennedy,” dressed “in a honey-coloured suit.” A potent, era-specific contrast. Provocative versus demure. Amy embodies a dangerous duality, so she comes to accept isolation, rendered in efficient strokes: “I sat in front of the big window that looked out on the lake. I sat in my leather armchair, feet up on my leather footrest… I had a radio but I seldom turned it on. Day after day, evening after evening too, I kept still, made no sound. I listened, heard wind flap branches, heard birds land on my eaves, little creatures cry.” By the end of the novel, Amy’s unreliability is clear, but Carol is also forced to confront the unreliability of memory, how memory is tied to self.

A Study in Red is a page turner, and I kept asking myself how Gault achieves this without using traditional mystery plotting or devices. The answer comes in this quote from Carol: “The mystery was not who did it; we saw who did it. The mystery was not why; that was clear even to me at thirteen. The mystery… was what the others had done with the knowledge – the other ones who knew – and what the killer had done.” Who are Amy and Carol, what did this sudden, violent incident make them, what can be remembered? Technically, the suspense relies on careful pacing, layered and offhand reveals, deep character work. Comparables to A Study in Red exist. There are shades of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History’s upending of tropes. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay’s subtle feminine eroticism. Amy often speaks like a noir femme fatale. The isolated, sparsely beautiful Saskatchewan landscape brings to mind Sinclair Ross. The narration can seem Gothic, in the vein of Shirley Jackson. Perhaps the highest compliment: I could see Alfred Hitchcock making a movie of this, circa 1962.

I’m slightly surprised that I enjoyed a book as female-centric as this – there are ten distinct female characters, whereas the few male characters are barely named – but the strength of Gault’s writing blows up gendered assumptions. Yes, it’s interesting for a mystery to put women in their seventies and eighties front and centre, and I assume that female readers will particularly appreciate the nuanced look at sisterhood, female desire, and unflattering emotions, but it’s nota “women’s novel” of the type Hattie might have written. This is a haunting psychological novel, polished like a gem, that dares to portray humanity in all its shades of red.

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