The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS (b. 1916)

Dorothy Salisbury Davis's character-driven fiction marks her as a crime writer rather than an author of detection-oriented whodunits. Particularly in her short stories, she rarely relies on series sleuths or on puzzling the reader with the facts of the case. More fascinated by psychological motivation than by material motive, even in stories featuring police detectives, she would rather toy with their relationships to the criminals than dog their footsteps as they follow police procedure.

Davis became a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master in 1985. Spanning nearly four decades of the genre's development, her highly respected work is very significant in placing value on the inner lives of her characters and granting dignity to female characters, in particular. In the early part of her career, when many female characters were portrayed as helpless women in jeopardy, Davis was endowing her women with intelligence and stamina rather than mere beauty and pluck.

Born in Chicago, Davis spent her childhood and adolescence on midwestern farms and her adulthood in or near cities. This dual background is used to advantage in her fiction. The rural setting and small-town mentality are often essential to the atmosphere of her short stories, while the city is more likely to provide the large canvas for her longer works. She claims that she left the farm only physically, taking the experience with her into later life. She felt similarly about her Catholic faith. Although she has stated that she turned to mystery writing because she was quite certain that she did not wish to write about herself, her work reveals a woman anchored in everyday, small-town reality who nonetheless has a penchant for puzzling out large philosophical questions about just what it means to be human.

Accidental insights, quiet but traumatic discoveries-these are Davis 's forte. Her own life was jarred by her accidental discovery, when she was seventeen, that she was adopted. "The whole room tilted over on its side and then somehow fell back into place again," she recalled. "I put everything back the way I found it. Except me." This is what her fiction does: the order of things is shattered and then put back together, but is never quite the same.

«A Matter of Public Notice» incorporates more police detection than do most of Davis 's stories. But even while the author would like us to wonder 'Whodunit?' her greater concern is to induce us to question ourselves.