Someday us Taggerts are gonna dig up that rose garden.
Wild Mustard
MARCIA MULLER
Marcia Muller (b. 1944) is one of the most celebrated and versatile writers of crime fiction to debut in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Born in Detroit and educated at the University of Michigan, she lives in Northern California, the setting for most of her fiction.
Though it caused barely a ripple at the time of its publication, Muller’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977) is now accorded primacy in one of the major trends of recent decades: the female private-eye novel. All previous efforts in this line demand an asterisk: characters like Carter Brown’s Mavis Seidlitz, Henry Kane’s Maria Trent, and G. G. Fickling’s Honey West were male wish-fulfillment fantasies not to be taken seriously; Fran Huston’s Nicole Sweet in The Rich Get It All (1973) was an attempt at a more realistic character but was actually the work of a man (Ron S. Miller) using an androgynous pseudonym; and the first of the wave of female-by-female private eyes, Maxine O’Callaghan’s Delilah West, appeared in print in a 1974 short story but not in a novel until 1980.
Sharon McCone did not return for a second case until Ask the Cards a Question (1982), the same year her two most famous female p.i. colleagues, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V.I.
Warshawski, made their debuts, but has averaged about a book a year since. McCone differs from most earlier private eyes in other ways than gender: she is not the traditional loner but part of an or-ganization, the All Souls Legal Cooperative, and her professional and personal relationships with her colleagues are important to her.
This leads to Muller’s other and more subtle distinction: she was one of the pioneers of the now-general practice of equipping the series sleuth with a large supporting cast of friends, family, and co-workers that recur from book to book. Unfortunately, few of the writers who have adopted this practice are able to do it as well as Muller does.
In 1992 she married novelist Bill Pronzini, with whom she has collaborated on three novels, beginning with Double (1984), in which McCone shares an investigation with Pronzini’s Nameless Detective; a short-story collection, many anthologies, and the valuable reference volume 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction (1986). Muller has also written series about two amateur detectives, museum curator Elena Oliverez, who appeared in The Tree of Death (1983) and two subsequent novels, and art security consult-ant Joanna Stark, the first of whose three appearances was The Cavalier in White (1986).
Among Muller’s honors is a 1993 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Appropriately, “Wild Mustard,” one of the earliest Sharon McCone short stories, comes from the PWA’s first anthology, The Eyes Have It (1984).
The first time I saw the old Japanese woman, I was having brunch at the restaurant above the ruins of San Francisco’s Sutro Baths. The woman squatted on the slope, halfway between its cypress-covered top and the flooded ruins of the old bathhouse. She was uprooting vegetation and stuffing it into a green plastic sack.
“I wonder what she’s picking,” I said to my friend Greg.
He glanced out the window, raising one dark-blond eyebrow, his homicide cop’s eye assessing the scene. “Probably something edible that grows wild. She looks poor; it’s a good way to save grocery money.”
Indeed the woman did look like the indigent old ladies one sometimes saw in Japantown; she wore a shapeless jacket and trousers, and her feet were clad in sneakers. A gray scarf wound around her head.
“Have you ever been down there?” I asked Greg, motioning at the ruins. The once-elegant baths had been destroyed by fire. All that remained now were crumbling foundations, half submerged in water. Seagulls swam on its glossy surface and, beyond, the surf tossed against the rocks.
“No. You?”
“No. I’ve always meant to, but the path is steep and I never have the right shoes when I come here.”
Greg smiled teasingly. “Sharon, you’d let your private eye’s instinct be suppressed for lack of hiking boots?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m not really that interested.”
“Maybe not.”
Greg often teased me about my sleuthing instinct, but in reality I suspected he was proud of my profession. An investigator for All Souls Cooperative, the legal services plan, I had dealt with a full range of cases — from murder to the mystery of a redwood hot tub that didn’t hold water. A couple of the murders I’d solved had been in Greg’s bailiwick, and this had given rise to both rivalry and romance.
In the months that passed, my interest in the old Japanese woman was piqued. Every Sunday that we went there — and we went there often because the restaurant was a favorite — the woman was scouring the slope, foraging for…what?
One Sunday in early spring, Greg and I sat in our window booth, watching the woman climb slowly down the dirt path. To comple-ment the season, she had changed her gray headscarf for bright yellow. The slope swarmed with people, enjoying the release from the winter rains. On the far barren side where no vegetation had taken hold, an abandoned truck leaned at a precarious angle at the bottom of the cliff near the baths. People scrambled down, inspected the old truck, then went to walk on the concrete foundations or disappeared into a nearby cave.
When the waitress brought our check, I said, “I’ve watched long enough; let’s go down there and explore.”
Greg grinned, reaching in his pocket for change. “But you don’t have the right shoes.”
“Face it, I’ll never have the right shoes. Let’s go. We can ask the old woman what she’s picking.”
He stood up. “I’m glad you finally decided to investigate her. She might be up to something sinister.”
“Don’t be silly.”
He ignored me. “Yeah, the private eye side of you has finally won out. Or is it your Indian blood? Tracking instinct, papoose?”
I glared at him, deciding that for that comment he deserved to pay the check. My one-eighth Shoshone ancestry — which for some reason had emerged to make me a black-haired throw-back in a family of Scotch-Irish towheads — had prompted Greg’s dubbing me “papoose.” It was a nickname I did not favor.
We left the restaurant and passed through the chain link fence to the path. A strong wind whipped my long hair about my head, and I stopped to tie it back. The path wound in switch-backs past huge gnarled geranium plants and through a thicket. On the other side of it, the woman squatted, pulling up what looked like weeds. When I approached she smiled at me, a gold tooth flashing.
“Hello,” I said. “We’ve been watching you and wondered what you were picking.”
“Many good things grow here. This month it is the wild mustard.”
She held up a spring. I took it, sniffing its pungency.
“You should try it,” she added. “It is good for you.”
“Maybe I will.” I slipped the yellow flower through my button-hole and turned to Greg.
“Fat chance,” he said. “When do you ever eat anything healthy?”
“Only when you force me.”
“I have to. Otherwise it would be Hershey bars day in and day out.”
“So what? I’m not in bad shape.” It was true; even on this steep slope I wasn’t winded.
Greg smiled, his eyes moving appreciatively over me. “No, you’re not.”
We continued down toward the ruins, past a sign that advised us:
CAUTION!