Murdering Oscar Wilde

by Nancy Sales Cash

A Nosy Rosy Mystery with The Pitchkettle Players

210 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Russell Sanders · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I’m on vacation, I love to celebrate local authors, and I’ve found some very enjoyable reads over the years. Last month, in Asheville, North Carolina, I came across Nancy Sales Cash’s Murdering Oscar Wilde. The book was chockful of some of my favorite elements: set among theater folks, featured Hollywood stars, was about a murder, and held a promise of small-town Southern humor. I remarked to the clerk who rung my purchase, “This looks like so much fun.” She assured me she knew the author and that she was delightful. The novel is very well-written. Apparently, the author is a career journalist, so her writing skills are not in question at all. That alone makes for an enjoyable read. The murder tale it weaves is reasonably mysterious. I have to admit I was blown away when the actual murderer was revealed and the motive for the murder delineated. The Southern humor part? Not so enjoyable. Cash’s characters are suitably quirky, but I didn’t find their quirks all that funny. One of the Hollywood stars, a young actress Cash named Gloria Grant, is irritating from the beginning and even after she achieves redemption for her transgressions, I still didn’t like her. And the protagonist, Rosalie Potter, is okay as a dithering matron trying to save her production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest when its star, local boy and Hollywood mega-star Tyler Ridge is arrested for murder. But Potter has a shoe fetish that is more irritating than comedic: if her various shoes hurt her feet so much, why doesn’t she quit wearing them? And Potter has a signature look that she flashes at any and all to get her way. The key word here is “all,” for again the trait is run into the ground. As for the murdering Oscar Wilde part, I had expected these small town community theater types to play so loose with Wilde that the result would be total hilarity, but that rarely happens. Mostly, we see a fear of murdering Oscar Wilde, for Potter and the play’s director are afraid the production will fall apart altogether if the town’s murder is not solved quickly. So here I’m doing what I rarely do—giving a negative review to a small-press author. I hate doing that, and I give it with the caveat that many people might find this book totally amusing and engrossing if they go in with lower expectations than I did. As someone who has spent a life doing theater, I was irritated by the scenes involving rehearsal and production, and thus, I’m sure, that colored my entire perception of the novel.