The Caravaggio Shawl

Gertrude Stein And Alice B. Toklas Mystery #2

by Samuel M. Steward, Phil Andros

The second entry in Steward's series (following Murder Is Murder Is Murder ) featuring his friends novelist Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas is a droll tale of homicide and amateur detection. The book assumes familiarity with the coterie of expatriate writers and artists whose social lives in the years between the World Wars revolved around Stein and Toklas's Paris home in the Rue Christine, but a tightly plotted mystery keeps incessant name-dropping and coy insights into the two women's private affairs from becoming irritating. Steward shares Stein's well-known fascination with ratiocination. To explore it, he uses a trio of sleuths: the intellectually bold Stein, the detail-oriented Toklas and gay writer John McAndrews, their legman, whose experience in the secret world of homosexual Paris yields critical clues. The three do not operate as Holmes and Watson but rather as a tripartite Holmesian mind, each contributing a unique perspective that assists in unraveling the puzzle. The effect is entertaining, though not particularly suspenseful.

Genres: Crime, Mystery, LGBT

209 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1989

About the author

Also published under the pseudonym Phil Andros,
Sam M. Steward.

Reviews

[Almeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know how I stumbled on to Caravaggio Shawl, but what must have caught my eye were two fictional mysteries (the other Murder Is Murder Is Murder) with two controversial real-life characters playing at being detectives. I am aware of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, patrons of arts and literature and hostesses for many well know invitees to the couple’s French Salon gatherings. (Some name dropping here, and even Steward given a part to play as Johnny Andrews.)

Because this novel portrays a quirky misuse of the English lexicon by Gertrude and Alice’s constant corrective nature, I had to investigate further to find out if these two actually bantered this way in real life. Did Samuel M. Steward just make this up for his books, or did he actually know whereof he speaks? Well, it seems that he had been a visitor of the French Salon circle, corresponded frequently with the couple and they became great friends. So even though Gertrude was an author, she apparently slaughtered the English vocabulary with malapropisms, for real.

I’ve found out that Samuel M. Steward, himself, was a controversial personality in his own right. Alleged to be the lover of Thornton Wilder, and an all round slattern!. According to Wikipedia: “Samuel Morris Steward, also known as Phil Andros, Phil Sparrow, and many other pseudonyms, was a poet, novelist, and university professor who left the world of academia to become a tattoo artist and pornographer.” ~` Wikipedia contributors. "Samuel Steward." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Mar. 2013.

Although Steward’s main protagonists, Gertrude and Alice are in a lesbian relationship, he has very little to say about their affection or love-making. As for the gay males in the story, Steward manages to spell things out a bit more frankly (but not graphically), including rough trade and sadomasochistic sex. By Steward’s account, you would think all of Paris was gay.

This was a fun relaxed read with characters that are larger than life…well, my life anyway!☻

[Sequelguerrier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late in life Sam Steward wrote two light 'mysteries' involving Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas and his own alter ego Johnny Andrews. These little books tend to get dissed by the mystery crowd for not being serious mysteries, by the Stein crowd for not being serious books about her and by the Sam Steward/Phil Andros crowd for not being intelligent erotica. Well, I like them. They are intelligent fun reads for a summer evening and meant as that and they do provide a domestic glimpse of the two great ladies and their friendship with Steward that is warm and humorous. And there is even a sexy policeman in the 'Shawl' who has his rather s/m way with Johnny. What's not to like?!

[João · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice Toklas leva umas amostras de lã até ao Louvre, para as comparar com a cor da pele do Orfeu, um quadro do grande Caravaggio que a Itália ofereceu a França. Quer surpreender Gertrude Stein com um xaile exatamente da mesma cor que a sua companheira tanto havia apreciado ontem, na abertura da exposição. Mas ao aproximar-se do quadro com as amostras, toca-lhe por acidente e percebe que a tinta ainda está fresca! Um quadro a óleo do século XVI e a tinta ainda está fresca? O mistério adensa-se quando Alice reporta o insólito e descobre que o responsável pela segurança está morto no seu gabinete e, caído no chão, um pequeno pin de Jean Marais o namorado de Cocteau...

Mais um romance policial em que as heroínas-detetives são as duas famosas escritoras americanas expatriadas em França, no cenário da cidade de Paris., recheado de personagens históricos da cultura francesa e anglo-saxónica, com um desfecho agitado, onde Alice Toklas tem um desempenho digno dos melhores duelos do Oeste americano.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote and presented a paper on this and Murder Is Murder Is Murder which can be found here:

“I Like Detectiving Almost as Much as Writing:” Detectives Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the Work of Samuel M. Steward"

Justin Spring categorically dismisses the two Stein/Toklas mysteries in his biography of Steward, but I found lots to like about both.

[Josue · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly delightful read. This is a mystery but not really a traditional mystery in the armchair detective/Agatha Christie sense. The guilty party is revealed to the reader fairly early on as well as their method and associations. So it is more of a mystery in the sense that you follow Stein and Toklas as they go through the journey of discovering this. And what fun it is to follow them! The dialogue is witty and the writing is really captivating. Stein and Toklas seem like a very real pair of people and not literary creations even with all their eccentricities. If you have any interest in history, and specifically queer history, there is tons of what feels like first-hand information. And given that Steward did live in Paris at that time this novel was set and was close friends with Stein & Toklas, it can be only be assumed that a lot of this color and detail is true, or at least based in the truth of his time there. Steward, under another penname earlier in life, wrote erotica so you might expect something along those lines here. But, truthfully, though there is the odd coital/post-coital scene, whatever sex present is described in frank terms and not in explicit detail really. It's not the focus of the story by any means, and it explains the connection certain characters have that would otherwise not be anticipated. I love mysteries, and I have loved recently discovering older mysteries that have queer protagonists. These Alice & Toklas (and Johnny too) mysteries should be remembered and much more widely read, they are deserving of attention. The back blurb says that, at the time of publication, Steward was working on two more books in the series that never seem to have been published. I don't know if this was lack of sales and they were dropped by publisher or, being that they were written in the last years of a long life, he became ill or what, but I hope the manuscripts exist for one or both entries somewhere and that maybe one day we'll see them published.

NB: Other reviews mentioned gaps in text, etc. My first-run copy of the book had an insert from the publisher that explained this was an issue at the printing press that wasn't caught in time. It explains that the sometimes wide gaps in text were meant to be ellipses (...) or missing fullstops, etc. The insert helped me as I stopped even noticing the gaps after a while once it was explained. Just FYI if that's helpful for anyone reading a similar copy.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever, smutty fun

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second book in the series finds Gertrude and Alice back in Paris, delighted to view a newly discovered Caravaggio painting in the Louvre. But when Alice goes back the next day to match a piece of yarn with a specific color on the painting, she is surprised to find that some of the paint is still wet. A forgery! Then, (horrors!) she finds the body of a murdered guard. And Gertrude, of course, when told about the discoveries, will not rest until they get to the bottom of the crimes.

Gertrude is as nosey and irascible as ever while Alice is calm and dependable. But it is Steward himself that kind of takes over the novel. An odd sort of Renaissance man (he was a college professor, novelist, essayist, sexologist, and tattoo artist), Steward’s personality—and his personal devotion to the two women he writes about—comes out on almost every page. I often imagined him scratching out words on a piece of paper as he fondly looked back to that time in his life in Paris with his two friends. He even writes himself into the book in the character of Johnny jump up, a young visitor from Chicago who becomes Gertrude’s and Alice’s “leg man” in their search for the killer. An oddity in a lesbian mystery, Johnny’s leg work sometimes takes him into the bedroom as he woos various suspects—all male—in the hope that they will give him information during “pillow talk.”

Although most of the chapters focus on Alice—and show us her voice in a limited third-person style—an entire chapter, cleverly entitled Kayaking up the Medulla Oblongata, consists of Gertrude’s unpunctuated stream of consciousness thoughts as she walks her dogs. Other chapters feature Johnny and his flings. There is even a chapter where Johnny describes his latest conquest through the words of at least a dozen other writers, few of which (alas) I recognized. It is a really fun book with more than a few insights into members of the artistic community (Hemingway receives absolutely o love from Steward) and gems of wisdom from both Alice and Gertrude. Gertrude, on knowledge: “It’s what you learn after you know a little that counts a lot.”

It probably doesn’t earn the highest rating as a lesbian mystery, but as a fun piece of literary entertainment, I’ll give it a solid 4 stars. The back cover blurb of the second book stated that Steward was working on the two final books of the series, but evidently he never finished either or them. Here is my full review of both novels in this series.

Note: I read the first Alyson printing of this novel, printer errors and all.

Another Note: This review is included in my book The Art of the Lesbian Mystery Novel, along with information on over 930 other lesbian mysteries by over 310 authors.

[Adam Dunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wouldn't say the book flowed well, or was a proper mystery, or will lead me to find book one in the series and read it. The best part of the book is the relationship between Stein and Toklas depicted livingly and with a lot of charm and humour.
There's quite a lot of French in the book, the formatting was poor in the copy I read with loads of errors from the printer, and the story tends to ramble and dart back and forth between characters. I don't think it could be called a mystery, there were a total of five characters, two are the women, one is the gay writer, and the other two did it.
I kind of don't understand what it was going for, I suppose a memorial of sorts of the two women, but all the other nonsense really gets in the way.