Professor Sets a Murder Mystery Novel in Qatar
April 2010
An expat professor and her Qatari student sift through clues to crack a murder mystery in Doha—such a story opens the door to an unchartered literary world. And it is currently being written by an English professor at WCMC-Q. As the final installment in the college’s April Literary Lecture Series, Mary Ann Rishel, MFA, read several chapters from her murder-mystery novel in progress “A Near Absence of Blood.”
Through Doha’s souqs, dusty pathways, bustling new developments, stretches of road and roundabouts, Rishel crafts the story of her main characters as they follow clues and solve a crime. Erin, an expat professor, finds herself in the middle of the investigation due to her relationship to Nour, her student, and Hassan, her driver, whose son dies in a mysterious road accident. The absence of blood around his body when discovered sets a tone of mystery and sends the characters on a quest.
A published author and winner of the Best American Short Story Prize for a work entitled Staus, Rishel read several chapters of her novel in progress, which outlined the character of Doha and its residents.
“A few meters ahead, on a muddy construction site where scaffolding crossed the road, a worker in a blue jumpsuit peered up from a newly dug cable pit, his head and face obscured by his heavy shaal,” Rishel read. “Behind them the high rises defining Doha’s new business district shadowed the blue of the Arabian Gulf, their metallic grey silhouettes dividing the sky into a bold, new geometry.”
Through Nour’s part in cracking this case, Rishel explores how a Qatari student’s ability to apply deductive logic and western reasoning is tested beyond a traditional range. Similarly, through spending time on the case, with Nour and Hassan, Erin must confront a range of new circumstances herself.
Rishel said she worked backward from the resolution to the initial moments of the victim’s discovery to craft the story. She grounded the plot as she shared evidence scenes that even provoked laughter among the audience at the lecture. At the end of one evidence scene in particular, as Zach, a PhD chemist from Harvard, explained different paints within the same chip and his theory about how they could have been smashed together, he says to Erin:
“Hey, what do I know? I’m only Harvard, not Cornell. I lay out the facts. You piece them together. You make sense of them,” Rishel read.
The lecture ended with a reading of a chapter that introduced Nour’s extremely wealthy cousin, Rasheed. His experience with—and large collection of—antique cars proved necessary as the characters’ hunted for clues. The stunning chapter displayed the heights of Qatar’s extravagance as well as Rishel’s research and commitment to detail.
A description of Rasheed’s residence, as read by Rishel, goes: “On the floor above the club proper, his private residence consisted of a fifteen-room apartment, and at the top of the gilt staircase leading to that apartment, suspended from the ceiling with massive industrial-weight chains and weight bearing planks, was a glass enclosed, free-standing infinity Olympic size swimming pool. In garnet reds and antique golds, the pool hung from the ceiling like the sun, and viewed from any direction the water floated upon itself as it lay suspended in mid-air.”
Audience members were left with a sense of Qatar’s variegated cultural and built landscape and doubtless with the desire to purchase her book when published.
Report by Emily Alp
