The Interpretation of Murder
by Jed Rubenfeld
Headline, HK$132
A make-believe murder thriller featuring Sigmund Freud might be an overly ambitious storyline for a first-time novelist. But not Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, who has blended fact and fiction in a way that persuades readers to sit by the psychoanalyst's couch to try to work out whodunnit. Rubenfeld gives the plot depth by inserting detail that brings to life the New York Freud visited in 1909 to deliver lectures on psychoanalysis. Accompanying him was his protege Carl Jung. The author's fictional point of departure is what happened in the city that caused Freud to call Americans 'savages'. As Rubenfeld explains in his foreword: '[His] biographers have long puzzled over this mystery, speculating whether some unknown event in America could have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction.' In The Interpretation of Murder, an heiress is found murdered the day after Freud arrives in the US. The next night, another high-society woman is assaulted. Although this victim survives, she remembers nothing of her ordeal and soon starts displaying signs of sexual obsession with her analyst, Freud's American devotee Stratham Younger. Interpretation shows how crime writing can be compelling with literary and historical touches.
