Patricia McLean
Rita Vegas by Patricia Donovan (Mary Egan Publishing, 2025), 264pp, $35
‘Lies, obfuscation, deception.’ For Patricia Donovan’s eponymous heroine, Rita Vegas, ‘[t]hey are just different forms of disability.’ For her readers though they form the basis of an enjoyable dual murder mystery. The novel opens in Cambodia where Rita has recently arrived to volunteer at a wellness retreat called the Serenity Centre, which turns out to be anything but serene. The corpse turns up early to the party—on the first page—and with a good nose for foul play, Rita immediately suspects murder. The death of Arlene at the Serenity Centre not only sets Rita immediately twitching like a bloodhound on a quest for truth and justice; her memory also flashes back to an event five years earlier in Wellington where she faced a similar situation. Thus begin two whodunnits that unravel in parallel.
A pathologically curious mind that sees and interprets the connections and patterns most people miss, Rita is a natural detective. She takes a dim view of the police, who are largely absent from the investigations. In Wellington, ‘[T]he cop at the door was your perfect stereotype: tall, thick set, thick’. In Cambodia, they are depicted as sleazy as well as thick. In a classic feminist wish fulfilment narrative, the female protagonist feels both responsible for and capable of making up for the shortfall of official law enforcement.
Back to Cambodia. When a dog’s leg turns up in Rita’s bed (I like to think this is a nod to the famous horse head scene in The Godfather) she knows she’s onto something. We root for her as she uses her powers of deduction and fearless prying to get to the truth, using methods that would not meet with the approval of the Privacy Commissioner. But Rita, as we have learned by this point, has little regard for officialdom. She also has limited respect for the guests at the Serenity Centre seeking solutions to their first world problems in a third world setting. If The Dead Kennedys’ punk rock song ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ were a crime novel, it might read something like Rita Vegas.
I love a cosy lady detective murder mystery. But this is not one of them. Instead, Rita Vegas happily reminded me of the Sarah Paretsky novels I devoured in the 1980s. There are delightful similarities between Rita and Paretsky’s loveable, hard-boiled female private detective, V.I. Warshawski. In Rita Vegas we are taken through downtown Wellington in the same way Paretsky takes the reader through the streets of Chicago.
Like Warshawski, Rita is dedicated to uncovering corruption from the lowest to the highest levels, exposing at the same time just how ruthless those in power can be. Warshawski is a feminist study of the flawed detective trope. She’s boozy, blunt and deeply troubled. Rita less so, but there are significant similarities between the two characters. Both heroines eschew domesticity in their obsessive need to bring the bad guys to heel. They rarely eat or sleep but have time for the gym to keep in peak physical condition. They grieve for their dead mothers (more on that later), are relentless in their quest for justice despite the risks—neither heroine is put off by a beating—and both are as stroppy as all get out. Paretsky’s and Donovan’s dead pan delivery reflects their heroines’ self-effacing humour, and finally, there is a strong social message that flows though the narratives.
The enduring popularity of murder mysteries, from ancient Greek myths to the current obsession with true crime documentaries and podcasts, invites a psychoanalytical explanation. In Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex, the child unconsciously desires the opposite-sex parent and fantasises about the death of the same-sex parent, reflecting the family drama that unfolds in Sophocles’ tragic play, Oedipus Rex. In crime fiction, the corpse symbolises a resolution of these repressed desires and the murder narrative becomes capable of resolving within our psyches the guilt attached to them. In addition to Oedipal fantasy, the crime novel invokes Freud’s theory of Thanatos with the corpse representing the Death Drive’s ultimate destination. I now wonder if this is why I spent a lot of my childhood working through my parents’ collection of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh paperbacks, these innocuous books being a safe and acceptable space in which repressed fears and desires can play out.
The loss of the parent is a recurring motif in crime fiction, with unresolved grief being a significant part of the detective’s psychological makeup and fundamental need for denouement. In this schema, the body that Rita discovers at the Serenity Centre symbolises the dead mother for whom she has been unable to properly mourn. When she finally identifies Arlene’s killer, her grief is alleviated. Paretsky’s heroine is also troubled by unresolved loss, but any solace she gets from solving complex murders is temporary: it lasts only until the next body turns up.
In the tradition of good crime fiction, Rita Vegas begins with not one but a series of enigmas. Why is Rita in Cambodia? Who is Arlene? Did she kill herself or did someone else? Is the Centre manager Marcus dodgy or just plain aloof, and what are the residents at the Serenity Centre up to? The main question we are left to ponder, however, is what happened in Rita’s past that triggered her compulsion to find Arlene’s killer? This is where the novel becomes a study of the inscrutability of memory. As Rita says:
Memories are malleable; you can rearrange them, reimagine or reinvent them. They are like remnants of cloth that fade and unravel over time, or even as you make them, commuting into something undependable, something wobbly.
As she becomes immersed in her Cambodian setting, she develops a feeling of inhabiting parallel worlds. A picture of Rabindranath Tagore on the office wall at the Serenity Centre reminds Rita of the same picture she saw in a Wellington flat, giving her ‘the uncanny feeling I was sliding back and forth between two parallel worlds, and I thought what a squashy thing time is, as if it were elastic, something springy and pliable’.
Crime fiction is structured around two opposing forces: the desire to conceal and contort the truth versus the desire to reach the truth and expose the villain. In this scenario, murder is merely a device around which these forces are played out. In the conventional crime novel, the reader has no opportunity, or even desire, to develop an emotional attachment to the corpse. It is a means to an end—not a character in its own right. Patricia Donovan takes a different approach. Although they are dead on arrival, the victims are not just props. They are ‘real’ people whose humanity is part of the storyline. This rewrites the murder mystery tradition where the purpose of the narrative is not to understand the people who died but to admire the detective’s superior ‘little grey cells’, as Hercule Poirot puts it, in deducing who killed them.
The more I read of Rita Vegas, the more I enjoyed it. Rita’s increasingly no-nonsense delivery adds to the mounting tension and pays homage to the hard-boiled style. In Cambodia, she admits to the thrill of the chase that she had experienced in Wellington five years previously, and that the sense of adventure in both places was precipitated by boredom: ‘Boredom is very good at sniffing out mischief where there isn’t any.’ Except that in Rita’s case there is plenty of mischief, despite her wondering if her suspicions are imaginary. Her self-doubt at this point is part of her psychological transformation as she grows towards self-knowledge.
While this is an entertaining read, the book does lack some of the qualities that a fan of detective fiction has come to expect. In the Cambodian narrative we get a vital clue too early, there are not enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing, and there are multiple confessions that don’t make sense.
In terms of style, the narrative starts off with overly dramatic metaphors: ‘I may not have encountered snakes or scorpions that morning, but I’d been stung’, and, ‘I’d anticipated anchorage only to find myself unmoored’. As the stories progress, however, Rita’s first-person narrative becomes less flowery and more matter of fact, suiting both the genre and her down-to-earth personality.
The Wellington story is a delight for anyone who has lived there and worked in the public sector. The office scenarios are all too familiar and there is vicarious pleasure in witnessing the fictional fall of the type of horrible bosses so many of us have been subjected to in real life. In fact, Donovan has said that the story was inspired by an encounter in her own work life.
Despite its shortcomings, I got a good feeling about this book from the start. Any writer who quotes Anita Brookner in their preface gets a thumbs up from me. In the fine tradition of detective fiction, Rita is of a self-confessed curious nature (‘that perennial of mine to know’) as well as having a talent for stumbling upon murky doings. This book deftly combines these traditions with a feminist wish fulfilment narrative and a thoroughly entertaining story. Pack Rita Vegas for your next holiday in Cambodia.
PATRICIA McLEAN is a freelance writer and reviewer based in Dunedin. Her PhD from Victoria University was on constructions of masculinity in the novels of Maurice Gee. She formerly taught academic writing at Victoria and Massey universities.
Excellent thought-provoking review. Definitely want to read this book.