Sex and Violence: A Love Story

Professors are being murdered in a way that suggests a sexual motive in a novel that occupies in imaginative space an area homologous to the area occupied by Columbia University in actual space.

Turtle Point Press’ first murder mystery is a novel in the form of letters written by Wynn O’Leary to his brother Joel, a bop trumpet player who died of a heroin overdose. O’Leary is an English professor, an expert on modernism.

The author of this witty and unabashedly politically incorrect novel is a professor in the English department of Columbia University, where some of the sex and all of the violence happens. It’s an enclosed world with its own customs and denizens. The time is the late 1980s. Cultural theory and gender politics reign supreme, smoking is still permitted in the cafeteria, and—unfortunately for O’Leary—Viagra is but a twinkle in a scientist’s eye.

• “Most novels set in the academy satirize the argot of the English department. Stade does this occasionally, too, but he likes even more to bury allusions to modern literature in his reflections, quips and conversations. As a result, Sex and Violence is, depite the gritty title, replete with literary arcana, and those who enjoy learned games will find it a playground.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post