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“Inside every critic is a frustrated writer” (p. 48), observes psychoanalytic literary critic “Norman N. Holland” in Death in a Delphi Seminar. The quotation marks surrounding the English professor's name suggest that he is, like the other characters in this fascinating murder mystery set in the mid-1980s at the State University of New York at Buffalo, fictional, an invention of the author of the same name. And yet anyone who is familiar with Norman Holland's distinguished academic career—the dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, he is the author of eleven scholarly books—will recognize his kinship to the fictional professor. An early proponent of reader-response criticism, Holland has written a detective novel which ingeniously dramatizes the major ideas he has developed in the past 30 years.
Indeed, although Death in a Delphi Seminar is both a mystery and a roman a clef, it reads like nonfiction, and some readers may believe that Holland is describing an actual murder which took place in one of his literary seminars. Holland has constructed a suspenseful plot which holds the reader's interest from beginning to end. In searching for the solution to a puzzling crime, the reader is initiated into the arcane world of contemporary literary theory, a world profoundly influenced by Freudian ideas.
As Death in a Delphi Seminar opens, we learn that a female student in Holland's graduate seminar on reader-response criticism has been poisoned, presumably by another member of the class. The narrative arises out of the conflicting texts surrounding Patricia Hassler's death: transcripts of police interviews, student essays, department memos, newspaper accounts, the professor's private journal, and the inner musings of Lieutenant Norman “Justin” Rhodes, who is in charge of solving the murder. All eight members