Henry Spearman is not a professional detective but an amateur sleuth. He is more Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey than Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes.
I can somewhat identify with him as he is an academic economist. But I can’t fully identify as he is a Nobel Prize-winning economist!
His adventures are written by ‘Marshall Jevons’, who is himself fictional. He is named after the two prominent economists Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) and William Jevons (1835-1882). Marshall pioneered many aspects of economic analysis and taught Keynes. Jevons was another founder of the marginal revolution and worked for a time at the Sydney Mint.
Marshall Jevons is a pseudonym for two US professors of economics, William Breit and Kenneth Elzinga. The first Spearman novel took them three years to write as they were concurrently working on a book about penalties under competition law. The Spearman books have been published by Princeton University Press and MIT Press, not normally associated with whodunits. Some have been translated into foreign languages (some might say economics is already a foreign language).
I feel the standard disclaimer in the books could be replaced with ‘all characters are imaginary and any resemblance to Milton Friedman is entirely coincidental’. For Henry Spearman shares a lot of characteristics with one of the twentieth century’s leading economists. Like Friedman, Spearman is a short, balding, eloquent, highly opinionated Nobel prizewinning American economist who works in a top US university. Both are neo-classical economists with a fervent belief in the free market.
In each story Spearman uses economic principles such as the law of demand, opportunity cost or the prisoner’s dilemma to solve the mystery which has the local constabulary baffled. The books have been placed on some undergraduate reading lists. A neoclassical economist like the authors, Spearman assumes everyone behaves rationally. To my mind, this could be a hinderance in solving crimes.
His first adventure, Murder at the Margin (1978) finds Spearman holidaying on a small Caribbean island (the same island on which the authors had stayed). In classical detective story style, a murder occurs amid a small number of diverse potential culprits in an isolated setting. It was favourably reviewed by Friedman himself.
The sequel, The Fatal Equilibrium (1985), is set on Spearman’s Princeton campus and the apparent motive for murder is academic promotion. One is reminded of Henry Kissinger’s aphorism that “university politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low”. I found the scenes set in faculty meetings quite relatable (in tone if not in consequence).
A Deadly Indifference (1995), while the third in the series, is actually set before the two previous novels, in the mid-1960s. But it features a time-displaced rather than a younger Spearman. It is perhaps my favourite as it is set at the University of Cambridge, home of some of my favourite economists and a very agreeable location. (As a Cambridge economist is rumoured to have said, “time is necessary to stop everything happening at once, and space is necessary to stop everything happening in Cambridge.”) It revolves around a plan to purchase Alfred Marshall’s house.
The final (so far) outing for Spearman is the Mystery of the Invisible Hand (2014). It is a solo work by Kenneth Elzinga, as William Breit had passed away in 2011. It is about the market for art. This is a contemporary topic at a time when British artist Damien Hirst has just issued a set of works he calls ‘the currency’.
Some crime novel readers have disparaged the Spearman novels for what they regard as a pedestrian style. But I would recommend them, at least to fellow economists.
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