The Professor and the Mystery Writer : Books: When Carolyn Heilbrun created her detective 25 years ago, she was afraid she would be found out by Columbia University officials. Today she’s a respected novelist of that genre.

Kate Fansler, erudite detective, does not actually exist. Wealthy, brainy, witty, willowy, prone to putting aside her duties as a tenured professor of literature at a very Columbia-like university just long enough to solve the occasional murder--how could she be real? She lives and offers her sardonic observations on the world only in the pages of mysteries by Amanda Cross.

Who does not actually exist either. Cross, elegant mystery author, sells quite respectably for the genre, has won the Nero Wolfe award and been nominated for the prestigious Edgar, and recently published the ninth novel in the Fansler series, “A Trap for Fools.” For years, readers wondered who she was, unaware that there is no Amanda Cross except on book jackets.

On the other hand, Carolyn Heilbrun, a distinguished professor of literature at Columbia and an influential feminist critic, is entirely real. Being real, she found herself, in 1963 at age 37, pressed on every side: teaching a full course load, seeking tenure, sharing her university office with colleagues and her Riverside Drive apartment with a husband, three children under the age of 8 and a dog. “You’re just never alone,” she recalls, in the now-familiar lament of what was then a rarer species, the hyphenated woman. “I felt I had very little time of my own.”

Worse luck, she was running out of the English mysteries she’d taken refuge in for years. That was when Heilbrun invented Kate Fansler and, fearing possible retaliation by the tenure-granters at Columbia, the pseudonym Amanda Cross. “This is all hindsight,” Heilbrun says, “but looking back, this was a space of my own.” As she wrote years later, “I sought to create an individual whose destiny offered more possibility than I could comfortably imagine for myself.”

It is a fitting time for hindsight, this 25th anniversary of her first Fansler tale. Women have long been mystery writers (consider Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James) but when “In the Last Analysis” was published in 1964, there’d been a historic dearth of female protagonists. “With the great male writers--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald--the women were either bitches or the women they loved,” Heilbrun says. “One of the things that makes me feel very good is the number of women detectives there are now. Women police detectives. Lesbian detectives.”

Trend in Mysteries

Indeed, the great influx of women writers and characters is one of the unmistakable trends in contemporary mysteries. Roughly 40% of the membership of the Mystery Writers of America is female. A group called Sisters in Crime, formed three years ago to promote women practitioners of the art, has grown from 30 members (including Amanda Cross) to more than 500. Its president, novelist Nancy Pickard, is among those who call Cross “something of a mentor, literally or figuratively, for a lot of women mystery writers. . . . When my turn came, there had been this person there first.”

Heilbrun says she “had no noble ends in mind” in 1963, however. Begetting Prof. Fansler was a hoot. “All detectives are fantasy figures in a sense,” says Heilbrun. This fantasy figure was roughly Heilbrun’s age and shared her profession, her astringent humor, her interest in social issues. She had an Upper West Side apartment that probably didn’t look terribly different from Heilbrun’s--stuffed furniture in dignified colors, Oriental rugs, paintings and the inevitable wall of books, an academic’s home. Fansler even shares her inventor’s willingness to wander onto interesting but tangential conversational paths. “I used to be quite thin myself,” Heilbrun muses, gray-haired and grandmotherly, though not a grandmother, at 63. “But the only way to stay thin when you’re old is to live on a lettuce leaf, like Jackie Kennedy.”

Anyway. Where Fansler differed dramatically was that Heilbrun made her single, childless, unencumbered. She gave her beauty because “I wanted to give her everything and see what she would do with it.” Heilbrun even granted her sleuth a trust fund; “you can’t have a detective who can’t hop on a plane.” Although, she says thoughtfully, “this question about rich women. . . . They are the most conservative, the most backward, the least adventurous.” Heilbrun belongs to the Cosmopolitan Club, where nearly every woman has money and her husband’s surname, “which I find simply appalling in this day and age.”

Anyway. Heilbrun was sure her department would take a dim view of this sideline when she was reviewed for tenure. “It was dangerous as it was; I was suspected even then of being a feminist,” she says. The name Amanda Cross, combining a surname from a Nova Scotia road sign with an Anglophiliac first name and having no other significance, sheltered Heilbrun for half a dozen years. Being anonymous “was great fun, I now realize,” she says. “Secrecy is always a kind of power. . . . A sense of power was the last thing a woman was supposed to have.”

She had one unnerving experience: Her first Fansler mystery was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award (after Poe, of course) and Heilbrun feared she might win. “It would have just been awful, simply awful,” she says. “There would’ve been some attempt to find out who (Cross) was.” But Cross was spared, and Heilbrun went on writing scholarly works under one name and mysteries under the other, on one occasion corresponding with a fellow professor-critic under both identities.

Cross had fans from the beginning, not so much for her plots (“not my strongest point,” she acknowledges) as for her gutsy heroine. “The women that I knew, and I myself, were just entranced,” says Jane Bakerman, professor of English at Indiana State and a scholarly writer on mysteries. “Kate was smart. She held down a major job in a major place. She was strong. She was a single woman who regarded marriage as a choice, not a destiny. She was vocalizing some of the things a number of us had felt or wished for.” Bakerman wrote a paper on Cross without knowing whom she was.

Cover Is Blown

It was the publication of “Poetic Justice” in 1970 that blew Heilbrun’s cover. The Fansler novels constitute sociocultural history as well as literate entertainment; this time Fansler’s university, reeling from the conflicts and questions unleashed by a student takeover, was recognizably Columbia. Furthermore, a revered but increasingly anachronistic senior faculty member, whose graduate student Fansler had been, bore a marked resemblance to Columbia’s Lionel Trilling, whose graduate student Heilbrun had been.

Heilbrun the emergent feminist never confronted Trilling, but Kate Fansler politely told her elder colleague that “I have never found youthful male arrogance . . . especially appealing, while you, of course, have.” (“There is a certain amount of wish fulfillment in all writing,” Heilbrun observes, mum on the Trillingness of her fictional professor.)

“Poetic Justice” started people poking around. Her associates and friends began to guess. One colleague even looked up the pseudonym at the copyright bureau. Her children were getting older. “I don’t believe in keeping a lot of secrets from one’s children,” she says. And she was, by then, a tenured professor. So, “gradually, it leaked out; I let it leak out.”

Now, she rather likes being known as Cross, whose mysteries far outsell Heilbrun’s “Reinventing Womanhood” and “Writing a Woman’s Life,” among other books. The only troubling part of the unmasking is the flackery involved in book promotion. “It does worry me how publicity begins, how it snowballs,” she reflects, then veers back from the detour. “That’s just grumbling about how awful life is, which you tend to do after 60.”

Older, Pricklier

Kate Fansler, over the course of nine novels, has grown older and pricklier as well, though Heilbrun notes that “she’s not aging at the same rate as normal human beings.” Fansler wed, though did not adopt the surname of, a wry attorney from the D.A.’s office. “I did not want her to get married, but she got into this relationship and relationships have momentum,” Heilbrun explains. “But she’ll never have children, I promise you that.” Over the years, too, “the importance of other women in her life, women’s bonds, women’s friendships, has grown.”

In this she resembles her creator, who believes that “if we have individuals who climb up and pull the ladder after them, this feminist wave will end like the others.” Heilbrun, “a feminist of a generation that produced very few of them,” was the token woman in virtually every arena she entered for years. But this has changed: “The wealth of wonderful women I now know--all of them younger, of course--it’s one of the miracles of life.” She points out that, by the by, when women writers envision utopias, they are frequently all-female. “Men don’t invent all-male utopias, and the reason, of course, is that they have utopia here.” But she digresses.

Speaking of miracles, Heilbrun has been married to her economist-husband since she was a 19-year-old Wellesley student, another “enormous secret” for years lest other young women consider similarly premature commitment. It was the Second World War, she tries to explain. “You didn’t go to bed with people the way people do today.” Pause. “Today is much better.” Fansler, known to have lovers here and there, would no doubt agree.

Occasionally, Heilbrun thinks she ought to write something different, fiction without Fansler. She’s even given it a halfhearted try. “Doesn’t work,” she’s found; she’s stuck with, as Fansler’s husband once fondly called her, “a sort of overage Nancy Drew.”

“She haunts me. She’s there,” Heilbrun says with a confessional shrug. “I like her.”