Former Carnegie Museum paleontologist pens murder mysteries
Funny how people write fiction to convey deep truths.
But it’s even more curious when a full-fledged scientist, who spent the first half of his career in Pittsburgh, starts writing murder mystery novels.
And it is especially curious that this distinguished paleontologist — who discovered the most fully intact Centosaurus skull fossil (the popular horn-frilled dinosaur) — has served a quarter century as director of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.
So one must ask Leonard “Kris” Krishtalka: What’s an accomplished scientist like you writing in a genre like this?
“I hate when people call them mysteries,” he answered. “I prefer ‘intrigues’ — scientific intrigue wrapped inside the human intrigue of love, loss, betrayal, fraud, chicanery and murder ... the human condition.”
He hails from a family of writers and simply loves to write. All published by Anamcara Press, his novels include “The Bone Field” ($17.99) and “Death Spoke” ($18.99), both released in 2019. The release of “The Camel Driver” has been delayed until fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Midwest Book Awards just gave its gold medal to “Death Spoke” in the fiction–mystery/thriller category. Kirkus Reviews described the novel as “an astonishingly clever tale — both intelligently conceived and executed.”
He’s now writing a fourth novel, “Native Blood,” in which paleontologists wrestle with the earliest human habitation of North America. He also completed another true-crime mystery based in Kansas.
Bones or books?
For sure, his novels contain lots of paleontology and ancient and modern history, including a focus on the Enlightenment. There even are Nazis and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporters. All provide plot foundation for characters to reveal how intellectualism and academic accomplishment fail to protect them from personality flaws, vengeance and bad decisions.
His books also depict academia and museum life as more Machiavellian than Socratic — more combative than collaborative — which in extreme cases becomes the very stuff of murder mysteries. Mr. Krishtalka’s novels follow traditional narrative lines of murder mysteries but emerge as works of serious literature with themes that bounce around the brain long after the last word.
In 1975, Mr. Krishtalka, with his newly earned doctorate in paleontology, followed his mentor to
Carnegie Museum of Natural History and soon started writing a column, “Missing Links,” for Carnegie Magazine that featured his “irreverent treatment of natural history subjects.” The best of those were combined in 1989 as a work of nonfiction: “Dinosaur Plots and Other Intrigues in Natural History.”
His nearly 20 years in Pittsburgh were interrupted by a threeyear stint with the National Science Foundation. Upon his return, he was promoted to assistant director of science while serving as a University of Pittsburgh adjunct professor before leaving for Kansas in 1995.
“I love the Carnegie,” Mr. Krishtalka said. “It’s a fabulous museum. It gave me my career. Its history is storied as the birthplace of American paleontology, along with the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
“The Carnegie always will occupy a part of me like no other institution does, despite all that I say about it — the criticism part of it. But you can’t have a bland book.”
The first 10 chapters of “The Bone Field” were written in Pittsburgh but rewritten in Kansas. Pittsburgh serves as the setting for two of his murder mysteries and plays a role in all three.
Murder stew
Krishtalka novels are an intellectual stew of history, science and murder with lots of wellpenned pages featuring descriptions and depictions of Carnegie Museum, the city, the South Side and Homewood, among other locales.
His detective, Harry Przewalski (pronounced something like Zhevalski), shares his surname with a mulelike horse from Siberia. He lives in a gritty South Side Slopes apartment and drives a car that “thieves refuse to steal” while smoking cigarettes he rolls with boutique Dutch tobacco, all while nursing a personal tragedy that feeds his desire to transition from paleontologist to detective.
The name serves as comic relief and plot diversion but also convinced one publisher to decline publication of his novels because Mr. Krishtalka refused to give his private eye an Americanized name, the likes of Mike Hammer or Sam Spade. His novels also feature a hard-nosed city detective — foil turn ally — with the locally famous surname of Mazeroski.
“The Bone Field” involves a Carnegie Museum-financed hunt for world-renowned archaeologist Peter Marchand after he goes missing in the Badlands of Wyoming during a dinosaur fossil dig.
As the plot unravels, Przewalski “excavates the dirty underbelly of people’s lives, unearthing sexual betrayals, treachery, fraud and
murder buried beneath the science of petrified shards, skin and bones,” says Amazon.com, whose customers give his novels 4+ star ratings.
He also must contend with a brutal killing of a loved one that sent him seeking refuge in a desert war, then trading a career in paleontology to one with “a gun and a license to detect,” it says.
“Death Spoke” involves the murder of a paleontologist whose lover and fellow professor is arrested as the obvious suspect. He hires Przewalksi based on his solving “The Bone Field” case.
That novel, based at the University of Kansas, involves prehistoric drawings found in French caves, in an area where Nazi atrocities occurred. That buried history and resulting academic debates seed a dramatic finale, with a key plot turn occurring in Pittsburgh.
‘Camel Driver’
The weave of history, science and murder come into full play in “The Camel Driver,” all initiated by vandalism of Carnegie Museum’s exhibit, “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions,” since renamed “Lion Attacking a Dromedary.”
Jules Verreaux, the famed French taxidermist, created the famous diorama in 1867 that included a human skull and teeth. Przewalski sums up the plot as: “A dirty business, taxidermy. Not much cultural respect. Graves robbed. Bodies stolen and sold. People murdered. Humans stuffed.”
Vandalism of the Carnegie exhibit at the novel’s opening generates “the scientific intrigue about how museum exhibits tell the bigotry of their time,” Mr. Krishtalka said.
“Here we have a fabulous — actually marvelous — creation, one of the most inventive exhibits ever created by Jules Verreaux and his brother” and sold by the American Museum of New York to the Carnegie because officials there “thought it was too entertaining and popular.”
Verreaux did animal taxidermy but also did human ones, leading to his discovery that all races are intellectually equal, with the samesized and configured brains and few skeletal differences.
“The Camel Driver” emerges as a tour de force with a strong message for an age still grappling with racial discrimination. Kirkus Reviews called it a “fiercely intelligent crime drama as emotionally sharp as it is historically inventive.”
The novel also focuses on a lawsuit against Verreaux on charges that he illegally ended his promised betrothal to a woman, with Mr. Krishtalka using actual trial transcripts in his novel.
Verreaux, like Przewalski, discovers important truths along the way.
“The racial-superiority idea is an absolute pack of lies and an absolute invention. For Verreaux, his own taxidermy of different peoples provides an epiphany and that’s the scientific core of ‘The Camel Driver,’” Mr. Krishtalka said.
“This taxonomy of racism — of racial superiority — rank as one of the greatest evils of our time, and the evil side of the Enlightenment, kind of like a mutant gene passed on generation to generation,” the author said.
“These racist memes, started by the anthropology of the 1800s, have been passed on in our culture, in literature, film, plays, art, and natural history exhibits and the human zoos at World Fairs.”
“It is now our job to exorcise those cultural memes from our cultural consciousness,” he said.
A Kirkus Review of “The Bone Field” says Mr. Krishtalka enlivens the genre, “not only with the paleontological slant, but also by highlighting a strain of professional resentment specifically found in academia.”
“The major theme of the novel is the relentless pursuit of truth, and the author executes it intelligently. As a reporter remarks: ‘We’re alike, Harry ... journalists ... paleontologists ... detectives — we dig up what history tries to bury.”
Just add murder “intrigue” novelist to that list.