For 'rookie' novelist, murder's the mystery at Harvard Business

Jeffrey Cruikshank had published nearly 20 books under his own name and had a considerable hand in another 20, but he had never written a mystery novel. So when he handed a half-finished manuscript to a colleague on the Milton School Committee last year, he told her, ''If you think it's good I'll keep going. Otherwise I'll put it away and never think about it again."

Happily, his ''bud" on the School Committee, third-grade teacher Mary Cobb, knew a good read when she saw it. Cruikshank completed ''Murder at the B-School," set at that crossroads of financial acumen and greed-driven fictional evil known as the Harvard Business School. It was published this fall by Mysterious Press at Warner Books.

By his own account, Cruikshank had a much better time at the ''B-School" than the character at the center of his novel, assistant professor Wim Vermeer, who is in the final year of a three-year contract and knows he's not going to make tenure. The novel's ''bleak perspective" comes from a guy ''who isn't measuring up," Cruikshank said, and discovers he's being framed for the murder of a business school student from an extremely wealthy family.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey, Cruikshank graduated from Amherst College and was working at MIT when he decided to get married, cut his hair, and look for a better-paying position. He took a job at Harvard Business School as an editor for the Harvard Business Review, hoping only to keep his head down and survive the duration of his two-year contract.

''My expectation was it would be boring, money-grubbing," Cruikshank said, ''but the business school [had] really interesting people. They were smarter than I was, better traveled, better read . . . It was very humbling to me. I had to lot to learn in a hurry." He stayed for seven years, then went into business for himself.

Since 1989 Cruikshank has owned a small, high-end corporate communications business, the Cruikshank Co., in a former chocolate factory in the Lower Mills section of Milton. With a small staff and word-of-mouth marketing, the business serves colleges, other institutions, businesses and private clients. He has written institutional histories, including one about Harvard Business School.

Cruikshank, 52, moved to Milton in 1980. With his children in the local schools (he and his wife have four, ages 9 to 23), he decided in 1989 to run for the School Committee.

''Your kids come along and you say, 'Who is running the place?' I went to School Committee meetings and I wasn't impressed," Cruikshank said. ''I said, 'I can do this.' "

He served on the committee for 15 years before recently stepping down, and helped persuade voters to spend $140 million to rebuild six schools that Cruikshank described as ''crowded, crumbling and obsolete."

His novel began with the image of ''a kid floating face down in a Jacuzzi," he said. To the initial character mix of the victim's old-money family, a bloodless dean, a senior professor who consults with billionaires, and the sympathetic but mediocre Vermeer, the plot adds manipulations of security systems and e-mail logs, an apparent suicide and a second murder.

''I paint myself into a series of corners and then try to get out of them," Cruikshank said.

The murder mystery is a familiar genre with its own rules. While playing within those rules, the author said, the genre appeals to him as ''a device on which to hang characters." The most memorable character in ''Murder at the B-School" is Boston Police Detective Barbara Brouillard, who combines a Somerville Catholic upbringing with an enormous capability to put overdeveloped egos in their place, whether they belong to Harvard deans or body-building security guards.

''It's about worlds colliding," Cruikshank said of the B-School setting, a place where extreme privilege bumps into nerdy strivers. ''Lower-middle-class kids are being transformed from one caste to another."

The B-School is still a Cruikshank Co. client, and the author admits to being glad his Harvard contacts shrugged off his murder mystery as nothing more threatening than a ''good read." But they were happy to find out they will not figure in his next book, Cruikshank said. With characters like the complex Brouillard, Cruikshank's mysteries have room to grow.

Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox@verizon.net.