Carolyn Whitzman's Clara at the Door with a Revolver is a page-turner whodunit, focusing on the fascinating and intriguing bio of the alleged murderess, a cross-dressing, maybe-bisexual, Black (mixed-race) dancer and seamstress, who backed up her male wardrobe with an ever-ready, phallic-symbol pistol. Whitzman is objective in her research and scrupulous in her analyses (even in speculating about motives, character, relationships, and psychologies). Yet she is also righteously sympathetic to the travails of Clara Ford, a single, Black, working-class mom, subjected to all the racist, sexist, and elitist hypocrisy of Toronto the Good, a Victorian-era bastion of white supremacy, British imperialism, and top-hatted patriarchy. Her tone always casual, her vocabulary always everyday (with her notes and references never allowed to interrupt the narrative), Whitzman reveals the ensconced corruption of the WASP establishment prepared to hang a Black woman for her "murder" of a rich Caucasian, even if he may have raped either herself or her daughter, and/or regardless of whether Clara Ford was actually innocent. That Ford's self-defense testimony may have saved her from the noose also recovers for the annals of "Black excellence" an "average" woman whose eloquence and poise overcame the empowered prejudices of journalists, judges, and cops.