If you’re around Washington D.C. this winter, you might want to consider swinging through the Renwick Gallery, located just a stone’s throw from the White House. A new display there, called “Murder Is Her Hobby,” features the work of Frances Glessner Lee, who used dollhouses to recreate real-life crime scenes and then used them to train homicide detectives. Each scene is exquisitely detailed, complete with tiny cups and saucers, charming wallpaper, and—always—a dead body, sometimes swinging from a rope or riddled with bullet holes. A flashlight and a crime report, written by Lee, accompany each of the 19 scenes.
Lee was friends with the kind of hard-nosed, fast talking detectives we romanticize in fiction today, and each story reads like something from the golden age of film noir. To wit:
Like the detectives who first learned from Lee in the ’40s and ’50s, visitors to the Renwick are invited to inspect the grisly scenes for themselves and determine whether the cause of death is murder, suicide, accident, or natural causes. Lee called her creations “nutshells,” as in, she hoped her dollhouses would help the boys in blue “convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.” The crimes that inspired each vignette—a woman drowned in a bathtub, a family massacred with a shotgun, a drunk dead in his jail cell—remain a secret.
Lee is considered the godmother of forensic science, but she worked her craft at a time when men carried the badges and guns. What kind of woman wanted to enter such a world?
Born in Chicago in 1878 to John and Frances, Lee could have been content with an affluent life. She was an heiress to the International Harvester fortune. She married a rich young lawyer, and played the role of a socialite, planning parties and charity events. But money and status gave her little satisfaction. After 16 years of marriage and three children, she separated from her husband. According to her son, the cause was, in part, his mother’s “creative urge coupled with . . . the desire to make things—which [her husband] did not share.” When she finally inherited the family cash pile at the age of 51, Lee was finally free—from her parents, her husband, and polite society—to pursue a life-long love: mysteries and crime. So she started working at her local police department and became the first woman in the country to earn the rank of police captain.
Lee started creating her dollhouses in 1943 at the age of 65. They helped teach the powers of observation that Lee believed were necessary in any crime scene investigation, challenging her students to pay attention to the minute details that might unlock a difficult case. Working side by side with a full time carpenter, Ralph Moser, Lee took at least three months and the equivalent of $40,000 to $80,000 to complete each scene. Her attention to detail—from the type of clothing worn by the victim, to the direction and shape of a blood spatter—bordered on the obsessive. Little hand-drawn calendars appear on the wall, frozen eerily on the month of the crime. If the victim received mail, she addressed the tiny envelopes with a single hair brush and miniaturized that day’s newspaper.
It’s no wonder that, among those who love crime fiction, Lee is something of a cult figure. She has been the subject of articles, books, documentaries, and podcasts. Rumor has it she is the inspiration for Angela Lansbury’s endearing, tenacious character on Murder, She Wrote. Erle Stanley Gardner, who created Perry Mason, attended her lectures at Harvard, befriended her, and referred to Lee as “one of the few women who ever kept Perry Mason guessing.”
Visit the Renwick Gallery and you’re sure to join a crowd of amateur sleuths trying to crack the nutshells. One woman told me that this was the second afternoon she’d spent in the gallery. She hadn’t planned on visiting a second time, “but it sort of sticks with you.” Standing around a scene with a dead doll who apparently slashed her own throat (or was it the man she met that morning on the sidewalk?) one investigator told me she thought the blade of the jackknife was far too large to have caused the wound. Her friend ignored our progress, distracted by the interior design: “I just love those curtains in the window . . .”
There’s something for everyone—you, the in-laws, the grandkids—at “Murder is Her Hobby.” It doesn’t take an art critic to appreciate Lee’s accomplishments as a criminal investigator and master craftsman. Really, it’s as simple as your first reaction: “Oh gracious sakes, did that kid burn down the cabin with his uncle still inside?”
