After reading another Golden Age mystery set at a university recently, I re-visited Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay (1894-1979). Originally published in 1935 by Skeffington & Sons, the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, also set at Oxford, this British Library Crime Classics edition was published in 2014 with an introduction by Stephen Booth.
I was intrigued to learn that Hay wrote three mysteries and went on to more serious nonfiction works, much like Sayers who gave up mystery writing for theology. Before Hay wrote fiction, she helped conduct surveys of rural industries in England and Wales under the aegis of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University. Later she returned to the subject, publishing some 20 books on quilting and other crafts under her married name Mavis Fitzrandolph. See Worldcat.com for a bibliography.
Hay attended St. Hilda’s College in Oxford and she turned to it for the setting of her second mystery. In Persephone College, one of the two women’s colleges at Oxford, a group of undergraduates meet in secret near the River Cherwell to vent their dislike of Myra Denning, the college Bursar, when a canoe bearing the drowned body of that same Bursar floats past. The undergraduates attempt to investigate the death, which all agree can’t be entirely accidental, and pull in students from the nearest male college to help. Miss Cordell, the Principal of the college, is afraid of negative publicity for her students, who are after all flouting the all-male bastion of Oxford with their presence. The police inspector from Scotland Yard is surprisingly patient with the students, enlisting them for their aid, probably to keep track of them, and sorts through the not very many clues to a logical but not surprising conclusion.
This book was an easy read. I noticed that Hay didn’t use much slang, if any, which always dates a piece of fiction. Use of slang during the wrong time period often trips up the historical fiction writer. The bias against higher education for women gets significant airing here. Oxford did not award degrees to women until just a few years before this book was published and prejudice was still heavy.
The plot lacked credible red herrings (perhaps this a more recent development in crime fiction) and about two-thirds through I began to wonder just how the story would resolve itself when the offender came to the fore of the story and the threads were neatly if a little tediously tied up.
A slight mystery but a great look at Oxford in the mid-1930s. Read this one for its academic setting and snapshot of undergraduate life.