Oxford vs Cambridge Transcript
Caroline: The precise appeal of golden age detective fiction is a tricky equation to solve, I find. These are books about violence and murder that we read for pleasure and relaxation. They tend to focus on a very narrow slice of society, the wealthy, and work with a small set of tropes and constraints, yet many of us read them over and over again without getting bored. Indeed, that familiarity and repetition can be part of the appeal — it's comforting and reassuring to recognise recurring elements in a new story.
One aspect of the genre's appeal lies in the settings authors of the 1920s and 1930s chose for their murder mysteries. This is an area where there is great range and variety, with settings as far apart as the ancient city of Petra in Jordan and the claustrophobic suburbs of England's Home Counties. But as I've been reading over the past few years, two cities that share historic connections have stood out to me in particular. Book after book has been set in these places, not just during the golden age of detective fiction, but also since, with a frequency that suggested something deeper going on than just "both have old universities". I had to look closer.
Why is there so much crime fiction set in Oxford and Cambridge? Join me, as I attempt to find out.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.
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The roster of authors who set a book in Oxford or Cambridge during the interwar period contains some impressively high profile literary names. Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin are all on it. They are accompanied by some slightly less well known, but nonetheless interesting, writers, such as Mavis Doriel Hay and Lois Austen-Leigh, as well as those who dabbled in detective fiction once or twice alongside an absorbing career in another profession, like J.C. Masterman and Glyn Daniel.
In more recent times, they have been joined in this endeavour by high profile crime fiction practitioners including as Colin Dexter, Kate Atkinson and Val McDermid. I haven't done an exhaustive survey, but I would guess that aside from London, no other English cities have seen this sort of sustained, century-long interest as a setting for murder mysteries. Even widening the net to the rest of the UK, I think we'd struggle to find an equivalent. There are quite a few stories and novels set in Edinburgh, for instance, but for all that Ian Rankin and others have firmly put Scotland's capital on the map in the last few decades, there isn't the equivalent activity a hundred years ago.
In between the golden age of detective fiction and the crime fiction of the late 20th and 21st centuries, there occurred a more general literary vogue for campus novels — that is, fiction set in and around a university, focusing either on its students or faculty or both, as well as the themes of scholarship and intellectual attainment that such a place evokes. There are notable examples from the 1950s, such as C.P. Snow's The Masters and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and the trend has continued ever since, with major works by David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury in the 1970s, Don DeLilo and Bret Eastern Ellis in the 1980s and Donna Tartt in the 1990s continuing it. I've been fascinated by this literary subgenre, so neatly defined by its setting and nothing else, for years. I even did a thesis about it when I was an undergraduate, which I have not dared read since, in case it's appalling. Since the city centres of both Oxford and Cambridge are architecturally dominated by their ancient universities and both places are known globally for this reason, it seems sensible to consider their murder mysteries in relation to this vogue for university-based fiction.
There are earlier literary examples that point to this alignment too, such as Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited from 1945 and Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson from 1911, although these are sometimes termed "varsity" novels rather than "campus novels", since they tell a story from the students' perspective only, and tend to be set at Oxford or Cambridge. In the UK in the first half of the twentieth century, "varsity" was a word that signified those universities particularly, rather than the more general landscape of higher education as it does now.
Campus novels and varsity novels are often semi-autobiographical. Evelyn Waugh was a student at Oxford in the early 1920s, where he was a member of Hertford College and part of an avant-garde social circle that included several members from Christ Church. He gives much of this same experience to his characters in Brideshead Revisited: Charles Ryder attends a college very much like Waugh's own, also in the early 1920s, and Ryder's life-changing friendship is forged with Sebastian Flyte, who belongs to Christ Church. One way to explain the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge in fiction, including crime fiction, is just to think about the university backgrounds of the people who graduated and became writers. Certainly in the first half of the twentieth century, and to an extent still now, the people with the means to realise their literary ambitions are also the people who have been students at these prestigious institutions. And while these cities are much more than just the universities that they contain, I do think that this connection is an important part of why they're such a popular setting for fiction.
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I certainly think the concentration of Oxbridge graduates in literary circles is one factor. But it isn't the only factor, especially when we're thinking about golden age crime fiction. The puzzle plots that this genre is known for thrive within boundaries, whether natural or artificial, and both Oxford and Cambridge are full of colleges that could have been designed for precisely this purpose. Harking back to the medieval monastery or cloister, they often consist of several interconnected quads or courts: square courtyards or gardens with buildings on all four sides, with entrances that only open out onto the inner square. It's a very inward style of architecture, sheltering inhabitants from the noise and interruption of the rest of the world. This layout is practical as well as historical, enabling scholars to work communally and meet often without actually having to share accommodation. Most colleges are accessed through a single gate onto the public street, which is guarded by a porters' lodge and staffed around the clock. While there will be other points of access through the college's walls, these tend to be restricted to inhabitants only and need to be unlocked with a key or, today, an electronic fob. The latter, of course, creates a log that can be checked and verified. The vast majority of visitors and ne'er do wells will have to pass through the main lodge or think of a creative way of circumventing it.
I'm sure crime fiction fans can immediately appreciate the possibilities of this. Finding a plausible way of closing a plot's circle of suspects is one of the detective fiction writer's earliest challenges when writing a murder mystery. That's why we have so many books set on trains, boats, islands and at remote country houses. Physical limitations like walls and the sea provide a perfect explanation for why the crime has to have been committed by one of the small handful of characters that the author has already introduced. "A stranger broke in and then escaped undetected" just isn't as satisfying a story.
When seen from the air, Oxford and Cambridge are a veritable honeycomb of grassy or paved squares enclosed by buildings and protected by their lodges. If a golden age detective novel is set in such a place, then all those within can be considered to be within the circle of suspects. Alibis can be confirmed or disproved by the on-duty porter, whose job it is to observe everybody's comings and goings and keep a record of it. It's a gift to author and detective alike.
Several Oxford and Cambridge set mysteries make good use of this arrangement. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers from 1935 draws its closed circle tightly around the academic and administrative staff who live in an Oxford women's college. Several of the book's big action scenes revolve around who is in college at night and the areas to which they have access, and Padgett the porter is a key character in it all. The Case of the Gilded Fly from 1944, Edmund Crispin's first outing for his Oxford professor detective Gervase Fen, also makes use of the college's architecture for its crime, although the book does also range more widely around the city as well, mostly to pubs.
But the most interesting example I have come across in this vein is in The Cambridge Murders by Dilwyn Rees from 1945. Dilwyn Rees was the penname initially used by Glyn Daniel, a Welsh archaeologist who both studied and worked at St John's College, Cambridge. He wrote two detective novels, both featuring an archaeologist sleuth, Sir Richard Cherrington, who is the Vice-President of the fictional Fisher College, Cambridge. When one of the college's porters is found dead on the last day of term, Cherrington turns amateur detective and pursues his own investigation for the killer alongside Scotland Yard's official version.
The plot has further twists, including the disappearance of the college's very unpopular Dean, but having the murder victim be a porter seems to me to be a little dig at the idea that the college and its porter provides an unassailable fortress within which a criminal can be trapped. In fact, there is a group of people resident in a college who aren't quite so easily tracked and monitored. As one character points out: "The trouble about all these dons living in college is that they have no alibis, and cannot reasonably be expected to have alibis." Most of Daniel's novel concerns the college fellows, their jealousies and rivalries, and so on.
Because they occupy positions of trust and respect in the college, they have passkeys and free rein about the buildings at all hours, and so cannot be so easily ruled in and out of that closed circle in the way that students and household staff, who exist under more restrictions, can. This book is especially concerned with timings and alibis and lies, so it makes sense that Daniel wanted to emphasise this loophole. Other college based books, such as Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes, are a little more willing to take the physical boundaries of such a college at face value. That book, by the way, is not strictly set in Oxford or Cambridge, but in a fictional college called St Anthony's in Bletchley, halfway along the now-defunct railway line between the two cities. I count it among the Oxford and Cambridge novels, though, because it is so clearly modelled upon those places, and because Innes, real name J.I.M. Stewart, was a professor at Christ Church, Oxford, having previously been a student at Oriel College. Writers really do like to write what they know.
After the break: beyond town and gown.
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Although the colleges are by no means the sum total of Oxford and Cambridge as cities — we'll get to some books that cover other aspects of these places soon, I promise — the universities are what a lot of people think of when they hear these names. There is supposed to be something tranquil, otherworldly even, about a community and a city devoted to scholarship and learning, which is an atmosphere that can contrast productively with the evil and horror that accompanies the discovery of a murderer. I think that's also a big part of why writers set books there. That name recognition, the sense of "et in arcadia ego", and the identification with old, storied institutions with lots of peculiar and pointless traditions.
Even a cursory look at most of the rest of golden age detective fiction would tell you that readers really enjoy stories set in the upper echelons of society. It isn't an accident that there are so many murders at country houses and in exclusive holiday resorts. Maybe it's because it's fun to catch a glimpse of "how the other half live", or perhaps readers just take pleasure in tales of privileged people being inconvenienced by police work. Class envy or class warfare, it's still a dominant facet of this genre. This era of crime fiction has, harshly perhaps, been described as "snobbery with violence", and I don't think that characterisation is totally without foundation.
Oxford and Cambridge, especially the old fancy colleges with their high table dining rituals and atmosphere of historic grandeur, belong alongside the country house as an emblem of Britishness and privilege. International recognition is a piece of this too, especially since for pre-WW2 British writers getting published in America could make a huge financial difference to a career as an author. These cities are familiar to us now from decades of books, TV and film, but they were also well known to readers in the 1930s from the popular fiction of that time. Many things about the world have changed in that time, but the fact that in 1935 it was completely plausible to have a professor express horror at a policeman entering a college to investigate a crime, and it would still be plausible in a book published 70, 80, 90 years later, is remarkable to me. Such long lasting familiarity is a great boon to a mystery writer who just wants to get on with delivering the meat of their plot.
Oxford and Cambridge offer a writer a rich palimpsest of existing fictions upon which to build their new story, and readers enjoy the game of compare and contrast this provides. Everybody wins.
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So far, I have talked about Oxford and Cambridge as comparable places — even combined, as they so often are, into that handy yet ugly portmanteau, Oxbridge. But I think we need to do some comparisons too. I did put "vs" in the episode title, after all. Speaking just of the books published during the golden age itself, my instinct is that there is slightly more crime fiction set in Oxford than in Cambridge, although it is a fairly close thing. Some of them pair up very nicely: the natural counterpart to The Cambridge Murders, I think, is J.C. Masterman's An Oxford Tragedy from 1933. Masterman was, like Daniel, a fellow and his book is also concerned with the murder of a don within the college environment. A historian by profession, Masterman also had a career in academic administration. After returning from his second world war service during which he ran a double agent system for the British secret service, he became first the Provost or head of Worcester College, Oxford, and then the Vice Chancellor of the whole university. I liked An Oxford Tragedy very much — it has an intriguing detective in the visiting lecturer Ernst Brendel and, being told from the perspective of the "Watson" character, the college's senior tutor, it has depth and a little more range of emotion.
Gaudy Night we have already discussed extensively on this podcast, and I don't think Cambridge has a novel to offer that matches it, but there is another Oxford story that has some similarities. Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay was published the same year and is also set in a fictional Oxford women's college. There's even a crucial incident on the river with a punt in both books. The general atmosphere is very different, though. Death on the Cherwell is much lighter and less concerned with the Big Questions about life, the universe and everything than the Sayers novel is. There's actually much more description of the river and the life that surrounds it, too, as that's where the discovery of the college bursar's corpse occurs. I appreciate this as a little insight into a bit of Oxford that is not quads and lodges and so on.
Also in a more light-hearted mode is Murder at Cambridge by Q Patrick, the quixotic penname under which four writers — Richard Wilson Webb, Hugh Wheeler, Martha Mott Kelley and Mary Louise Aswell — wrote detective fiction in various collaborative combinations. This one, from 1933, was by Webb alone. It's a locked room mystery set at a fictional All Saints College, Cambridge, and it unfolds over the space of a single week, told from the point of view of a young American who has come from Harvard to study there. While some of the events described are far from being funny (suspected suicide, attempted poisoning, and so on), there is a certain fish-out-of-water comedy to this book, underlined by the fact that when the first American edition was published it included an glossary for readers unfamiliar with the terminology of Cambridge life in the 1930s.
Where I think Cambridge definitely has the edge is in golden age novels that break free of college life. Margery Allingham's Police at the Funeral from 1931 is a highlight here, being a murder mystery set in Cambridge that is not substantially about the university at all. It sees Albert Campion summoned to investigate a household plagued by mysterious deaths. The formidable matriarch, Great Aunt Caroline Faraday, is the widow of an academic, but other than that this story is much more town than gown. We get some picturesque scenes of the river and in the Faraday's well-to-do suburb, too. The novel is much more concerned with familial relations and parental control than it is with academic prowess or traditions.
Another honourable mention in this vein, also from 1931, is The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh, which has been recently republished by the British Library. Although not nearly as successful as the Allingham, it was an intriguing attempt by Austen-Leigh to combine a Cambridge college plot concerning a potential drug smuggling ring with a country house mystery in the neighbouring county of Suffolk. A sort of two for one deal.
So, to sum up — I think Oxford takes the prize for the best academic mysteries, because Gaudy Night and An Oxford Tragedy are so good, but if I want crime fiction that is set in a historic city but not wholly focused on a university, then I'm heading to Cambridge.
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But the tale of these two cities doesn't end with the conclusion of the golden age of detective fiction in the 1940s. Crime writers of much more recent generations are still choosing to set their books in Oxford and Cambridge, for one or more of the reasons that I've already mentioned — they know these places because of their own university days perhaps, or because they want to evoke readers' existing associations with them. Oxford and Cambridge begin to seem as improbably blood-soaked as the the villages of Midsomer Murders.
Colin Dexter's thirteen Inspector Morse novels, beginning with Last Bus to Woodstock in 1975, and all the subsequent television adaptations, did a lot to cement Oxford in popular culture as the "home of the murder mystery". Although I had long been a fan of Morse on TV, I only read this book very recently for the first time for a Shedunnit Book Club discussion, and I was surprised to find it a lot darker and grimmer than the picturesque version of Oxford that is presented on screen. Those sunlit establishing shots of sandstone colleges or beautiful villages or cosy pub interiors — that's not quite the vibe of the original fiction. Nonetheless, Dexter's creation did spawn some incredibly valuable IP that has stayed on screen for decades, through Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, and I do think that at least some of the Oxford crime fiction that has been published since is owing to his success. Dexter, incidentally, was the only writer I found when researching this episode who attended university in one city — he studied at Cambridge — and then set his fiction in the other one.
Val McDermid, an alumna of St Hilda's College, Oxford, published a standalone novel in 2010 that is set in a fictionalised version of the college. Trick of the Dark is quite far from Shedunnit's usual fare, being quite psychological and, well, dark. I did appreciate, though, that McDermid had updated the trope of the college novel to incorporate the purpose that these places are often put in modern times. The murder victim that first brings her sleuth to town to investigate is a groom who has been killed just after his big day — the college is now a wedding venue as well as a place of learning.
Cambridge also has its share of more recent crime fiction. Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, her first book featuring ex-police private investigator Jackson Brodie is set there, and sees him take on a cold case in the city. Alison Bruce has written seven contemporary police procedurals set there too, focused on Gary Goodhew, the youngest detective in Cambridge CID. The series begins with 2009's Cambridge Blue.
But of more interest to me personally are two authors who have written new books set in Cambridge during the golden age of detective fiction, part of a wider trend for historical fiction. Barbara Cleverly has published two such novels so far, 2018's Fall of Angels and 2019's Invitation to Die, both centred on a WWI veteran who returns to Cambridge to work as a police detective after being demobilised. These stories do involve some plot elements set at fictional colleges, but Cleverly's detective John Redfyre straddles the divide between city and university. Cambridge seems to be a popular location for 21st century historical crime fiction, with James Runcie's Granchester stories and Rory Clement's Tom Wilde series also centering on the city.
I must admit, at certain points in putting this episode together, I began to feel like there were Oxford and Cambridge related novels every where I turned, either via their author's academic assocations, or their fiction's settings, or both. But I was able to comfort myself by returning to the work of that golden age stalwart, Agatha Christie, who not only did not attend university herself, but even among all of the many dozen novels she penned, never set one in Oxford or Cambridge.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton.
If you'd like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
You can find a full list of the books and stories I mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/oxfordvscambridge. We publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit was created by me, Caroline Crampton, and is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
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