Josephine Tey, P.D. James – and me

DEATH AMONG THE DONS Part 2

One of my favourite novels with an academic setting is Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), which is set in an female physical training college. Hers is in many ways an affectionate portrait. Tey had herself attended just such a college, Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham, and had worked as a physiotherapist and as a PE teacher. The title refers to the saying, ‘man proposes, but God disposes’ and is deeply ironic. The eponymous Lucy Pym has had a popular success with a book on psychology and is invited to lecture at a women’s college of physical education run. She feels she can’t refuse as the head is an old school friend. When the most unpopular student is found dead in the gym, Lucy employs her psychological skills to work out who has engineered the accident.  We seem here to be in the world of the golden age, amateur sleuth novel. So far, so cosy. Lucy identifies the culprit or thinks she does, but what happens next pulls the rug from under her feet and left me open-mouthed the first time I read it.

Also set in all female college – this time Cartaret College, a women’s teacher training college – is Gladys Mitchell’s Laurels are Poison. In Laurels are Poison (1942) the formidable Mrs Bradley – one of the most original sleuths in crime fiction – takes up a post of warden at one of the college houses in order to find out what happened to the previous warden. Last term towards the end of the college dance Miss Murchen wemt off to tidy her hair and was never seen again. In both novels, disaster strikes when the boom comes loose in the gym and hits someone on the head. Dangerous places, college gyms. Both writers describe very well the pressure-cooker atmosphere as students prepare for finals or end of year exams. As is often the case with Gladys Mitchell, the actual plot is fairly bonkers and the novel has somehow come unmoored from the title (no laurels and no poison either), but she gets full marks for atmosphere and setting. Like Tey, Mitchell was drawing on her own experience. She trained as a teacher and taught English for 40 years as well as – amazingly – writing a book a year.

Many writers, perhaps especially women writers, chose to set novels in colleges similar to the ones that they had attended. Those years away home in late adolescence are memorable in anyone’s life, and must have been specially so for young women of the interwar years whose opportunities for leaving home were so limited. More limited for some than for others. Reading about P. D.James I was taken aback when I learned that someone so formidably intelligent had to leave school at sixteen to look after her siblings when her mother was committed to a mental hospital. In any case her father didn’t believe in women being educated. She became a Principal in the Civil Service as well as a best-selling writer, and when she wrote a crime novel set in a hospital nursing school, Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), she was drawing on her professional experience as a hospital administrator. When a Cambridge college did feature in a novel, it was in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and the point of view is that of an outsider, young private eye, Cordelia Gray.

I haven’t time to say much about American crime fiction set in academia, but I’ll mention the novels of Amanda Cross (the pen name of academic Carolyn Heilbrun) which feature Kate Fansler, who was an English professor like her creator. She wrote fifteen novels between 1964 and 2002. Through them she explored issues related to feminism, academic politics, female friendships. Nora Kelly’s novels featuring historian Gillian Adams are well worth reading and two of them are actually set in Cambridge in the UK, In the Shadow of Kings (1986) and Bad Chemistry (1994).

 But probably the best known US crime novel set in academia is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a best-seller in the early 1990s and a novel which has acquired almost a cult status. The setting is Hampden College, a liberal arts college in New England, inspired by Bennington College, Donna Tartt’s own alma mater.The Secret History is bit like Brideshead Revisited, but with dead bodies. It is a story of gilded, entitled youth told from the point of view of the outsider who is admitted to their ranks. There is no mystery about who is dead or even who killed him. We’re told that in the opening pages. The questions are why did they do it and what will happen next?

With my own first novel, Dead Letters (2002, Murder is Academic in the US), there was never any doubt that it would have an academic setting. I knew where the bodies were buried – metaphorically speaking. I’d experienced at first hand the darkness between the stacks on the top floor of the University Library on a winter’s afternoon, the sound of footsteps echoing on flagstones in misty courtyards, the dead florescent light in a college corridor at dusk. It was huge fun inventing my own college, St Etheldreda’s, deciding on its architecture and where in Cambridge it was located and the name of the college cat. And my years in academia had provided me with a wealth of material. To give just one example, my supervisor once told me about a PhD student who was maddeningly slow at submitting work. She was working on, well, let’s say, Kipling – because perhaps it was Kipling or maybe H.H.Wells – and at last she was about to complete a chapter of her thesis and a date was arranged for a supervision. She turned up empty-handed. She explained that she had been in touch with Kipling at a seance and he had told her that what she’d written wasn’t good enough. So she’d torn it up. I simply had to use that story in one form or another and I did.

I wonder how many writers of academic mysteries took the opportunity to settle a score or two. In my own case certainly there was an element of don’t get mad, get even. By the end of the first chapter Dead Letters, someone was floating under a layer of exam papers in a swimming pool. I’d better not say any more, but it was a satisfying moment when a friend emailed me to say that my novel was in the window of Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge. Since then I have gone on to murder many more number of people with impunity.