Review: Death on the Cherwell (Mavis Doriel Hay)

[highlyeccentric]

As you can see, I read this on the journey from Geneva to Lancashire (actually, I'd started it in Grenoble - and the book itself had been carted around all summer, including to Australia and back, before that!). It was something of an impulse purchase: I fell in love with the British Library Crime Classics display at Waterstones in Oxford, and found I couldn't get them in the AU Kobo store, so I ended up buying this one in hard copy in Leeds. It's the kind of book I would generally prefer to read in e-book, but the covers of this series are so delightful, I had to have one.*

In the opening chapters we meet four undergraduates of a girls' college in Oxford, who are gathering to form a secret society. Their shenanigans are disrupted by the discovery of a canoe, complete with the dead body of the college bursar. The headmistress, who loathes impropriety and publicity, attempts to keep a lid on the situation, but with the police involved and mysterious rumours flying, the four undergrads set out to investigate matters. Was the bursar murdered, and who put her body in the canoe? At what time did the canoe come down the river past the neighbouring mens' college, and was the bursar alive at the time? Why does one of their fellow undergraduates seem to be hiding something? And what is the connection between the bursar's hitherto unknown niece, and a reclusive oxford don?

This book won a great deal of leniency from me on the first page with its wry description of undergraduates as 'not quite sane, and indeed not quite human'. The setting, and the cosy feel of the whole thing, is vivid and warming. There were two significant drawbacks throughout: one, that the four girls at the centre of the book hardly had distinct characters; and two, some predictable for the period but generally distasteful ethnic stereotyping of an eastern european character. The denouement seemed to fizzle a little - the inquest being an entirely separate thing from the detective (and by this point the girls have faded into the background in favour of the chief inspector) figuring out what happened and why. It allows for a tasteful sort of ending- no disgrace brought on any august institutions - but I suspect that the narrative tension would have been better sustained if the two denoument threads could have unravelled simultaneously (I'm thinking of the inquest scenes in DuMaurier's Rebecca - there, too, there are whole chunks of the resolution which are separate from the court proceeding, but the court proceeding serves to increase rather than dissipate tension).

The edition is strengthened by a historical introduction, framing Hay in the context of golden age crime, and noting reasons why her work has remained obscure in comparison to, say, Dorothy L Sayers. I definitely recommend it, not as a work of outstanding genius, but as a charming read and an interesting recovery from mid-century obscurity.

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*As it happens, the US publisher (Poisoned Pen Press) has generously sent me an ARC of the forthcoming 'The Division Bell Mystery' in epub, and I'm every bit as delighted by it as by Death on the Cherwell. Review anon! Apparently my stock-in-trade for long reviews is shaping up to be mystery novels. Who'd have guessed it?