Traveling to History: Ten
DETECTIVE OXFORD: FOLLOW THE FOOTSTEPS OF FICTIONAL CRIME SOLVERS
By James F. Lee
Radcliffe Camera, the heart of the Oxford labyrinth. Fictional Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey stood on the roof balcony in the novel Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. (Photo by David Iliff. License: CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).
How to plan a trip to Oxford, England? Try crime novels. The city is a mystery writer’s delight – a delectable crime scene – and stage for some of the most popular crime fiction ever written.
What’s more, although most of the crimes take place in fictional Oxford colleges, the novels often travel beyond college walls to the real city of Oxford, allowing visitors to see many of the sites they’ve read about, all in a compact, walkable area.
Why Oxford as crime scene?
Years ago, I asked that question to Dr. Val Cunningham, then Professor of English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He said that the labyrinthine nature of Oxford, the twisting alleys, and secret gardens, creates an atmosphere that crime writers can’t resist.
“Detective fiction is a representation of our desires for order out of anarchy,” he said. The labyrinth represents that anarchy, thus the Oxford maze as crime scene.
One of the traditions of detective fiction is the “closed room” story, when a victim’s body is found in a room with no apparent way in or out for the murderer. Oxford offers writers the epitome of this situation because most of the colleges are enclosed by walls with access limited to only one or two gates.
As Cunningham put it, detective fiction “operates in a closed world [and] Oxford colleges are closed worlds literally surrounded by walls.”
Perhaps the most famous Oxford detective novel is Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1936). Fictional Shrewsbury College (based on the real Somerville College where Sayers studied) becomes the closed room in this story in which somebody leaves poison pen notes lying around. It is obvious from the start that only a college member could be leaving the notes because they are left after the college gates are locked at night and in places inaccessible to the public throughout the day. Nobody gets murdered in this story, but the perpetrator can only be from a small list of suspects. Alumna Harriet Vane and her friend, Lord Peter Wimsey, team up to solve the case.
An aerial view of Oxford city center. This photograph shows the labyrinthine nature of the Oxford colleges. (Photo by SirMetal. PD: Own work by the original uploader).
Sayers paints a sweeping view of the real city of Oxford as Vane and Wimsey stand on the roof of Radcliffe Camera, Oxford’s great domed library building, gazing down at the labyrinth stretched below them, each college its own closed room:
… the twin towers of All Souls, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards … black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress … Queen’s with her dome of green copper … Magdalen, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers … the Schools and the battlemented front of University … Merton, square-pinnacled, half-hidden behind the shadowed North side and mounting spire of St. Mary’s [church] … Christ Church, vast between Cathedral spire and Tom Tower … spire and tower and quadrangle, all Oxford springing underfoot in living leaf and enduring stone, ringed far off by her bulwark of blue hills.
Radcliffe Camera’s roof is inaccessible to the public now, but the view from “the mounting spire of St. Mary’s” (The University Church of St. Mary the Virgin) offers everything that Vane and Wimsey took into their gaze. Check the church website for details.
Radcliffe Square, above which Sayers’ characters were standing, is in many ways the heart of the university and city, the center of the labyrinth. The square plays a prominent part in Robert Robinson’s Landscape with Dead Dons, a 1956 novel. Scotland Yard uncovers a scheme in which valuable manuscripts are being ferreted out of the Bodleian Library in the dead of night. Two detectives stake out the square watching for the culprits in a midnight scene still possible today:
The Mob Quadrangle of Merton College illustrates the “closed-room” quality that makes Oxford colleges ideal for fictional murder mysteries. (Photo by DWR. License: CC BY-SA 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en).
Radcliffe Square was a litter of silent bicycles … [and] the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the stiff pinnacles of All Souls, the spire of the Church of St. Mary, grew in their stillness beneath the moving sky…
Soon, the detectives spot a suspicious van and chase it from the Square down Catte Street, then right onto High Street, an impossibility today because Catte Street is a pedestrian way blocked off on either end by bollards.
A missing student lies at the heart of Michael Innes’ Operation Pax (1951). Detective Sir John Appleby returns to his fictional alma mater, Bede’s College, located at the site of the real Randolph Hotel, to find his sister’s missing fiancé. Interestingly, the sister is a student at the real Somerville College, Dorothy Sayers’ old school. Michael Innes was the pen name of J.I.M. Stewart, who studied at Oriel College. Like Sayers, Innes places much of the action in the core of the Oxford labyrinth. While tracking down a lead to the case, Appleby asks Bede’s provost “Where in Oxford would you hide, Provost, if you felt yourself to be a fugitive…?”
“’In Bodley.’ The Provost had no doubt about it.”
The novel closes with a midnight break-in of the Bodleian stacks underneath Radcliffe Square.
Edmund Crispin, the pen name of writer Bruce Montgomery, gives loving depiction of Oxford town and gown in his series of novels from the 1940s and early ‘50s, featuring eccentric detective/don Gervase Fen, Professor of English Literature at fictional St. Christopher’s College. Fen’s college is in the neighborhood of the real St. John’s College on St. Giles’ Street, where Montgomery himself was educated.
A fruit stand inside Oxford’s Covered Market. The market sometimes appears in Oxford murder mysteries. (Photo by M stone. License: CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).
Gervase Fen takes the reader to real places that still exist: The Lamb and Flag pub on St. Giles’ (temporarily closed due to COVID); the colorful Oxford Covered Market on the High; and the Oxford Playhouse on Beaumont, where Fen proves that an apparent suicide is indeed a murder. Crispin’s best-known Gervase Fen novels include The Moving Toy Shop and The Case of the Gilded Fly.
In Oxford Blood (1985) by Antonia Fraser, television reporter Jemima Shore uncovers disconcerting clues about the origins of Lord Saffron, a dashing student at fictional Rochester College (near real Balliol). Jemima protects Saffron from a killer apparently trying to murder the young lord. Fraser studied at Lady Margaret Hall and knew Oxford very well. The author takes Jemima down “the long curve of the High Street…” past “the classical façade of Queen’s College …” and by the long secure wall of Magdalen [College].” Jemima rooms at the Martyrs’ Hotel, a fictional name for the real Randolph Hotel, with a room “… looking at the Martyrs’ Memorial.”
To see Oxford at its cinnamon-stone best, television viewers need only watch “Inspector Morse” and its two spinoffs: “Inspector Lewis” and “Endeavour” on PBS. Based on the novels of Colin Dexter (a Cambridge man!), Morse is a cerebral yet unorthodox character, a brilliant Oxford (St. John’s) dropout with a love of Wagner and crossword puzzles. He is a Thames Valley police detective with an intimate knowledge of the shadier sides of the university and the city. He lives in Oxford on the real Banbury Road.
The Lamb and Flag. An ancient Oxford pub that features in lots of murder mysteries. Temporarily closed. (Photo by oxfordmaps. License: CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en).
When Morse is on a case, action may take place within the quadrangles of any of multiple mythical colleges, or outside the fictional college walls into the real Oxford. Readers become intimately familiar with the once working-class Jericho in The Dead of Jericho, or with more upscale North Oxford in The Secret of Annexe 3. In the former book, Morse solves a murder on Canal Reach, a fictional name for the real Combe Road, a dead end street in Jericho that backs onto the Oxford Canal. Across from the entrance of Combe Road is the real Bookbinder’s Arms (temporarily closed), a pub that appears in the novel as the Printer’s Devil.
Other novels, such as The Way Through the Woods, take readers to the lovely village of Wytham just outside Oxford. Much of the action takes place in the White Hart pub, an inviting (and real) stone pub in the heart of the village. The Daughters of Cain revolves around the search for a murder weapon that is in full view at Oxford’s (real) Pitt Rivers Museum.
Another series of Oxford-based novels (each with Oxford in the title) is Veronica Stallwood’s Kate Ivory series. Kate is an aspiring novelist, sometimes detective, and running enthusiast who lives in North Oxford within walking distance of the heart of the city. From her vantage the reader gets views of the city from a distance across the Port Meadow with the spires and trees of Oxford visible in the distance (Death and the Oxford Box, 1993), to the inner workings of the Bodleian Library (Oxford Exit, 1994), where Stallwood once worked as a cataloguer. The real countryside around Oxford is a short walk away; you can walk Christ Church Meadow along the towpaths of the Cherwell and Thames Rivers or across Post Meadow near Jericho to the tiny village of Binsey. This is Kate’s running world, and she takes the reader there. Stallwood wrote fourteen Kate Ivory novels from 1993 to 2011.
In the preface to Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers apologized for using Oxford as the setting for a murder mystery. She said that detective fiction writers must use real places in which “unpleasant incidents and people … intrude upon the life of an innocent and well-ordered community.” She needn’t have apologized. Oxford is the perfect crime scene: a labyrinth of streets, alleys, and gardens, much like the tangles of synapses, nerves, and blood vessels of a brain. Out of that tangle, minds can become twisted, even the minds of geniuses. And although murder is a physical act, it can take premeditation. But most important, it takes a keen mind to solve the mystery.
And it’s all there for mystery lovers to see.
This scene in Jericho, Oxford, shows the Oxford Canal in the foreground and St. Barnabas Church in the background. Both were showcased in Colin Dexter’s The Dead of Jericho. (Photo by Kaihsu Tai. License: CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).
