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Fiction set at upper-class British schools was a popular genre in the 19th and early 20th C, and murder mysteries were the dominant form of popular fiction in the early and mid-20th century, so it’s only natural that cross-pollination would create a subgenre: the murder mystery set at an upper-class school.
I’ve read three of these things: A Question of Proof by “Nicholas Blake” (really C. Day Lewis), A Murder of Quality by “John Le Carré” (really David Cornwell) and Was It Murder? by “Glen Trevor” (really James Hilton). And I can safely say at this point that the subgenre is not for me.
I didn’t set out to carefully explore this subgenre that I’ve found so tedious. I read the Le Carré book because it’s a Le Carré book—the second novel that features his burnt-out Cold Warrior, George Smiley. Of the three murder-at-school books named above, A Murder of Quality is probably the best, but it’s my least favorite of the Smiley books. It’s a small story that stands in the shadow of its most unpleasant character, possibly a caricature of a particular person, certainly of a type of person, that Le Carré knew and disliked. Le Carré had better luck mingling mystery elements with upper-class schools in some memorable sections of his greatest novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He’s writing from sympathy, rather than malice, there, and that usually pays off better in fiction.
I read A Matter of Proof because it was by C. Day Lewis, behind the false whiskers of Nicholas Blake, and because it, too, is part of a long-running and successful series, the Nigel Strangeways novels. I didn’t like it much, and don’t remember it well enough to review here but I paste in full a review I found at Goodreads.
In summary: this book is a mixed bag, but I don’t recommend it unless the prospective reader is already a huge fan of Nigel Strangeways. There is a modest spoiler in the comments below: caveat lector.
This was the first novel by “Nicholas Blake” (a pseudonym for the eminent British poet C. Day-Lewis) and it’s not completely unpromising. The setting, a British middle-class school for boys, was fairly original for a murder mystery at the time (paving the way for better books like Innes’ The Weight of the Evidence or Le Carré’s A Murder of Quality). There is some interesting detail about the lives of the school’s denizens and the tensions between them, and a bold use of the 3rd-person-omniscient point of view. Hardcore fans of the British “cozy” will find a lot to like here.
I’m less enthusiastic about the detective, Nigel Strangeways. In this book he was a bit of a Mary Sue (beloved of all, whether there was reason for it or not) and his bundle of mannerisms never raise his persona into a recognizable personality. More importantly, he and the narrative voice conceal relevant data from the reader, making it difficult or impossible to play the game of a classic mystery novel.
Worst of all is the solution, where a conveniently insane person explains everything and assumes all the blame. Any difficulties are swept away with the non-explanation “X was crazy”.
I understand that later books in the series have a good reputation, and I might give them a try sometime.
Then again, I might not. The classism, the narrative padding, and the abominable ending were all deeply annoying to me. De gustibus non disputandum est, as Nigel Strangeways would no doubt observe, looking down his nose at nothing in particular.
FYI: I read the ebook for Kindle produced by Agora Books. It was a high-quality ebook, free from the typos, missing or garbled text, etc., that often bedevil electronic editions.
posted June 21, 2021 on Goodreads
It’d be an egregious breach of netiquette, at least, to borrow the entirety of someone’s Goodreads review, except that I was the who one wrote it four years ago. I failed to post the review to my blog, because it was in that period when I’d forgotten I had one. I have also forgotten The Weight of the Evidence entirely, but Mr. Internet tells me that it’s set at a university and so slightly outside of the subgenre as I defined above.
Re Was It Murder? by James Hilton: I picked up at a bookstore yesterday. (It originally appeared as Murder at School under a pseudonym, but I latched onto the Bantam paperback from 1946.) I’ve never read anything by Hilton (author of Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon), but there was something on the first page that made me laugh, and the Bantam paperback was beautifully produced—the binding still tight after 84 years, and a set of endpapers that must’ve outclassed those of most clothbound books in 1946:
The art is signed Palacios—the same Rafael Palacios, I think, who did the art and map for the first edition of Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn.
The copy I found, in good condition, was priced 2 bucks. There was no way I wasn’t going to buy it.
The book starts out promisingly enough. Hilton had not only gone to a small public school, like the fictional one in the novel, but had taught at one, and his father was the headmaster of one. The hero seems to be a light-hearted parody of Hilton himself. We find him writing poetry in his Islington flat, a rhymed octave about how English fathers never tell the truth of their own sexual entanglements and temptations to their sons
Therefore, in England now, on every hand
This proper study of mankind is banned.
Anyone who can shake hands with Alexander Pope at the beginning of a murder mystery has my attention. We soon learn that the hero, Colin Revell, has attempted and mostly failed at various stabs at journalism and is engaged in writing a modern epic in the verse and formless form of Byron’s Don Juan. “By the date at which this story opens it had grown to lack only two things: continuity and a publisher.” Snap! I figured this is a writer who didn’t take himself or his hero too seriously.
Revell receives an odd note from the new Headmaster of his old school, Oakington. The Headmaster has heard, from Revell’s former tutor at Oxford, that Revell has a talent for solving mysteries, and he asks Revell to come stay with him for a weekend and look into one at the school.
Revell, who is easily flattered and whose “soul yearned with Byronic intensity for something to happen to it”, readily agrees.
The mystery at the school is that one of the students, a boy named Marshall, died earlier in the term under unusual circumstances. The death was ruled accidental, but the Headmaster has some acquired some evidence that the boy anticipated his death, which in retrospect makes the circumstances a little more sinister. It’s not superclear what the Headmaster expects Revell to do, but he wants the matter looked into somehow, and Revell is willing to oblige.
Revell, unfortunately, has no clear idea how to proceed with a murder investigation and he’s not very good at it. The book loses its focus here, never to regain it, but we do get sharp portaits of some of the school’s staff. A couple more deaths occur and a third murder is attempted before the mystery is eventually cleared up—by someone else. Revell is, in some sense, the book’s hero but he’s not the detective, which is a problem for a mystery novel. Thirty-some pages are employed at the end of this rather short (250pp) book to explicate to the hero the events he’s just experienced, something that dampens the impact of the ending somewhat.
And the ending was pretty damp to start with. Very early in the book, suspicion falls on a character I’ll call X, to avoid spoilers. But so much suspicion is directed at X that it becomes clear X is only a red herring. Most of the evidence that could point to X also points at a character I’ll call Y. No one so much as mentions this, the kind of omission a writer makes when they’re trying to keep something under wraps. “The murderer is obviously Y,” I said to myself, and so it was, to the astonishment of the hero and no one else.
A mystery novel can be a pretty inept mystery and yet be worth reading if it’s a good novel. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise is a good example. Hilton’s book doesn’t fall into that category because the scene in which the hero operates isn’t vividly drawn and his experiences (which might be described as an emotional affair) aren’t really that interesting. This is not his story, and Hilton’s insistence on putting him at the center of it is baffling in retrospect.
Hilton never wrote another straight-up mystery, which was probably for the best. This particular book, though not a success in my view, didn’t discourage me from looking up more of his work. Lost Horizon, in particular, has been on my horizon for decades; maybe I’ll get around to reading it soon. If so, you can count on me kvetching about it here.
As for as the “murder at school” subgenre goes, I think I’m done with it unless I come across one where the detective is actually a kid at the school. The stakes would be high; the danger would be greater; the likelihood of success more remote; and most of the characters in the story wouldn’t just be background scenery for Old Boy nostalgia, but something like actual people with distinguishing characteristics. That might have some interest.
Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.
