Five Best Campus Crime Novels

In All The Beautiful Lies, bookseller Bill keeps a list of the five best campus crime novels. I’d only read The Secret History before, but I loved that one.  So, just like I did reading China Rich Girlfriend, when Corinne recommends the top manners novels to Kitty Pong, and I immediately requested all the ones I hadn’t read, I had to read these other top campus crime stories.

Five Best Campus Crime Novels

Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, originally published in 1935, has Harriet Vane solving a mystery poison pen notes and cruel pranks while sorting out a personal problem, set a fictional all-women’s college at Cambridge. This is almost a locked-room mystery, since only the college residents could be leaving these nasty messages, and there’s absolutely no gore but plenty of surprises and misdirections.

You don’t need to have read any of the previous Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries to follow this one, Harriet is the heroine and Peter is more of her sidekick in this one. My detailed review of Gaudy Night is here.

The Secret History

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt,  is about class, classics and murder. My full review of The Secret History needs its own post, but if you like suspense, dark academia, complicated friendships, this is recommended reading.

Last Seen Wearing

Last Seen Wearing . . ., by Hillary Waugh, is a police procedural story about a college student who disappeared one morning. The hook is compelling, since the missing girl didn’t seem to have any problems before vanishing without a trace.  This has solid suspense, but like I said in my detailed review of Last Seen Wearing…, some of the investigators’ misogynistic attitudes make it hard to root for the detectives to solve the case.

The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, by Colin Dexter, is part of his Inspector Morse series, but it stands alone. Nicholas Quinn is a deaf teacher, and a fairly new staff member at an exam center. When he turns up dead, none of his coworkers have any idea what could have happened to their new colleague, they were all mysteriously out of the office that afternoon, all on different reasons. Everyone’s hiding something, whether that’s a shocking secret or just something personal they’d prefer to keep quiet.

Besides the mystery, I liked reading about the world of foreign English exams in the past. Some of the scenes about accessibility for faculty with disabilities, about exam honesty, and about staff meetings in general were pretty familiar.  I got caught up in the world of partner schools and exam standards, and ok, a little bit of the departmental infighting, too.

The Case of the Gilded Fly

The Case of the Gilded Fly, by Edmund Crispin, is the first in the Gervase Fen mystery series, originally published in 1944s. When a sneaky, gossipy, backstabbing actress in a theatre group is found dead, nobody’s sorry to see her go, but everyone’s got an alibi.  The Gilded Fly was more a case of Team Nobody. I do like a murder mystery when everyone had a good reason to hate the victim, but between the upperclass bores and the bitchy theatre crew, I started to feel like this was a Team Nobody novel. It was definitely my least favorite, but the murder is so cleverly done that I’m still glad I read it.

I enjoyed the mysteries in all of these, but sometimes the dated attitudes are hard to handle. Sometimes in these books, men can just tell, simply by looking at a woman, whether she’s promiscuous and sexually available, or whether she’s a Nice Girl. In Last Seen Wearing, the detectives see a photo of Lowell Mitchell and instantly know she’s secretly sleeping with someone and probably pregnant (because why else could a young girl disappear? are there any other problems or secrets a college student could have? do women have internal lives?). Yseut Haskell in The Case Of The Gilded Fly just can’t stop seducing men and then using them for her own ends, and while I did like the unlikable-victim mystery, many of the other characters seemed to assume that a women who has sex would come to a bad end sooner or later. Monica Height in The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn isn’t exactly a nun, and Morse can tell she’s available, just by looking at her. This sort of background disrespect for women, especially women who dare to be sexually active, made it harder to root for the detectives.

This is absent from the women’s college world of Gaudy Night, although there are plenty of unpleasantly dated ideas there, too.

In all of these, I found myself really enjoying how much hinges on notes left for other people, or on physical letters. Most of Gaudy Night is about mean notes left around the college for certain people to find, and without revealing too much, the plots of Nicholas Quinn and The Gilded Fly both rely on written notes. Mysteries are often escapist for me, and it was so much fun to read novels where the entire plot wouldn’t possibly work if cell phones existed.