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J.C. Masterman’s Oxford Tragedy is a successful mystery, and
its settings are excellent:
Only a Philistine of the
first water could fail to be impressed by the beauty of the dining-hall of
St. Thomas’s. The long tables and benches almost black with age, the lights
on the tables which left the great space above dark and mysterious, the
beautiful sixteenth-century roof, now only dimly seen, the rows of stately
portraits along the walls; the high table where the silver showed white
against the background of the bare oak table beneath it—all these made up a
picture, which no amount of familiarity could ever make other than a marvel
of beauty to my eyes.
And:
... there is no place more
pleasant than Common Room, no hour more wholly pleasurable than that spent
in it immediately after dinner. For here the Fellows of St. Thomas’s,
having dined, settled down to enjoy the comfort of port and dessert, of
coffee and cigars. I had come, as I grew older, to look forward all day to
that hour in the evening which I most enjoyed. The good wine, the flow of
conversation, the ritual of the table at once dignified and almost stately
and yet homely as well, exercised a soothing effect on my nerves and filled
me with a sense of physical and mental well-being... life there suited
itself to my every mood. If I felt festive and sociable there were always
others ready to meet me halfway. If on the other hand a black shadow of
pessimism was on me, the room seemed to attune itself to me. I thought of
it then as the home of a multitude of my predecessors—who had drunk their
wine and lived their short lives there since the foundation of the college.
The
narrator’s appreciation of his surroundings and the company he finds there
is almost destroyed when he learns that one of his colleagues has been
murdered, almost certainly by another of his colleagues. The sharp contrast
is very effective.
Despite the huge numbers of mysteries which
have been set in Oxford, I didn’t find many I liked. A number of them have
what I think of as the “humor problem,” typified by Edmund Crispin’s The
Moving Toyshop, 1946, which is more farce than mystery, and often
downright silly. Unfortunately, there are a number of Crispin-type novels
that can’t make up their minds whether they’re a mystery, or a joke.
Stripped of all the waggery, dopey exclamations (“Oh my paws!), tedious
repartee, chase scenes, nude bathing, etc., the plot of The Moving
Toyshop is mildly interesting, although ruined by too many
coincidences. But Crispin’s descriptions of Oxford are beautiful:
Through a rift in the trees
he caught his first real glimpse of Oxford—in that ineffectual moonlight, an
underwater city, its towers and spires standing ghostly, like the memorials
of lost Atlantis fathoms deep…in the quiet air he heard faintly a single
bell beating one o’clock, the precursor of others which joined in brief
phantom chime, like the bells of the sunken cathedral in Breton myths rocked
momentarily by the green deep-water currents, and then silent.
And a little later:
Out of the grey light came
a gold morning. The leaves were beginning to fall from the trees in the
Parks in St. Giles’, but they still made a brave show of bronze and yellow
and malt-brown. The grey maze of Oxford—from the air, it resembles nothing
so much as a maze—began to stir itself…shops opened and buses ran; the
streets were thronged with traffic. All over the city, in college and
belfries, the mechanism of clocks whirred, clanged and struck nine o’clock,
in a maddening, jagged syncopation of conflicting tempo and timbre.
Because the book is so nonsensical, the
exquisite settings seem discordant. It’s as if two different authors wrote this book, one who
devised the silly characters and flawed plot, and another who described
Oxford.
The Cornwall settings in the books I read are equally entrancing,
and I found several Cornwall mysteries I liked. Daphne Du Maurier’s
Jamaica Inn, 1936, is not exactly a mystery, but all of us can
learn from Du Maurier’s atmospheric settings:
She looked up at Jamaica
Inn, sinister and grey in the approaching dusk, the windows barred; she
thought of the horrors that the house had witnessed, the secrets now
embedded in its walls and she turned away from it all, as one turns
instinctively from a house of the dead.
Janie Bolimo’s Buried in Cornwall, 1999, is not entirely
satisfactory as a mystery, but the description of the artists in the art
colony at St. Ives is fascinating. As for the setting:
Rose had to admit that [the
village of St. Ives] was a beautiful place. The sand was fine, the color of
clotted cream, and the sea, beloved by surfers, was bluer than the Agean.
If you arrived by train the breathtaking view was framed by a fringe of palm
trees.
My favorite mystery set in Cornwall is Elizabeth George’s A
Suitable Vengeance, 1991. It’s also a wonderful “setting as character”
novel:
It was a wild part of the
country, comprising desolate moors, stony hillsides, sandy coves whose
hidden caves had long been used as smuggler’s caches, sudden lush woodlands
where the countryside dipped into a combe, and everywhere tangles of
celandine, poppy and periwinkle that dominated the narrow lanes.
Other interesting mysteries set in Cornwall that make good use of
settings include Robert Goddard’s Days Without Number, 2003, which
contains enough surprises, twists, and suspense to keep the most blasé
mystery reader guessing, as well as expert uses of location and atmosphere
to heighten the sense of impending doom. Goddard’s use of the weather as a
constant presence is also excellent.
Ngaio Marsh’s Dead Water, 1963, is a
grim story about the exploitation of a local beauty spot, and the conflict
between those who want to preserve its beauty, and those who’re willing to
sacrifice it for money. The plot has a startling resolution, and those who
journey to Cornwall can see the impact of tourism on once beautiful
settings, as well as read about it in Dead Water.
The plot of Thomas Graham’s Malice in
Cornwall, 1998, is gruesome, but the setting is cheerful and bright. A
gloomy and forbidding setting might have been expected, but skillful writers
sometimes use this type of contrast for its shock value. It works well in
this book.
For the course on setting, I read many books
and sections of books on the subject. The most startling idea came from
Elizabeth George:
One piece of advice, that
neophyte writers are always given is ‘write about your own backyard’.
Loosely translated, this means to write about an environment with which you
are familiar. Broadly translated, it means to write what you know. To this
I say balderdash. If I had believed that, I’d have spent years attempting
to write about Huntington Beach, California, a place that could not interest
me less as a setting.
George writes in detail
about the meticulous research that make her English settings so authentic.
For those who want to go far afield to find settings for their books,
George’s description of her approach is immensely valuable. (See George’s
Writing Away, 2004).
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