|
As for mysteries set in Oxford, Antonia Fraser's
Oxford Blood, 1985, is in a sense, a 1980s sequel to Brideshead.
Oxford Blood has some interesting twists, including its concept, but
it also has some serious flaws-for example, the murderer is not exposed by
the detection of the heroine, but caught because he strikes again. Fraser's
Oxford-that of a "golden lad," Viscount Saffron-is as opulent and richly
decorated as Waugh's Oxford.
J.C. Masterman's 1933 Oxford Tragedy, is
a successful mystery, with excellent settings:
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 colleague. The contrast between how he
sees the setting before and after the murder is most effective.
Despite the huge number of mysteries set in Oxford, I didn't find many I
like. A number of them have what I think of as the "English problem,"
typified by Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, 1946, which
is more farce than mystery, and often downright silly. Stripped of all the
waggery, dopey exclamations ("Oh my paws!), boring repartee, chase scenes,
nude bathing, etc., the plot of The Moving Toyshop is mildly
interesting, although it contains too many coincidences. But Crispin's
descriptions of Oxford are exquisite:
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 silly, the marvelous settings seem discordant. It's
as if two different authors wrote this book, one who devised the idiotic
characters and flawed plot, and another who described Oxford. Nevertheless,
anyone interested in Oxford should at least skim it to read Crispin's
descriptions of the world in and around Oxford.
|
|
