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Antonia Fraser’s Oxford Blood, 1985, a mystery set in
Oxford, is in some ways, 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. Still, 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, which includes well-written 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 admiration of his surroundings and
respect for 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
haven’t liked many of them. A number have what I think of as the
“English flaw,” typified by Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop, 1946,
which is more farce than mystery, and often silly. (The reader may have
to be English to appreciate it.) 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 it, one who
devised the idiotic characters and flawed plot, and another who so
beautifully described Oxford. Still, anyone interested in Oxford should
at least skim this book to read Crispin’s descriptions of the world in
and around Oxford.
Works Cited
Crispin, Edmund. The Moving Toyshop, 1946.
Fraser, Antonia.
Oxford
Blood, 1985.
Masterman, J.C. Oxford Tragedy, 1933.
Sayers,
Dorothy. Gaudy Night, 1935.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited,
1944.
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