Implausibly, they meet on the roof of the boathouse in early January, notwithstanding the summery picture of punting on the cover, to swear their oath of allegiance and place their curse on the unfortunate woman. At the outset I thought I had picked up a copy of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, with four undergrads setting up a secret society to put a curse on the unpopular college bursar. I did not enjoy this book as much as Hay’s earlier novel and part of my problem is down to the fact that the book is rather rudderless, without a clear sense of direction and left to drift on the current going wherever the fancy takes it. Sally, too, has pretensions to amateur sleuthing and takes the lead in the unofficial investigation into the suspicious death of the college bursar, Miss Denning. Betty, who played a starring role in sleuthing the solution to the murder of her fiancé’s aunt, Euphemia Pongleton, has now married him and visits her sister, Sally, who is up at Persephone College, an all-girls’ college in Oxford. This is Hay’s second crime novel, following on from Murder Underground, and there are links between the two books. The detective fiction writers’ fixation with Oxford and its environs as murder capital central is well established, but one of the earliest to make the association is this rather curious novel, written by Mavis Doriel Hay, originally published in 1935 and now reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series. A review of Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hayĭeath is to Oxford as espionage is to Cambridge.
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