Book Review: Death on the Cherwell

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay (orig. 1935; reprint by The British Library, 2014).

It’s retro week again! Death on the Cherwell caught my eye for a very specific reason: It’s a mystery novel written in 1935 and set in a women’s college at Oxford University. It has all these things in common with one of my all-time favorite books, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. So I couldn’t resist seeing what another author did in the same year with the same genre and the same setting. (Death on the Cherwell takes place at a different women’s college, but it’s still at Oxford.)

This story jumps into the action almost immediately. Four students are sitting near the river, forming a new club based solely on their goal of perpetually cursing Miss Denning, the much-hated college bursar (financial administrator). This makes it awkward when Miss Denning’s corpse suddenly comes floating down the river in a canoe. The truly inexplicable thing is, she appears to have drowned—but how could she have drowned inside the canoe?

My fellow fans of Gaudy Night who pick up this novel will recognize some themes in Death on the Cherwell. For instance, there’s the terror of publicity among the denizens of a woman’s college, still a relatively new and controversial institution, which pushes them to find ways to do as much of their own crime-solving as they can and minimize police involvement. (There’s even the same exasperation over shoddy news reporting that uses terms like “undergraduette.”)

But there are significant differences too. Sayers’s novel, for the most part, concentrates on the adults in the college. Hay keeps her focus on the students: the core four we met at the beginning—Sally, Nina, Daphne, and Gwyneth—plus various friends, classmates, and relatives of theirs. They do most of the amateur detecting, as well as working with the police when the latter can’t be kept away any longer. They’re not always great at it, but their creativity and occasional misadventures are fun to follow. The Detective-Inspector who gets involved in the case pokes gentle fun at the girls’ “sublime confidence that they are the only people with good ideas,” but has to admit that they’re fairly good at finding evidence.

The late Miss Denning turns out to be one of those people who were hated by many around her, for a variety of reasons, leading to a plethora of possible suspects. You generally don’t get an entire club dedicated to calling down curses on your head without having offended a few people. But there’s an unfortunate whiff of that xenophobia that crept into so many novels of the era when the feelings of the one foreign student in the story, Draga Czernak, are described. Everything she says or does or thinks is explained by her fellow students as “Yugo-Slavs” being so terribly “excitable” and “macabre” and “superstitious” and prone to blood feuds. It’s poetic justice, perhaps, that Draga, when allowed to speak for herself, is one of the more interesting characters in the book, and certainly more memorable than the rather interchangeable group of four British girls.

When you get right down to it, it’s not easy to compare Death on the Cherwell to Gaudy Night, after all. That’s because Gaudy Night is much more than a mystery—it’s a mystery, a romance, and a novel of manners all in one. Death on the Cherwell is simply and solely a mystery. But it’s an enjoyable mystery, with a brisk pace, good dialogue, plenty of humor, and a solution that, if a bit convoluted, is satisfying. Whether or not you’re comparing it with anything, it’s a good read in its own right.

(Cover image copyright The British Library.)

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