J C Masterman's 1933 mystery, An Oxford Tragedy, is a remarkably satisfying mystery. Wholly in the tradition of the Golden Age of English crime fiction, it is very similar to the traditional country house mystery, where there is a defined set of suspects. It also has aspects of the locked room mystery - or in this case, the locked college. The gates to St Thomas' College are closed and locked at 9 PM and the porter at the gate writes down the name of everyone who comes and goes after that hour.
With such a carefully defined group of suspects, all of them dons or students, the amateur detective, in this case, a pseudo-don, begins his investigation with a time-table and a floor plan. If he can determine where everyone was at the time of the murder he can deduce who had opportunity and begin looking for motive. No intuitive problem solving in this sort of mystery.
The murdered man, a classics don named Shirley, has been looking at plans for renovations to the college library, sitting in the study of the dead with whom he has been working on the project. Someone entered the room, picked up a loaded revolver the dean had left on a table there, and shot Mr Shirley in the head, then disappeared. No one heard the shot because the college was celebrating the last day of Torpids (whatever that is - it seems to have something to do with rowing) and the students have been setting off fireworks.
Who would want Shirley dead? Nobody liked him and some people hated him, but there seems no specific reason to kill him or to kill him now. The narrator, the Senior Tutor, Mr Winn, along with a visiting lawyer from Vienna, Dr Brendel, are in the clear as they were together during the time of the shooting, but everybody else has to provide an alibi, some of them more useful than others. The entire high table knew the revolver was waiting on the table where the dean had put it after confiscating it from a couple of rebellious undergraduates.
The solution was entirely satisfactory in an old-fashioned way. I thought of another solution - with another murderer and another motive and my solution fits with all the clues and characters. I wonder, indeed, if the author thought of this and left it there for the reader to wonder about. The author, Sir John Cecil Masterman, was a don who ran the Enigma program during the Second World War, so he was no slouch where logic and reasoning are concerned.
I was reminded of this book and of another early Oxford mystery, Murder in the President's Lodging by Michael Innes, by the lecture on Oxford crime fiction by Colin Bundy which I talked about in a blog a couple of days ago. I read about that splendid lecture at Cornflower Books.
2012 No 126