The Black Stage by Anthony Gilbert

 Oh, comforting - killing night!
Black stage for tragedies and murder fell!
                       - Shakespeare

 
Alistair and Anne Vereker returned home from fighting in World War II to find a situation which treatened the stability of their home and the lives of all its occupants.  Alistair had been in the military, and Anne had been a driver for military personnel in the Balkans. Four Acres, their home, was the residence of Tessa Goodier, their aunt, who was one of those helpless females who seemed incapable of understanding the more practical things of life. Her affairs had been managed by Mrs.  Dutchley, a reliable and practical woman who was the housekeeper. In Alistair's absence, the estate had been managed by the rather incompetent Mr. Bledsoe. Also living in the house, was cousin Alicia who was young and totally untrained for any occupation whatsoever.

Upon their arrival, Alistair and Anne met the two new guests of the house. There was James Goodier who was the brother of Tessa's late husband. James had spent the war years in the safety of South America and had returned to England to get the money from Tessa which he felt that he should have received in his brother's will. The greatest threat came from Lewis Bishop. Tessa said that she was in love with Bishop and that she was going to marry him. She was already giving Bishop full rights to manage Four Acres and to decide its future. Bishop wanted to sell Four Acres to an industrial concern, and after the sale, he and Tessa would move to London. Alistair felt that Four Acres should be his, Mrs. Dutchley and Alicia would lose their home, Mr. Bledsoe would lose his job, and Anne, who had know Bishop during the war, realized that he was holding a dreadful secret about her. It is no wonder that someone killed Bishop. The police found out about Anne's secret, and arrested her for the murder.

Alistair went to the lawyer, Arthur Crook, hoping that he could find a way to defend Anne. Crook believed that the only was to establish the innocence of a client was to find the guilty party, and began an investigation.  Crook wears a rather disreputable brown suit, enjoys drinking beer, and sometimes resorts to unscrupulous methods to solve crimes. He is quite middle class, and the other characters in the book tended to look down upon him. I found this book  to be well written with good plotting and intelligent conversations.

Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson who was an early member of the Detection Club.  Her first novel featuring Crook was Murder by Experts and was published in 1936. The Black Stage was published in 1945.  Her books are no longer in print, and I found this copy at Alibris. I hope that some publisher brings her works back into print.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

It all began when Harriet Vane, a noted mystery novelist, attended the Gaudy Dinner at her Oxford alma mater, Shrewsbury College. At first, Harriet was reluctant to attend because she had become involved in a notorious murder case after her graduation, and she was well aware that many people were put off by the publicity surrounding it. The dean of Shrewsbury welcomed her warmly, and Harriet felt that she could relax and enjoy her return to Oxford.

Then the mysterious events started happening. Harriet and others in the college received hateful, anonymous notes. One scholar's book manuscript was badly damaged. The new library was vandalized on the day of its opening. These and other events created an incredibly tense atmosphere in the small college, and members of the faculty started to suspect and fear each other. The Dean asked Harriet to investigate these events knowing that Harriet had assisted Lord Peter Winsey in solving an earlier mystery, and Harriet had accepted.

Harriet started observing and keeping a journal of the events. She believed that she could solve the problem on her own, but after the suicide of a student which was linked to the hostile notes, she realized that she needed help. She was very reluctant to call upon Sir Peter Wimsey who had been asking her to marry her for the last five years, but she finally decided that his help would be necessary before these events tore the college apart. The charming Lord Peter does take matters in hand and exposes the writer of the poison pen letters.

This book is an exploration of the problems that women who wanted a scholastic and scholarly career faced. They were viewed as dried up spinsters who were unable to undertake the more "feminine" career of a wife and mother. The women's college was not taken seriously by their male counterparts. The book reaches a screaming conclusion with the conflict about the roles of women in the academic world.

I read this book many, many years ago, but I have just read The Late Scholar which is the latest of Jill Paton Walsh's Lord Peter Wimsey books, and I really wanted to go back and look at Oxford in the way that Dorothy Sayers described it. As I reread Gaudy Night, I could see how much she loved the city of Oxford and the scholastic life. The descriptions of the colleges are positively glowing.

Dorothy Sayers studied at Somerville College in Oxford and graduated with honors in 1915. She received a master's degree from this college in 1920. From here she went to a position in an advertising agency, and then in 1923 to writing mystery novels  in order to earn a living. I have read that she stopped writing the mystery novels when she felt that she had enough money to enable her to undertake more scholarly endeavors such as translating The Divine Comedy.

I have also recently read A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf which was is a collection of speeches which she delivered at two women's colleges in Cambridge in 1929. In these essays, she describes the difficulties which are encountered by women who hope to become writers and scholars. Woolf always regretted that she did not receive a university education though she did have the financial means to support her writing without needing to have a job. Sayers did not have this luxury, and mystery readers have benefited from her financial needs. Gaudy Night was published in 1935, and was the next to last Peter Wimsey book. It is still in print.