This is a book from a collected Women’s Crime Novels of the 1940s that the Library of America put out a few years ago. I’ve read the others in the collective where Laura and In a Lonely Place are the standouts. I have to say that this one is a marked step down in quality from the other two, but does offer an interesting look into a familiar setting. There’s a murder in the English department at an all-women’s college in the Northeast United States. A young poetry professor has been bludgeoned and an undergrad with maybe a relationship with him and maybe a crush on him “confesses” to the crime. We then spend the novel following a fellow undergrad, a grizzled reporter, and a psychologist interviewing the suspect as we try to pinpoint the real (it could be her yet!) killer, track down the gaps in the evidence, and tell a convincing story.
Like I said, this one is less good than the other two, but it takes places on a college campus in the 1940s and the characters are not treated with a kind of “proper young ladies” kind of distance. And given that one the very best mystery novels of all time, Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, also takes place on a college campus, it’s a fun setting. This book also lets us peer into academia and college drinking and the expectations of female undergrads in some curious ways. The novel material tells us that the college is based on Smith, and is called like Oakholly or something like that so that tracks.
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