Mavis Doriel Hay’s “Death on the Cherwell”

Four young women who attend Persephone College in Oxford casually stroll down to the River Cherwell for a little ceremony. They are there, an undergraduate secret society of a sort, to express their frustration, anger, and general ill will against the college’s bursar, Myra Denning, who’s apparently something of a tyrant and generally disliked. As they stand near the riverbank, they see a canoe coming toward them, Myra Denning’s canoe, and Myra’s in it.

And Myra Denning is very much dead.

And she appears to have drowned. But if she drowned, then how did she get into the canoe?

So begins Mavis Doriel Hay’s Death on the Cherwell, one of three mysteries published by Hay in the 1930s and recently republished by the British Library (the others being Murder Underground and The Santa Klaus Murder.

Death on the Cherwell is kind of a locked room mystery. While there’s no apparent shortage of suspects – from local residents fighting the sale of land to the undergraduates themselves – everyone involved seems to have something of an airtight alibi. The local detective investigating the murder is somewhat confounded; the college girls start doing some sleuthing of their own; and eventually Scotland Yard arrives. And it is the Yard who will ultimately solve the murder. And murder it indeed is.

Hay attended St. Hilda’s College at Oxford, at a time when women could attend but not graduate. She draws upon that experience for this story, and it has the feel of the city and colleges we know as Oxford (says this seasoned traveler who’s been there all of one time).

While story looks like one without a solution, it has one, of course. And the shape of it appears fairly early in the narrative – the key is something of a secret, buried in the past. Those secrets, however, have a bad habit of surfacing at inconvenient times.

It’s a fun story, too, and includes cameo appearances by two of the characters from Murder Underground.

The three stories were Hay’s only contributions to the Golden Age of the mystery story (and the sub-genre popularized by Agatha Christie). For whatever reason, she left mystery writing behind, and turned her creative energies to other endeavors, especially quilt making. But we do have these three.

Related:

My reviews of Hay’s other mysteries:

            Murder Underground

            The Santa Klaus Murder

Photograph of the River Cherwell by Rob Brewer via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission.

Mavis Doriel Hay’s “The Santa Klaus Murder”

It’s Christmastime. The Melbury family has gathered in the country home where Sir Osmond Melbury has retired. The grown children, the grandchildren, the secretary, and various servants are celebrating the holiday.

And then someone spoils the festivities by shooting Sir Osmond in his study.

And the murderer looks to have dressed in a Santa Klaus costume (we would spell it Claus; the author spelled it Klaus).

Enter Colonel Halstock, chief constable of the local village and a friend of the family. But not so much a friend as to overlook a plethora of suspects, motives, and opportunities.

The surprise is that Sir Osmond lasted as long as he did. His family wasn’t particularly fond of him.

And then there’s this business of wills, and which one was operational at the time of his death. Did Sir Osmond change his will shortly before he we was killed? And who made the mysterious phone call the day before the death?

The colonel is on the case.

Mavis Doriel Hay published three murder mysteries in the 1930s, part of what’s called the Golden Age of Mystery. Her contemporaries were Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and other writers who perfected the classic British mystery – a wealthy family, a country home, lots of motives, and a body very much dead (the victims were usually dispatched discreetly off-stage; graphic violence was simply not done).

The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) joined Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell as hay’s contributions to the genre. It’s an intelligently written story; Hay wrote for an audience who appreciated a good mystery and one not easily puzzled out. She also liked to include something of a love story, and The Santa Klaus Murder has one. In fact, it furnished a possible motive for murder, as Colonel Halstock soon finds out.

Halstock does it by the book, and he does it tenaciously. The solution is neither obvious nor simple, but our detective keeps at it relentlessly.

The Santa Klaus Murder is not great literature, but then it’s not meant to be. Hay wrote a mystery story, a good mystery story, and kudos to the British Library for republishing all three of them.

Photograph: The layout of the ground floor of Flaxmere, the Melbury’s country home, where the murder is committed. Many mystery writers routinely included floor plans of the scene of the crime in the 1920s and 1930s; for example, every Philo Vance story by the American mystery writer S.S. Van Dine included such a floor plan.

Related: Mavis Doriel Hay’s “Murder Underground”

Mavis Doriel Hay’s “Murder Underground”

Mavis Doriel Hay wrote only three mystery novels, during the period known as the Golden Age of Mystery. Her first, Murder Underground, was published in 1934, when writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers were already household names. It was followed by Death on the Cherwell (1935), set in Oxford, and The Santa Klaus Murder (1936), set at an English country estate. Hay continued to write, but after her third mystery, she turned to the subject of rural crafts, which she dearly loved.

Hay was largely forgotten until last year, when the British Library began republishing a number of mystery novels printed during the Golden Age (like John Bude’s The Cornish Coast Murder and The Lake District Murder). All three of Hay’s mystery novels are now available in both paperback and ebook versions.

The original book cover

As my wife well knows, I love the London Underground, and I started reading Murder Underground almost as soon as it downloaded to my Kindle. It’s set in north London, near Hampstead Heath, and it is a combination of improbable, bewildering and great fun.

Miss Euphemia Pongleton (only a British writer would invent that name), a rather elderly resident of the respectable Frampton Private Hotel, sails forth one morning for a dentist appointment. She passes the closest tube station to save on fare, and arrives at the Belsize Park Station. Because of her fear of elevators, she decides to walk down the 220-step staircase. Along the way, someone strangles her with a dog leash – the leash for her own dog, taken from where it usually hung in the hotel entrance way.

The book cover for the new British Library edition

Miss Pongleton wasn’t a particularly nice character, and there are no end of suspects, including residents of the hotel and her relatives. And the suspects rather cheerfully go about suppressing evidence, changing evidence, omitting facts, and conveniently not remembering, to the extent that it becomes difficult to keep track of who was actually where, who did what, and who said what. The police inspector seems to be outsmarted and outmaneuvered at almost every turn. And several of the characters/suspects decide to do some sleuthing and investigating on their own, all for the very best of reasons (and one, of course, for the very worst).

Is Murder Underground one of the great mystery stories?  No, but then no one is making that claim. It is representative of its period; there were numerous writers in both Britain and America during the Golden Age of mysteries, and most are largely forgotten.

It includes diagrams of some of the scenes; I can’t explain why I’ve always loved diagrams in mystery stories, but I do. It does require a closer reading than one might expect with a mystery story, if nothing else than to keep track of how the characters try to screw things up.

But it is a fun read.

Illustration, top: Escalators were introduced in the Underground in the 1920s and 1930s. Unfortunately, Miss Pongleton's tube station did not have one. She hated elevators, so she made the fatal mistake of using the stairs.