Review by Library Journal Review
An expert on Golden Age British mysteries, Edwards (The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books) gathers 15 stories set in academia in this thoroughly enjoyable collection. It features famous sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Priory School," in which he and Watson suss out the whereabouts of a missing student, and A.J. Raffles, E.W. Hornung's gentleman burglar, who steals from a former classmate at an alumni reunion in "The Field of Philippi." Other highlights include "Battle of Wits" by Miriam Sharman, in which a student and teacher's disagreement turns deadly, and "Lesson in Anatomy" by Michael Innes, which finds a dissection lab's lecturer swapping places with the cadaver when the lights mysteriously go off. There are also entries from Dorothy L. Sayers, Edmund Crispin, and Jacqueline Wilson. Fans of more recent dark-academia titles, such as Donna Tart's The Secret History or Kate Weinberg's The Truants, will enjoy these forebears. Readers will likely finish the book with a lengthy list of TBRs gleaned from the introduction and opening chapter essays. VERDICT A chocolate box of academic mysteries that will delight all lovers of a good whodunit.--Jon Jeffryes
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fifteen tales out of school, originally published between 1904 and 2000, that show how much more was happening in and out of British classrooms than you realized. Edwards' editorial apparatus is oddly hit-or-miss: His introduction is mainly a survey of full-length novels set in Oxford, Cambridge, or English boarding schools, and his brief biography of Ethel Lina White, whose alert governess foils a kidnapping here, never mentions White's best-loved novel,The Wheel Spins, memorably filmed asThe Lady Vanishes. But with a few exceptions--E.W. Hornung's dated theft by A.J. Raffles, Malcolm Gair's snappy anecdote whose title provides a major spoiler, prolific Herbert Harris' inverted story about a killer who anticipates all possible missteps but one--the stories are worth staying after school for, as Jacqueline Wilson's imperious instructor forces a dyslexic pupil to do with dire results. A scrap of paper holds the key to Henry Wade's missing undergraduate. Wine salesman Montague Egg, Dorothy L. Sayers' second-string sleuth, briskly identifies the culprit who bashed an antireligious master to death. Joyce Porter's ignorant, irascible DCI Wilfred Dover more or less figures out which of the eight adult students murdered their teacher. Colin Watson shows the predictably disastrous outcome of the fake murder a pair of boys stage to prank a dull-witted schoolmate. In the three best stories, Miriam Sharman presents a high-stakes battle of wits between a retiring headmaster and the actor whose thieving son he expelled; Michael Innes, clearly reveling in academic jargon, uses a few moments of darkness to replace a cadaver with the much more recently deceased instructor of an anatomy class; and Arthur Conan Doyle's "Adventure of the Priory School" is just as much fun to read for the 10th time. Warning to teachers who read this: Watch your back, and check the current beneficiaries of your life insurance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
