 It's now my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Professor Colin Bundy, is South African and a distinguished historian of South Africa, particularly rural South Africa. Hearing him speak a few years ago, I remember his saying that he said, I'm an academic but I fell among administrators. I don't know whether he fell among administrators. He rose to starry heights in a way. He moved from being the vice chancellor of Waterstrand University in South Africa to deputy vice chancellor of the University of London. He's been the director of SOAS, the School for Oriental and African Studies. Until he retired last year, he was the principal of Green Templeton College in Oxford. With all that high-powered academic administration and scholarship, somehow or other, he's managed to fit in the reading of a large amount of detective fiction. Peter touched on the fact that, as well as St Mary Mead and Midsummer, Oxford is one of the murder capitals of the country, and Colin is going to speak specifically about that. Dons, deaths and detectives, Oxford in crime fiction. Please welcome Professor Bundy. David, thank you very much. You've chosen to attend a day school on crime fiction, and you are in an entirely appropriate venue. For Oxford, as has been trailed, has an astonishingly high level of crime, but especially of murder. For about 40 years, these murders took place not exclusively but predominantly within the University and its colleges. Bodies were found in college cloisters, in student rooms, in libraries, in the vaults below the libraries, in the chapel, in the senior common room, and at high table. These bodies had been variously stabbed, strangled, shot, bludgeoned, or poisoned, typically with great ingenuity. Undergraduates were murdered, yes, college staff and visitors were occasionally disposed of, but most frequently the victims were academics, college fellows, lecturers and professors, and a quite dismayingly high number of heads of house. More recently, since about the 1970s, these crimes have engulfed town as well as gown. Members of the University continue to be murdered, but not they alone. Citizens of Oxford who live their lives quite independent to the University, they come to violent ends, too, beyond the ivory tower. Their bodies crop up all over Oxford. There's perhaps a statistically unlikely concentration of murders in leafy North Oxford streets, but then both Colin Dexter and Inspector Morse live there. Other bodies have been found in Heddington, Kiddlington, Port Meadow, Osney Island, and Jericho. They've been discovered in the Pitt Rivers Museum, in the Randolph Hotel, on Port Meadow and in Wytham Woods. A good number of bodies surface in one or other of the city's waterways, in the Charwell, in the Thames, in the Canals, in the Cut-off Fissureau, and under Donnington Bridge. So my topic today is this quite extraordinary affinity between Oxford City and University and the detective story. Crime fiction can be and is set anywhere, but Oxford has proved not only one of the most frequent and the most popular, but one of the most enduring backdrops to murder and, of course, to the detective work and the solutions that follow. Now I did notice that both David and Peter Kemp put in a plug for Midsummer and St Mary Meade as possible rivals for being the murder capital of England. And Midsummer is not only the rampant crime in the county town of Causton, but 40 separate villagers had single or serial murderers operating out of those. However, however, unlike the homes of Marple and Barnaby, Oxford is real, or fairly real. And importantly for my topic, unlike Miss Marple's Inspector Barnaby, Oxford boasts not just one well-known detective, but a proliferation of them. What I want to do this morning is firstly to remind you of some of these detectives simply by outlining the history of the crime novels set in Oxford. Secondly, I will look briefly at one particular fictional detective, the best known Oxford sleuth, who featured not only in 13 novels written between 1975 and 99, but also in 33 episodes of a staggeringly successful TV series. And then thirdly, I will ask and try to answer the obvious question. Why? Why have this city and this university attracted so many authors, generated so much crime solved by so many sleuths? Let me begin then with that outline history. There were a couple of predecessors in the 1920s and early 30s, but works of no great distinction. The history of Oxford-based detector stories really begins effectively in the mid-1930s. Three books in particular may be considered to have launched the sequence. In 1933, J. C. Masterman published an Oxford tragedy, still regarded by eminent critic T. P. Binion as perhaps the best of many detective stories set in Oxford. The story, Oxford tragedy, is narrated by the senior tutor at St. Thomas's College, Watson, to the novels Homes, a visiting Viennese academic lawyer named Ernst Brendel. When an unpopular tutor is found shot in the dean's rooms, Brendel sets out to solve the crime, which he satisfyingly does. Two years later, in 1935, Dorothy Sayers' Gordy Night appeared. It brings Harriet Vane, an Oxford graduate like Sayers, back to her undergraduate college, where she encounters an outbreak of anonymous letters, vandalism, threats, apparently from someone within the college. The community of students, dons and servants is almost torn apart by suspicions and fear. The perpetrator is finally unmasked by Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers' somewhat insufferably superior sleuth. Gordy Night was the eleventh of twelve novels featuring Wimsey. It is also not only a detective story, it is a complex exploration of the nature of personal responsibility and choice, the changing roles of women after the Great War, and the relationship between genre fiction and high art. It's a very significant novel in those terms too. The third book in my founding trio appeared in 1936. It was Death in the President's Lodgings by Michael Innes. It's an ingeniously plotted tale and the first case to be solved by John Appleby, then still Inspector Appleby, although after a long series of novels he becomes Chief Inspector and then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, acquiring a son, a wife, and a knighthood along the way. Appleby is summoned in this book to St. Anthony's College, a fictional institution 14 years before the current college in Woodstock Road was important enough to borrow its name. The head of the college, Dr. Appleby, was murdered in the night in a crime we are told on page one that was at once intriguing and bizarre, efficient, and theatrical. The solution is also bizarre, intriguing, theatrical, and efficient. It involves a series of confessions by fellows of the college, all telling the truth, but none of whom was the actual murderer. You'll have to read it to understand that. But these three books have things in common. Firstly, they are not only chronologically, but in the observance of the conventions and the type. They all fit in the golden age of English crime fiction outlined by Peter earlier this morning. Secondly, all three use the Oxford College as the equivalent of the country house, beloved of the genre, a hermetically sealed setting, drastically limiting the number of possible suspects. As the blurb to the death of the president's lodgings has it quote, the only people with any motive to murder Appleby were the fellows of the college and they too were the only people who could have had the opportunity because the president's lodgings opened off orchard ground which was locked at night and only fellows had the keys. Classic, it's locked room and country house together. Incidentally, crime fiction set in Oxford has created enough imaginary colleges to construct an entirely parallel imaginary university. I have a mind to draw the map guiding us through St. Thomas's, St. Anthony's and Shrewsbury's colleges, the Three of My Trio, but also All Saints, Bartlemas, Leicester, Lonsdale, St. Christopher's, St. George's, St. Mary's, St. Martha's, St. Mark's, Warlock, Woolsey, and my favorite, Apocrypha College and many others. Thirdly, my trio of books were written by Oxford insiders. Sayers was born in the Headmaster's house of Christchurch Choir School. She attended Somerville and she knew many Oxford academics in her own capacity as translator and writer on Christianity. Michael Innes was the pseudonym of J. I. M. Stewart, who from 1949 to his retirement in the 1970s taught English literature at Christchurch. J. C. Masterman read history at Oxford before becoming tutor in modern history, then provost of Worcester and vice chancellor of the university. If you look him up in the D&B, he's actually got more prominence for his role during the war as a spy master. He ran a network of double agents during the war and in that capacity chaired a committee called the 20 committee. White 20 Roman numerals, XX double cross. Anyway, you can see why he wrote Detector Story. What these three books did was found the lineage of the Donnish detective, a conflation of a rarefied intelligence associated with Oxford Donns and the notion that detective work resembles pure deductive reasoning. So detective work, Oxford Donns, bring them together, you get the Donnish detective. And many of the Donnish detectives were actual Donns in these books. Although the type is personified in Applebee, who was, of course, a policeman and not a Don. But his familiarity with the classics, with literary allusions and quotations, his ability to cap anybody else's quotation, display all the features of a Donnish detective. He was witty, quirky, stunningly erudite, impeccably courteous, but not notably patient with lesser intellects. He was not merely the most Donnish of Donnish detectives, but also the first. After World War II, Donnish detectives remained active, but as the 40s and 50s yielded to the 1950s and 60s, sorry, to the 60s and 70s, changes occurred in their pursuits, their preoccupations, and their particulars. This is not surprising. The years after the war saw far-reaching changes in British education, part of the new welfare state. And even Oxford, the intake of student and Donns, became more diverse. More women and international students entered the university, and scientists came to outnumber classicists, theologians, and philosophers. The detective stories gradually caught up with some of these changes. Most of the Donnish detectives of these, these periods, the 40s and 50s, 60s, are not read much anymore. Some are virtually forgotten. I have selected three for mention. One of the earliest post-war representatives of this subgenre, the Donnish detective, was Professor Gervais Fenn. He was the creation of Edmund Crispin, the nom de plume of a professional musician, Robert Bruce Montgomery, who wrote his first book while still an undergraduate at Oxford. Fenn, professor of literature at the university, solved a number of crimes that he bounced and burbled his way through. Although only two, of I think there are seven detective stories, only two are actually set in the city. That's the case of the gilded fly, and the moving toy shop, the best known one. Another scholar, Tern Sluf, was a philosophy Don Ambrose Usher, who featured in six novels written over a quarter of a century by Jocelyn Davy. Jocelyn Davy was a pen name again for Chaim Raphael, who was an Oxford Don, a foreign office functionary, and a spokesman for the treasury. His detective, Ambrose Usher, also moved between the intrigues of the university and those of the world beyond. He was periodically summoned to put down wickedness on behalf of Her Majesty's government. And Usher was based upon, quite closely modelled upon, one of Oxford's best known dons, the larger-than-life intellectual Sir Zaire Berlin, remembered in an obituary as the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time. And then thirdly, I wonder if anyone here has come across the novels of Sarah Cordwell. Good, again her own name was Sarah Coburn, and she wrote only four elegant, witty crime novels, unusual in that they were solved partly by four young barristers in London and partly by their mentor, Professor Hilary Tamar, tutor in law at St George's College, Oxford. The story is narrated by Tamar, and it is the Lordon who does the actual detecting, often receiving all the clues in letters and texas from the young lawyers who do the legwork. The stories are subtle, witty, and complicated. The voice of Hilary Tamar, unforgettable. Do notice that in this brief paragraph I have not specified where the Hilary was a man or a woman. Cordwell sustains this ambiguity over the entire series of novels. She in fact refused to have their made into a television series because she said it would spoil the joke. Now this trio of Donnish detectives, Fen, Usher, and Tamar, odd Donnish to the point of caricature, like their pre-war predecessors. Fen, whimsical, eccentric, throws off quotations in half a dozen languages and is an appalling driver with a rake-ish sports car named Lily Christine, Ambrose Usher. But let me quote from a review. Quote, while bodies are filled and dark deeds are done all about him, the philosophy Donn lets Bach's magnificat sing through his mind, ruminates about Hegel, and numbs his listeners with a flow of quotes from the Bible, Shakespeare, major poets, and minor limericists. Unquote. A reviewer, I think a baffled reviewer in Time magazine said, quote, the book is lesser who done it than a witty who said it. Hilary Tamar is less given to shows of erudition, but in all other respects an entirely credible Oxford Don. Sarah Cordwell told an interviewer, Hilary's voice was in my head before any of the plots. I knew from the outset Hilary must be an Oxford Don-ish type, sorry, an Oxford Don of equivocal sex and even equivocal age, resembling that precise Don-ish kind of individual who starts being elderly at the age of 22. Because I can't resist it, he has a brief echo of Tamar's voice. I like it very much because it resonates so closely with the real life of academic research. Quote, on my first day in London, I made an early start. Reaching the public record office, not much after 10, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost 11 and I was quite exhausted. I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment. But these Don-ish detectors are quite unlike their pre-war predecessors in important ways. Yes, each of them belongs to a named Oxford College, but it is not the sealed world of the college that provides the setting for their detection. Much of the detective work is not even done in Oxford. Fenn investigates crimes located in the West Country Cathedral Town, in a boys' school, in a film studio, and the Devon countryside. Usher's endeavors take him to London, frequently, and even to New York and Harvard. Hilary Tamar's detective work shuttles between Oxford and London, but also extends to the Channel Islands and Monaco. So these are Dons who double up as detectives, but their detective work is almost entirely independent of their university lives. In this respect, I think they provide a kind of bridge between the classical amateur detective, golden age amateur, and those of the late 20th and early 21st century. Because the amateur crime solver, including the Don-ish detective, has tended to vanish from British crime fiction in the second half of the 20th century, giving way to the realistic recognition that investigation of crime is normally carried out by policemen and police women. So detective novels in England in the second half of the century came increasingly to revolve around professionals, think Dalglish, Wexford, Laidlaw, Dalziel, Rebus, and of course in Oxford, Morse. Morse is a professional, not an amateur, a policeman, and not a Don. And while a number of these cases take him into the university and the colleges, especially Lonsdale College, the series as a whole does not depend on the cloisters or common. Dexter's Oxford, in quite important ways, straddles town and gone, and I need to return to Morse in a moment. Let me mention two other detectives who move between the university and the city, solving crimes in both millions. They are emphatically not Don-ish detectives. One is Kate Ivory, a romantic novelist whose curiosity constantly leads her into investigations. She appears in 13 novels by Veronica Stallwood, all have Oxford in the title, Oxford Blue, Oxford Falls, Death in the Oxford Box, and so on. And I think they're one of the series that realize the city and its topography and its rhythms very, very well. Kate may be, as one review has it, spirited, independent, and observant. But I have to confess that I find the basic premise of this amateur finding a self-wide-eyed, in one case after another, does place a strain on one's credulity. It's a pity because, as I say, she writes engagingly about Oxford, and her best books are well-plotted and talkly told. The other detective in this group is also a woman, Sam Falconer. She is a professional private investigator, and as her office is in South London, some might object that these are not Oxford stories at all. However, all four books written by Victoria Blake, Sam Falconer is a detective, take place mainly in Oxford, and in the most recent, Sam actually opens a branch office in the Cowley Road. Victoria Blake's father, Robert, now Lord Blake, was provost of Queens College, and that's where she grew up, she grew up inside the college. Sam, her detective, has a stepfather who's head of a college, and I think it would be fair to say that Sam has a love-hate relationship with the city. These detective stories are darker, the view of Oxford more ambivalent than any of those I've mentioned so far. One blurb calls the fourth book a taut mix of classic crime, modern noir and psychological drama, and that's about right. I reminded you of some of the detective stories set in Oxford, but I should also emphasize how many I've not mentioned. There are detective stories, for example, which are essentially humorous, which parody the genre. When he died earlier this year, many people remember Robert Robinson's essay into this genre, probably the best title of any of them, Landscape with Dead Dons. It's also got a very, very good beginning when the College porter, Tantalus, notices that there's an extra statue up on the roof, and upon investigation, this turns out to be the vice chancellor in vertical rigor mortis. You get a flavor of the book from its famous ending, when the murderer is chased from Parsons pleasure, the male bathing spot, through the town by dozens of Oxford dons, the quarry like all the hunters stark naked. Yeah, there's a troop of naked men rushing through the town. Two high churchmen in South Park's road, suppose them to be Baptists. Two heads of house leaving black wells assumed to be an advertising stunt, and a philosophy don peering through his window in Baileal advises his pupil, let us take this as a hypothetical case, and so on. There are other comic novels, I think that's probably the best. Then there are detective novels set in the past. The 13th century is where the several novels in the William Falconer series by Ian Mawson take place, and the 17th century is the setting for a one off Ian Pierce's very fine, an instance of the finger post. They are also donnish detectives at other universities, and some of them visit Oxford. Amanda Cross brought her American academic sleuth, Kate Fanzler, to spend a sabbatical and solve a crime in the city. Jane Langton brought Homer Kelly as a visiting professor and a tourist sleuth. In 2005, the Argentinian novelist Guerrero Martinez wrote The Oxford Murders, young Argentinian visitor combining high mathematics and low crime, most entertainingly. It was subsequently made into a very poor film. Finally, I come to Dexter's Morse and Morse's Oxford. I'm very much aware that Colin Dexter will be addressing you this afternoon, and I hope nothing that I say will preempt from his presentation. But it would be a very odd omission if one did not cover Morse in a lecture on detectives in Oxford. And indeed, there's a further complication. One is referring not only to a much loved series of novels, but also a wildly successful television series. In Dexter Morse, the series ran for 33 two-hour episodes on our screens, attracting an average audience of 15 million viewers. And to the delight of advertisers, this audience was unusually affluent and well educated. That's the target. This means that for many, it's difficult to disentangle the books from the TV series. And it's very difficult not to see the fictional Morse with the craggy features of John Thor, or Sergeant Bluus as the open-faced Kevin Whakley. And of course, there were differences between the books and the programmes. The very first scene of the first television episode begins with Morse driving his vintage car. It is, of course, not if you have a first edition of the earlier novels. In those, Morse drove a classic Lancia. But once the TV series was in full swing and they wanted a British car, Morse was so identified with that burgundy Jaguar that in all later editions of the books, the Lancia becomes a Jaguar. In the books, Lewis was Welsh. In the series, he becomes a Geordie. These are not significant changes. A more telling difference stems from the nature of the medium of television. Its ability to create a visual Oxford which looks real, but is actually false. I'm sure we've all seen, particularly those of you who come from Oxford, we see Morse and Lewis enter the lodge of one college, only to find them in the quadrangle of quite a different other. Or they drive from A to B on a route that doesn't link them. This is actually very different from Dexter's novels, where the city's physical geography is lovingly even pedantically recreated. He walked out of the Randolph and crossed over by the Martyrs Memorial into Broad Street. He strode fairly quickly past the front of Baleill, the Great Gates of Trinity, Blackwell's Bookshop, and waited by the new Bodleian building to cross at the traffic lights into Hollywood Street. Even more briskly now, Aschenden walked past the King's Arms, the Hollywood Music Room, the back of New College, until he came to Longwall Street. Here he turned left, and after 200 yards went through the wooden gate that led into Hollywood Cemetery. Absolutely physical recreation. So that in the Dexter books, the city is real, and Morse, therefore, acquires a kind of reality. It is, says one reviewer, a perfect example of character and landscape in harmony. It's not only the artifice of the television programs that contrasts with the topographical realities of the books, because Colin Dexter also introduces his readers to more of Oxford, its suburbs, its scruffy seats, its shopping centres and rundown buildings, quote from one novel, as the coach slowly moved one car length at a time towards the Headington Roundabout. A litter-strewn patch of ill-kempt grass beside a gaudily striped petrol station lent little achievement to the scene, unquote. By contrast, the TV series concentrated on the glamorous aspects of Oxford, not to say those various country houses which also featured the cameras linger on the city's honeyed sandstone, on its walls and gateways, its golden youth on cycles or pumps, and the picturesque rooftop and so on. Absolutely typical of those languid panning shots of the Oxford skyline, where it is always summer. This, to be perfectly blunt, is Oxford as an export item. This is Englishness gift-wrapped for an international media audience. The visual expression of Englishness requires village greens and gardens, medieval lanes and churches, and wood-panelled interiors. And in Morse, none of this has denied us, the inspector Morse. A reviewer in the listener reflected the coziness of the program, I'm quoting. The plots have a nice comfortable ring to them, like Agatha Christie's stories rewritten by Iris Murdock. They remind us of sensible shoes and unchilled sherry, toasted crumpets, and the triumph of good over evil. And it's also been argued that the biggest difference between the novels and the TV episodes is that Morse is less misogynistic on screen than he is on the page. The inspector's somewhat predatory attitudes towards women are softened, and it becomes instead a romantic, doomed in episode after episode to fall for a woman who'll prove to be out of his reach, not least because so many of them turn out to be the perpetrators. All in all, the character played by John Thor is cuddlier and easier than the original of the Dexter novels. What is common to both is Morse's intuitive intelligence, his pessimism about human nature, and his strong moral sense, his lonely and curmudgeonly probity. If it weren't such a poor pun, I'd call this the Code of Morse. Inspector Morse has, of course, been succeeded on television by Lewis. In terms of ratings, this is a fairly successful spin-off, and there are, of course, continuities between the series. I personally think that the plots in Lewis have become convoluted and strained, and even that the use of Oxford as setting has become somewhat hackneyed. What does work in the Lewis programs is the relationship between Lewis, now Inspector, and Lawrence Fox as Detective Sergeant James Hathaway. Hathaway is a hugely bright, younger policeman. He's a Cambridge graduate who subsequently trained for the priesthood in Oxford. In one episode, we told that at his school, he was nicknamed WC, short for Wolfgang Christ because he didn't know whether he wanted to be Mozart or Jesus. Hathaway is highly knowledgeable, and he often shows it. He's technologically savvy, he's always on his blackberry, and especially in the pilot episodes, Hathaway constantly shook Lewis with a range of specialist knowledge that would see him do outstandingly well on university challenge. I make this point because although Hathaway is a professional policeman, he's not a don, he unmistakably belongs in the tradition of Appleby, Then, Usher, Morse, and the rest, because, of course, Morse, although he's a policeman, is rarely a kind of don too. Hathaway is at home, like Morse, in the city and its university. Here's the latest in a very long line of clever Oxford detectives exercising intellect in the solving of crimes. I suspect you will not be the last, but we must now confront the question, why Oxford? Others have posed this question, and they've come up with different answers, and I draw upon their insights. But I want to begin with a more general observation. Move beyond detective stories and consider campus novels, all novels set in British universities, which universities predominate. Well, for the period 1945 to 1988, a scholar has, as they say, done the math. A total of 204 novels were set on British campuses. Of these, 145 or over 70% took place in only two universities. Yes, Oxford and Cambridge. And Oxford's own share was, says the author, monstrously large, with 119 novels out of 205 set in this single campus. So British fiction generally privileges Oxbridge. And so in that sense, not surprisingly, so does crime fiction. And that provides the first element in an answer to the question, why Oxford? Almost all the authors, this is the second element, that almost all of the authors of these campus novels, and many of the detective novels, were students at Oxford. They're here at an impressionable age, impressionable age, they're living in the intense, cloistered, rarefied setting of an undergraduate college. Small wonder that they revisit this experience in fiction. The crime writer, Martin Edwards, a Balliol graduate, notes that 30 alumni of his college have written crime novels set in Oxford. One of them, Tim Heald, has written a series of novels featuring a detective called Simon Bognore. And one of these, Masterstroke, is set in Oxford. And Heald's website remarks of this book, quote, every novelist who went to Oxford University has to write an Oxford novel, and this is mine. I think it's another element in the explanation. The same rule, the Tim Heald rule, applies to other one-off appearances in Oxford by detectives who usually work elsewhere. Antonia Fraser brought her detective Jemima Shaw to Oxford for one story, Oxford Blood. Hazel Holt brought Sheila Mallory here just once in 19 novels. And Val McDermott, a hugely successful crime and thriller writer, waited until her recent 28th novel, A Trick of the Dark, for an Oxford setting. McDermott emphasized, when she talked about why Oxford, she emphasized the spirit of the place, the extent to which members of the university love crime fiction both as producers and consumers. And I noted earlier that the Oxford College in particular lends itself to detective fiction. It provides obviously a distinctive and picturesque setting, buildings, quadrangles, archways, a complex of buildings that turn in on themselves, that with those front doors, the port is large, that exclude the outer world. Private, even secret architecture. More than this, as Michael Innis put it, the fellow's habitat, the material structure in which they talk, eat and sleep, offers such a capital frame for the quiddities and wily beguilies of the craft. McDermott also mentions some practical advantages of the university as a setting for crime novels. It's near enough to London to provide narrative access to the world beyond the academy. It houses a vast range of nationalities and cultures. It is a center of power, and it's full of very clever people. And finally, she says, it also has snob value. It helps define us, the British, to ourselves. I think that's a very important insight as part of this explanation. It still surprises some that crime fiction is written and read by so many academics in Oxford. 50 years ago, the political philosopher A. M. Quinton waved aside such doubts. And I'm going to give you a quote from him in wonderfully Donnish language. He said, why do people read it? This is a perfectly intelligible state of affairs. The classical detective story is in an appropriately narrow sense of the word, preeminently intellectual. It calls on its author for out-of-the-way knowledge, for extended interest in the articulation of mistaken theories, red herring, and for the ability to manipulate complex interlockings of time, place, and movements. And when it comes to the playful, puzzle-solving side of classic detective fiction, it's frequently observed how much detective work and academic research have in common. They both seeking for the truth, they both weigh and assess evidence, they pay great attention to detail, and they apply logic and rationality in arriving at their conclusions. But at a more fundamental level, I think all of those are parts of the answer. At a more fundamental level, proposes Red Miller May, the answer surely lies in the way that Oxford has been depicted, not only in crime fiction, but in a certain type of literature as a city which is essentially mystical. This is the view of Oxford as the English Athens, a city of dream and a world of its own, enclosed, secluded, conservative, and eccentric, a closed community with its own customs, its own rituals, and its own concerns. This is the Oxford imagined by Haslett as the sacred city, the palace of enchantment. This is the Oxford of Matthew Arnold, not only the home of lost causes, but in another poem, and that sweet city with her dreaming spires. She needs not June for beauty's heightening. Lovely, all times she lies, lovely tonight. Lovely, all times. This is Gerald Manley Hopkins Oxford, a towery city and branchy between towers, cuckoo echoing bell swarming, lark charmed, ruck-wracked river-rounded. It's Oxford as a city of mystery and nostalgia, and it is exactly that Oxford that is invoked by some of the authors I've mentioned. Dorothy Sayers does so over and again. Here is Harriet Vane gazing out from the parapet. She's actually on the roof of the Radcliffe camera, not some very search. The eastwood within a stone's throw stood the twin towers of all souls, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath, brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring. Behind them, black and gray, new college frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her belfry louvres, and queens with her dome of green copper, and as the eye turns southwards, mordland, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers. Beautiful. Edmund Crispin, shortly before Richard Cadogan pushed his way into the toy shop, he's been hitchhiking, he gets off the lorry, threw a rift in the trees. He caught his first real glimpse of Oxford in that ineffectual moonlight, an underwater city, its towers and spires standing ghostly, like the memorials of lost Atlantis fathoms deep. So if this is romantic Oxford, other worldly Oxford, timeless Oxford, where does that locate the detective story? Surely it derives its impact precisely by shattering tranquility and beauty by violence and evil. Peter Kemp mentioned Orden's essay, The Guilty Vicarage, and in that essay he says murder should take place, quote, in the great good place. The corpse must shock, not only because it is a corpse, but also because even for a corpse it is shockingly out of place. And Orden in fact anticipated a great deal of more recent literary theorizing about detective novels when he wrote, I'm quoting, the detective story society, cast of characters, is a society consisting of apparently innocent individuals. The murder is the act of disruption by which innocence is lost. The fantasy then, which the detective story addict indulges in, is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence. Val McDermott makes a similar point, Oxford she says is a beautiful city, murder the ugliest of crimes. The university is a place of intellect, of pure reason. Murder is a reminder of how corporeally mortal we all are. Crime fiction flourishes in Oxford on this reading, because the city in real life is a relative haven, with a level of violent crime well below the national average. When fictional detectives solve fictional crimes in fictional Oxford, their success is important to us to the reader, because it restores order, it sets wrongs right, and it makes it possible for us to continue to believe in an Oxford of golden stone, green lawns and high-minded intellectuals. In this sense, all Oxford detective fiction is nostalgic, is an exercise of restoration and reassurance. The city of Oxford has changed a great deal since my trio of founding novels in the 1930s. Think Morris Motors, Blackbird Lees, think tourists in August. The university has altered even more, think the dominance of science over classics, coeducational colleges, think research-driven labs and departments. And with those changes I've tried to suggest, crime fiction has responded and reacted and reflected change. Detective novels continue to provide us with ways of thinking about Oxford that go beyond their plots, their perpetrators or their policemen.