Crime fiction at college: third-level murder

Could you hazard a guess at the population of the average Irish small town? Don’t fret, I did the googling so that you don’t have to. It turns out that it’s about 5,000. Kinsale, in other words.

Multiply Kinsale by five and you’ll get the population of University College Cork: 22,000 students and approximately 3,500 staff. More than Portlaoise, considerably more than Clonmel, more than twice as many as Dungarvan, and nearly as many as Kilkenny. That number of people concentrated in one location equals a lot of stories and a massive opportunity for a crime novelist. Add in the exceptional loveliness of the UCC campus, the cluster of atmospheric heritage buildings, the fact that it’s the place I spent my student years, and that I live a 10-minute walk away and stroll through the grounds often, and it was only a matter of time before I started writing about the place. In doing so, I wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel. Novels set in universities aren’t unusual. By this point, books set in TCD are a genre unto themselves.

Novels set in Irish universities that aren’t Trinity are rarer beasts. Although Dervla McTiernan uses a dodgy research institute attached to the University of Galway in her excellent 2019 book ‘The Scholar’, the second in the Cormac Reilly series, I was aiming for the full Inspector-Morse-sur-Lee effect. I wanted to take a deep dive into the beauty and order contrasted with ambition and venality formula so familiar from the much-loved television show starring John Thaw - set mainly amongst a succession of fictional Oxford colleges and based on the novels of Colin Dexter - and apply it to Cork. And the prequel, ‘Endeavour’, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, is even better than the original, I think. No pressure, like.

But university-based crime fiction isn’t all about Morse and it never has been. Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’, published in 1992, about a group of classics students who kill their classmate at a fictional elite New England college, is a hugely important work that has gone on to inspire an entire subculture known as ‘Dark Academia’. ‘The Secret History’s’ enduring influence may be best known to Irish readers from Tana French’s ‘The Likeness’ (2008). Alex Michaledes’s ‘The Maidens’ (2021), about a charismatic Cambridge professor and an exclusive society of female students, is a more recent example, as is ‘The It Girl’ (2022) by Ruth Ware, about murder amid a group of Oxford friends. There are many more.

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Long before any of these, in ‘Gaudy Night’ (1935), Dorothy L. Sayers has novelist Harriet Vane investigating, with the assistance of Lord Peter Wimsey, a series of unsettling occurrences at Vane’s alma mater, the fictional Shrewsbury College. She returns to Oxford for a reunion (a ‘Gaudy’) and is ‘visited by an enormous nostalgia’ even though ‘she had long ago taken the step that had put the grey-walled paradise of Oxford behind her.’

In the engrossing ‘Trick of the Dark’ (2010) by Val McDermid, a bridegroom is beaten to death in the grounds of fictional St. Scholastika’s College Oxford a few hours after his wedding. It’s a fiendishly difficult crime to solve because there are ‘people everywhere’ and, just like in UCC, ‘anyone could walk in and out of college.’

All the same, you might be starting to discern a pattern here. In crime fiction, invented educational institutions are quite the thing. There’s even a Wikipedia page devoted to ‘Fictional Oxford Colleges’ which, it states, are to be ‘found in many modern novels, films, and other works of fiction, probably because they allow the author greater licence for invention.’

It was presumably for those reasons that Eilís Dillon used fictional King’s University in ‘Death in the Quadrangle’ (1956), which features detecting duo Professor Daly and Inspector Kenny; and that, in Catherine Ryan Howard’s Edgar nominated ‘The Liar’s Girl’ (2018), the fictional St. John’s College Dublin forms the backdrop to the Canal Killer murders. Likewise, Simon Mason substituted St. Barnabas Hall for Lady Margaret Hall (his old college) in the superb ‘A Killing in November’ (2022), the first of a new Oxford-set series.

It’s not just in crime novels that universities are fictionalised. David Lodge made up the university (and city) of Rummidge for his comic campus trilogy that ended with 1988′s ‘Nice Work’; and in 2011′s candidate for the great American novel ‘The Art of Fielding’ by Chad Harbach, Westish College Wisconsin is an invention too.

Nevertheless, I still wanted to set my crime novel in UCC. I considered basing the plot around a department for an obscure subject not taught there. If I’d stuck with that, A Lesson in Malice would have been a very different, and probably unfinished, book. In the end, I opted for something I know a little about: a law school, but a fictional one, within the real college; and a reluctant return for a conference by former student and now solicitor Finn Fitzpatrick.

I began with an idea of a university quite different from John Henry Newman’s: that everybody working in a senior position was almost certainly at one time the brightest pupil in their primary school class. From then on, it was gold stars all the way to a PhD and, ultimately, a daily grind where they’re merely one clever clogs among many. I surmised that a life path of early distinction and acclaim followed by ordinariness and possible disappointment could affect someone’s ego in potentially destructive ways.

So I decided to put a group of academics in a room in the East Wing of the Quad at UCC to see what might happen. Spoiler alert, as ‘A Lesson in Malice’ is a crime novel, you win no prizes whatsoever for guessing there’s a murder.

A Lesson in Malice by Catherine Kirwan is published on June 29th by Hachette Ireland.