★★★★☆ Crimes of Passion

Death in the Spires

K.J. Charles

K.J. Charles's Death in the Spires begins in 1905, when our hero Jeremy (Jem) Kite is called into his boss's office. His boss has just received an anonymous letter accusing Jeremey of murder. Jem immediately knows what this is about, because it's something he's been living with for ten years. The REAL beginning of our story is in 1892, when Jem shows up at Oxford as a new student. He is quickly taken up into a group of seven friends, revolving about Toby Feynsham. So brilliant are these seven, both in sports and scholarship, that they become known among their contemporaries as the "seven wonders". Until 1895, when Toby was murdered. The other six know that the murderer had to be one of themselves. But the murder has not been solved.

Jem, prodded by the letter, is no longer able to let sleeping dogs lie, and begins to investigate. So it's a murder mystery with some of the usual elements common to most murder mysteries.

Two things about Death in the Spires stand out as different from genre murder mysteries. First, the usual mystery novel is passionless. The investigation is framed as an intellectual exercise, a game that the author plays with the reader. Indeed, Jem's boss alludes to this in his conversation with Jem. And, even more strangely, the murderers in genre mysteries are coldly rational actors, who plan their murders, and carefully think about the costs and benefits.

That is not the seven wonders at all. They are not coldly rational sociopaths. These are passionate, angry people (who, indeed, have much to be angry about). Death in the Spires is more emotionally powerful, and more believable as an account of murder, than most mystery novels.

The second thing that jumped out to me was, "This could not happen today." Charles has described Death in the Spires with these words

It's also whatever the opposite of a love letter to Oxford University might be. Possibly hate mail.

But the message is addressed to late 19th century Oxford, not the 21st century university that some of us know. At one point in the novel Jem and Hugo tell each other:

‘It hasn’t changed, has it?’
‘Not much. Nothing here does.’*

But it does. If your time horizon is ten years, the change is imperceptible. But the Oxford of Death in the Spires is not 2024 Oxford.

The Oxford in which Dorothy Hodgkin could not become a full-fledged Oxford Don because she was a woman is gone. That would not happen today. The England that convicted Alan Turing of "gross indecency" is gone. Gone too is the Oxford that would greet a brilliant new student with public mockery because he had, through his own merit, won a competitive scholarship.

Now, to be sure, the prejudices that motivated those injustices are still alive and flourishing in some quarters. But, at the very least, the legal environment has changed. And it has changed for the better!

Death in the Spires is not a typical genre mystery -- it is something better than that.

Thanks to NetGalley and Storm Publishing for an advance reader copy of Death in the Spires. Release date 11-Apr-2024.

*The quote is from an advance reader copy of Death in the Spires, and may change before publication. This review will be corrected on the release date if necessary.

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