Academia is brutal, even without a murder. Adjuncts spend hours on the road for little pay and no health care; research grants get smaller each year as the competition for resources grows tighter, graduate departments exploit labor without providing opportunities, and tuition (and student debt) are ever increasing. And in this land of broken dreams, misplaced cash, and vicious competition, springs the Academic Mystery, and it’s closely related cousin, Research Noir.
A history of the academic mystery mirrors the rise and fall of academia itself, and particularly, women’s place within academia. The more women who have become academics, the lower the status of their profession and the size of their salaries (see computer science for an exercise in the reverse: computer programmers, once primarily a profession of low-paid women, has morphed into a high-status, high-salary job as the profession has become coded…get it?…as male).
Early academic mysteries are concerned with fighting for a place for women within academia, and more broadly, for women’s right to live as intellectuals. Academic mysteries from the 70s and 80s often featured female professors at the top of their game, with jobs that were a clear result of hard work and education, yet with plenty of jealous and old-fashioned colleagues waiting for the slightest misstep to swoop and say “I told you so.” The elegant mysteries of the late millennium, in contrast, were tinged with a dawning realization that academia might be in trouble; the jobs that women educators had earned weren’t as stable as those that previous generations of male colleagues had vacated, while ever-higher tuition rates translated into ever-lower returns.
And, in the new millennium, a burst of psychological thrillers have chronicled academia’s modern-day implosion, bowled over by school shootings, sexual harassment, rising tuition, low returns for intellectual investments, and a narrowing vision of access to the ivory tower, based more on privilege than merit.
The less access we have to elite institutions, the more we rely on fiction to provide us with a behind-the-doors scene. The university system may be imperiled, but it still represents, in its most elite institutions, access to a level of power unimaginable to the ordinary American attending a public university or community college (Hook ‘em horns!). Perhaps the fact that we can all access the most restricted halls of privilege through crime fiction is yet another key to the academic mystery’s enduring appeal, and continued relevance. How else are you gonna learn about Skull and Bones?
Academia increasingly resembles bare-knuckle capitalism, and the desperate struggle of life under capitalism has always been great fodder for crime fiction. Your experiment fails? You don’t publish this year? You get a bad review on your teaching style? You don’t have tenure? Not quite “phft, to the Russian front,” but you catch my drift. Academia used to be a journey with an end, and now it’s a struggle without end.
The resources are few. The consequences are real. You will work as hard as you possibly can as a graduate student, apply to 300 jobs each year after getting a doctorate, and depending on your degree, you may end up back in school to become an accountant. And that’s okay, because let’s face it: academia sucks. The failure is not yours. The failure is the system’s.
I’ve rounded up 12 of academic mysteries through which we can trace this history, and enjoy the violent delights of revenge, both petty and justified. There is, of course, a sizable oeuvre already dedicated to academia in crime fiction, and research noir, its modern-day outgrowth, is ever-expanding.
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The Academic Mystery
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Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935)
Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night is the academic mystery that started them all, taking her character Harriet Vane to an alumni dinner at Shrewsbury College, an all-women college at Oxford based on Sayers’ own alma mater, where things quickly go awry. Graffiti, poisoned-pen letters, anti-feminist harassment, and academic fraud all make their appearance in a mystery equally compelling for its plot and its defense of women as intellectuals.
Helen Eustis, The Horizontal Man (1947)
This Edgar-Winner from 1947 affectionately pillories the eccentric denizens of Hollymont College, based on Eustis’ time at Smith. When a young student confesses to killing a professor, a friend steps in to investigate the crime herself, unwilling to believe the fragile confessor capable of the act. She joins forces with a fast-talking journalist to discover the truth, and along the way, encounters a variety of female students testing the limits of allowable female transgression, and heralding the soon approach of Second Wave feminist sentiment. Plus, sweaters!
P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job For A Woman (1972)
P. D. James’ classic PI novel fulfills the classic pattern of noir—“starts bad, gets worse.” Private investigator Cordelia Gray walks into her office only to find her partner has killed himself and left the agency to her. She soon gets her first solo client—a woman investigating the disappearance of her employer’s son Mark, dead under mysterious circumstances at Oxford. As Gray investigates further, she soon becomes convinced that Mark could never have committed suicide. The novel unfolds for a shocking denouement that wraps up plot threads neatly while exploring class, gender, and of course, money.
Amanda Cross, Death in A Tenured Position (1979)
Caroline Gold Heilbrun, writing under the name Amanda Cross, penned this feminist classic in the late 70s. In Death in a Tenured Position, an unpopular but hard-working professor receives tenure, only to immediately face jealousy and scorn from her male colleagues. When she’s found dead in the men’s faculty bathroom, it’s up to her only friend to discover the truth. Death In A Tenured Position asks, at its heart, “What now?” Heilbrun’s characters, who have gone farther than any generation before, find themselves struggling for recognition and ostracized by male colleagues in a profession that remains less than inclusive to this day. In the end, the murder is solved, but academia remains broken, and the question remains remains unanswered.
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Campus Thrillers
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Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)
Tartt’s debut featuring classics students gone haywire takes us into the world of status insecurity in an elite college, as a student who feels himself not quite at home is lured into a cult of classics students whose taste for bacchanalias turns deadly. A fascinating take on the outside-in narrative, from an enigmatic and brilliant talent who I still can’t believe was at school with Bret Easton Ellis. Despite its bleaker sections, The Secret History is still a work that fundamentally believes in the possibilities and opportunities of academia—the students at the center of the work are so besotted with the classics that they engage in ritual violence to satisfy their hunger for twinned knowledge and experience.
Ian Smith, The Ancient Nine (2006)
Ian Smith’s adventurous thriller about a Harvard student recruited to a powerful and secretive private club was an entertaining reminder that academia is still the best place to take down the power structure from the inside. When Smith’s protagonist sours on the concept of so much privilege restricted to so few members, he vows to learn the club’s darkest secrets, and harness its power for good.
Lori Rader-Day, The Black Hour (2014)
Lori Rader-Day has a talent for telling traditional mystery stories with language that’s noir to the bone. In this, her debut, a professor wakes from a coma to learn she’s been shot by a student. Unable to understand the shooter’s motivation, she casts recovery to the wind and launches into a desperate and revelatory investigation of her own.
Christine Mangan, Tangerine (2018)
Tangerine is only partially a campus novel, but it fulfills so many of its classic tropes that I thought I’d include it. Two former roommates reunite in 1950s Morocco, but the heat quickly gets to them, leading to conflict and plenty of revelations about their twisted relationship at school. This one reads as if Patricia Highsmith, Paul Bowles, and Donna Tartt had written a campus novel together, with plenty of twists, turns, and lingering glances exchanged between the two central characters as they aimlessly wind their way through campus and casbah, conversation pregnant with subtext and unease.
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Research Noir
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Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor (2017)
In this brutal academic noir, a TV historian’s research assistant is engaged in an intricate deception when it comes to research materials for a soon-to-be-bestseller. As the two women engage in a vicious struggle over intellectual property, contributions to research, and academic credit, you’re not quite sure whose side you’re on, except, perhaps, whatever side both of the main characters are not on. Atkins uses her mystery to poke fun at the dilution of history for sake of story that so plagues our new entertainment-driven era.
Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand (2018)
Megan Abbott stunned me once again with grim rendition of the struggle beneath the surface – for credit, as much as for knowledge—when it comes to scientific research. Give Me Your Hand explores the intensely competitive environment of a research lab investigating premenstrual dysphoric disorder (P.M.D.D.), a powder keg of jealousies and resentments, that needs only the entrance of a charismatic new scientist in charge to explode. In Give Me Your Hand, women have achieved individual power in academia, but the grim realities of academic struggle and shrinking budgets (even for the sciences) negate many of the gains made in the past half-century. Give Me Your Hand represents, in short, the brave new world of academia.
Dervla McTiernan, The Scholar (2019)
In The Scholar, a woman found murdered on a college campus is quickly identified as the heir to a fortune, and child to the university’s biggest financial supporter. Dervla McTiernan uses her second novel to explore the backroom deals that keep colleges afloat—and under the sway of wealthy donors. While Ireland’s universities have yet to soar to US-level tuition hikes, The Scholar still has seemingly universal relevance when it comes to the disproportionate power wielded by the wealthy when government subsidies begin to dry up.
Nina Revoyr, A Student of History (2019)
In A Student of History, Revoir’s grad student protagonist Rick Nagano, broke and desperate, lands a sweet research assistant gig to one of Los Angeles’ ultra-wealthy .01 percenters, only to discover the dark secrets underpinning his newly wealthy surroundings. A Student of History asks, what would you do to stay in school? And what would you cover up about someone else’s past, in the service of your own future?
