A Schooling in Murder
The fictional Monkshill estate, in its heyday, was the backdrop to The American Boy (2013). Crime writer Andrew Taylor returns there in 1945, when the crumbling, neglected grounds are now home to a mediocre boarding school for girls. In this who-whydunit, the protagonist, Annabel Warnock, is recently dead but can’t quite leave her ghostly form behind for the place where dead folks go. Annabel was a teacher who seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, but no one seems particularly concerned. A cursory police investigation came up empty, and the strange disappearance is brushed off by teachers and students alike, with the exception of the bookish student Sylvia, who does some investigating along with the cook’s nephew, Stephen. Alan Shaw is hired on short notice to make up the staff shortfall, although a male teacher is not ideal in an all-girls’ school.
Annabel floats around the crumbling estate, watching and listening, routinely held up at thresholds she did not cross in life. Her mental acuity for people’s character is far sharper now she’s dead. As she watches Shaw at his typewriter, attempting an atrociously written mystery novel in his spare time, she discovers a tenuous way to communicate with him. This empowers her to do her own investigating, returning to the scene of her murder and mulling through the long list of suspects.
Taylor’s standalone novel is chock full of bizarre and cleverly drawn characters—headmistress, Miss Pryce-Morgan or PM; matron, Mrs Runciman, or Runty; overworked and underpaid housekeeper, Mrs Crisp; mean-spirited mischief maker, Tosser, who fixes the boiler and engages in other less benign things; and schoolgirls—self-assured, aristocratic Venetia; hygienically-challenged Rosemary; and shy, cowering Prissy. Hidden agendas, poison-pen letters and another murder make A Schooling in Murder a true winner and its very satisfactory ending will not disappoint. You can’t go wrong with a Taylor mystery.
