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The Irish art of campus crime
by Cormac Millar

My first novel, An Irish Solution, was about drugs and politics. My second book, The Grounds, migrates to the somewhat different world of academe, maintaining something of the same murky perspective.

King’s College Dublin, the main location for The Grounds, was first invented for a rather gentle detective story, Death in the Quadrangle, written by Eilís Dillon and published exactly fifty years ago by Faber & Faber.

Eilís Dillon was my mother. Author of 50 books, she was also the wife of a respectable professor of Irish literature at University College Cork. The fictional university she invented for Death in the Quadrangle was both local and archetypal. Some of my father’s colleagues identified themselves, or each other, in the book’s characters, while academic visitors to Cork nervously enquired how she had come to know about scandals in their home universities. The Greek scholar Kathleen Freeman, reviewing the book for The Western Mail, felt that ‘all dons and ex-dons’ would understand the book. Another critic declared that Eilís Dillon’s picture of academic life was ‘the best we have read since Dorothy Sayers gave us Gaudy Night’. The TLS noted approvingly that ‘the mutual relations of the professors crackle with well-expressed malice’. In short, Death in the Quadrangle was a superior example of the ‘Don’s Delight’, a mid-century English (or Irish: what’s the difference?) detective novel, set in a pleasantly eccentric no-man’s-land where all university staff hold the title of Professor and saunter about at leisure, like well-fed cathedral canons, plotting against each other.

That was then; this is now. In 1956 the fictional King’s, sequestered in the almost rural calm of Dublin’s Phoenix Park, was a haven of self-indulgent erudition, disrupted by the genteel poisoning of a bumptious and manipulative President. That crime was solved by a charming old buffer, Professor Daly, and his willing accomplice, Inspector Kenny of the Civic Guards. Half a century on, King’s College Dublin is mediocre, dysfunctional, demoralized. The College President is once again a bumptious and manipulative popinjay. Like his predecessor, he too comes to a deservedly sticky end, arousing little regret and no great surprise among his colleagues. They do find it hard to believe, perhaps, that one of their number has managed to take such a decisive step. As the embittered Mr Jeremy Quaid remarks, on surveying the corpse of President Cregan, ‘academics bitch, but rarely kill. That only happens in Golden Age detective stories, where bodies are found in libraries. Our President has never been in a library.’

And yet, one can’t be quite sure.

Today, given the changing values of Ireland, a campus in Dublin is among other things an appetizing slice of real estate, a lucrative prize to be fought over by educational entrepreneurs and property developers. This time around, the King’s College crime falls on the plate of my unlikely hero, Séamus Joyce, a former civil servant driven from his job and reduced to earning a living as a ‘consultant’ to that well-known educational chainstore, Finer Small Campuses of the Western World™. An incompetent but sometimes perceptive shamus, Joyce stumbles through The Grounds, distrusted by the police and the media, suffering sexual harassment and other indignities, and nearly getting himself killed in the process. (Note to other mystery writers: I would gladly exchange this recalcitrant character for a cool, clean superman. Séamus Joyce is nothing but trouble.)

The modern crime story inevitably reflects changing social realities, and Ireland has changed more than most. Over the past half-century, we have moved from poorhouse to powerhouse. In 1956 the Republic was a stagnant backwater, shielded by a vigilante Church and a pious political class that lived in denial of the modern world. In 2006 we are Europe’s most open and successful economy, a cosmopolitan society whose young people believe they can do anything. We are world travellers. We weekend in New York, buy apartments in Málaga, Budapest, Dubai. We think it merely natural that an Irishman should head British Airways. We honour the writers whose works we used to ban, and exempt their successors from income tax. We remember Bob Geldof when he was only a boy, and hope the new Pope will pay proper respect to Bono. Accompanying these advances have been some nagging negatives: the recent memory of a savage sectarian war in Northern Ireland, the persistent stench of corruption among certain of our politicians and public servants, and the gradual exposure of an extraordinary criminal conspiracy within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, devoted to the promotion and protection of paedophilia, particularly in the educational sphere.

More conventional crime has also come of age, as western policies on recreational drugs have created an enormous market in the shipment and sale of illegal substances, and entrepreneurial Irishmen have seized the opportunities, fuelling the growth of a well-armed criminal class.

Further violence hangs on the horizon. Local terrorism has faded into quiet racketeering, as the Irish political landscape is reshaped under the benign influence of two world powers, Britain and America. But now our two benefactors are themselves descending into an ill-conceived crusade against assorted bogeymen, and even neutral Ireland finds itself implicated in the transport of troops and kidnap squads through our airports. The spread of Bushite ‘diplomacy’ intrudes only slightly into The Grounds; it will occupy a more prominent position in my third novel, The Bridge, now under construction.

A minor but significant symptom of underlying disorder is the government’s concerted attack on Ireland’s higher education system, previously one of the most cost-efficient in the world. Under the trendy guidance of consultants, bureaucrats, visionary ‘leaders’ and their eager acolytes, we are dismantling a fine tradition of solid undergraduate degrees, and starving our universities of core funding while competitive towers of expensive research, built on increasingly narrow foundations, sprout from every campus. This cock-eyed policy is accompanied by shrill proclamations of ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’.

So why write campus crime today? The waywardness of academics still lends itself to the creation of a light-hearted freak-show, but one hopes to do more than that. In former times, campus crime encapsulated W.H. Auden’s idea of detective fiction as a locus of pastoral calm, disturbed by murder and restored by detection. Universities were centres of tradition, privilege and prestige, equally attractive to writers and readers who had never got over their educational years, and others who had never got the chance to go to college. Intellectual and social snobbery doubtless played a part, but some of the old campus crime was remarkably well written. Michael Innes sparkled with witty urbanity in his début Death at the President’s Lodging, and goodness, what fun we had with Edmund Crispin’s Dr Gervase Fen of Oxford! (For a nice survey of the Oxbridge school, visit Mystery Readers on the web.)

It’s harder to pull off the same trick today. Campus fiction has been invaded by credible females and members of the lower-orders; camp crime can no longer shrug off the influence of such non-criminal academic novels as Changing Places, Nice Work and Thinks by David Lodge, or The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury. The prestige of academics has fallen away now that much of the population holds higher educational qualifications, and can purchase further diplomas and doctorates off the Internet.

In Matricide at St. Martha’s (1994) the talented Irish crime writer Ruth Dudley Edwards can still conjure up a light fantastic Oxbridge scandal, But faced with her airy upper-crust detectives, one is reminded of Raymond Chandler’s critique of a Golden Age amateur sleuth in his classic essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’: ‘The English police seem to endure him with their customary stoicism; but I shudder to think of what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him.’

Without aspiring to the status of a Chandler, I wanted to do something slightly realistic in The Grounds, reflecting the state of a world out of joint. Hence the book’s occasionally dark but satiric atmosphere.

Lastly, a disclaimer. The Grounds inevitably suggests some aspects of my own working life. I teach at Ireland’s oldest and finest university, Trinity College Dublin (founded by the first Queen Elizabeth in 1592). I am the son, grandson and great-great-grandson of Irish university professors. For the past four years, my Faculty Dean was my sister. This background places me uncomfortably close to my material, and may prompt the suspicion that I am settling personal scores in The Grounds. Not so, I swear. The Grounds is fiction, not transcription. Most of the malfeasances in Irish universities, as in any institution, are too minor, irrelevant, sordid or unbelievable to get in a novel. As Aristotle remarked in his Poetics, history tells of things that did happen, while literature, being more philosophical by nature, tells of the sorts of things that might happen. I rest my case.