Female Sleuths: The Imogen Quy detective novels by Jill Paton Walsh are an engrossing college education

Among the estimable body of work produced by the author Jill Paton Walsh is a series of four detective novels featuring Imogen Quy, an intriguing addition to the genre of amateur sleuth.

Imogen is a woman who abandoned her medical degree at Oxford University to follow her boyfriend Frank to America, where, yes, you’ve got it, she is dumped by the bounder.

What is left for her in life? A very nice little gig, as it happens. She trains as a nurse and gets a job at St Agatha’s College, one of Cambridge University’s finest. Imogen chooses to work part-time, trading a more affluent way of life for one which gives her time to enjoy exploring her range of interests and just about enough money to maintain her modest house in a suburban corner of Cambridge, a bike ride away from the town.

Nursing confidence

This is a brilliant set-up. Imogen’s job makes her part of the college (at one point she is granted an honorary fellowship) and enables her to move seamlessly among college dignitaries, dons and students. Her personable, sensible and empathetic nature draws people to her and gains their confidence — attributes which are very helpful in her pursuit of the truth.

The job itself seems an absolute doddle, consisting of handing out over-the-counter analgesics and a spot of first aid, backed up by filing and record-keeping.

At the same time, there is an element of uncertainty in the depiction of our sleuth. Imogen is in her 30s, and her investigations span the years between 1993 and 2007. These years introduced us to single women of the same age such as Bridget Jones and the zingy quartet in Sex and the City, characters whose well-worked constructs may be thought to reflect and shape the lifestyles and attitudes of contemporary young women.

While the lack of reference to romance and dating and shoes and Chardonnay (actually, there’s lots of wine, lots) is quite a relief, the absence of any sense of cultural context can feel a bit strange. Imogen doesn’t manage to be timeless, in the way of Morse, for example, but rather seems to be misplaced in her era.
There’s a touch of Miss Marple about her, and just the slightest echo of George Orwell’s spinster. She uses expressions such as ‘my dear child’ and says that in her generation, an engagement got announced in The Times and led to the purchase of a ring.

Hmm. I wonder if Jill Paton Walsh was influenced by her admiration of Dorothy Sayers and by having written some lovely additions (‘continuations’) to Sayers’ Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane oeuvre. Sayers is specifically referenced in at least one Quy book.

As you might expect, the pace and tone of the novels is sedate, occasionally verging on the soporific. You sometimes feel the need for a man with a gun to burst in, as Raymond Chandler advised. (Coincidentally, just as this reader was reflecting on the appropriateness of Chandler’s comment, a man with a gun did materialise on the very next page — not altogether convincingly, though.)

Case study

However, the overall ambience is richly imagined, and the process of investigating mysterious deaths almost takes second place to the leisurely, intellectual engagement with a huge range of topics. The cases themselves are intriguing.

For example, there’s the death of a student in a locked library crammed with 17th Century tomes; the death of someone working on the biography of a mathematician; the demise of a young man engaged in a daring feat of climbing the college tower at night. This was quite a thing — Paton Walsh cites a book called The Night Climbers of Cambridge as a source. All I can say is Parkour aficionados, eat your hearts out.

If you sign up for the, not ride, but gentle saunter through the Imogen Quy books and allow yourself to become engaged with the issues they raise, you will be rewarded with insights and observations which may stay with you long after.

The books are crammed with specialist knowledge, philosophical ideas, ethical considerations, matters of law. You learn about the relationship between quilting and mathematics, about narrowboats and the river and canal communities. Questions are raised about the nature of biography — ‘how can you propound the meaning of a human life without a theory of what makes human life meaningful?’ How indeed.

The title of The Bad Quarto refers to a particular text of Hamlet, and presages details about a production of the drama, where ideas about the dumb show and the play-within-a-play are integral to the plot. You become familiar with critical theories and the controversy they attract. You learn about the struggle that women had to study and be awarded their degrees. You become absorbed in the knotty issues of probability, subjectivity and the law, applied to legal cases recognisable from the time, and to matters of interpretation and certainty in the study of Science as opposed to English. An A E Housman poem is quoted in full. In the end, you feel you could take part in any debate in the Senior Common Room or wherever, sipping sherry and running rings round the intellectual bigwigs.

Gown and town splendour

The College, and Cambridge itself, are the real stars of the show. Attention to tiny details of the urban landscape, gleaming wet streets, shops casting angled rectangles of light across the pavements, and of the natural environment with the green brown river swirling and sparkling in patterns which endlessly recur but are never repeated, adds grace to the narrative.

The Arcadian vista of bridges and gardens, the medieval lanes and alleys, form a backdrop. The college structures and interiors are evoked through unexpected images — a parapet decorated with saints and gargoyles, ancient beams decorated with running vines and fruits, the Hall prepared for a dinner with the black oak of the ancient tabletops contrasting with the glint of silver candlesticks, a spectacular Jacobean carved oak screen, framed by elegant arched doors.

One mystery remains unsolved — the origin of Imogen’s last name. We are told that Quy rhymes with Why, and that’s all. It’s an unusual choice, in a body of work crammed with familiar surnames and the fanciful nomenclature of professional academics. Perhaps it is intended to highlight Imogen’s enquiring nature, but that is a rather unappealingly literal reading.

Perhaps at this very moment a student is sitting in an ancient library in Cambridge, using this point as the focus for a learned work on the practice and philosophy of naming people and ideas. Let’s hope they’re not found in a pool of blood.

The Imogen Quy novels by Jill Paton Walsh are: