On the enticing side, both Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers and Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey feature strong female characters and are set in the closed academic worlds of an women’s Oxford college and a girls’ physical training college.

Equally enticing for some is the comparatively bloodless nature of the crimes under investigation.

In both books, crime novel conventions are used as hooks to explore ideas such as personal and academic responsibility, moral complexities, gender issues, psychology, character, relationships and social class, and they both offer fascinating insights into the lives of women in the period just before and immediately after World War II.

Lucy Pym makes her entrance in 1946, in a country just emerging from the Second World War, and just entering the era of compulsory education for all. She is a French teacher turned psychologist who accepts an invitation to be a guest lecturer at a girls’ college and, finding the students’ company and their obvious liking for her a refreshing change, prolongs her visit.

The girls at Leys Physical Training College are good-hearted, energetic, ambitious, hard working ‘jolly hockey sticks’ types who will go on to be games teachers or health workers.

Most of them survive the hard college regime of physical exercise and theoretical study, the incessant practising in the gym, the bells which wake them at 5.30am, sitting up until 2am to learn Gray’s Anatomy by heart — just reading about it makes you want to have a nice lie-down.

The references to kinesiology, pathology, physiology, skeletal anatomical features, the booms and beams and ropes in the gym add authenticity to Josephine Tey’s depiction of this tightly enclosed, inward-world where the daily newspapers are provided but remain unopened all week.

Lucy has an engaging liveliness. She appreciates the civilised, urbane nature of the academic and publishing worlds in which she now has a position, but she would like to keep company with people whose interests are broader, whose conversation can cover ‘Social Security, hill-billy songs, and what won the 3.30.’

She wears her scholarship lightly, so lightly that we have no information about the nature of her ground-breaking, best-selling tome on psychology. Her sudden rise to publishing stardom is described with the comic touch and wry tone which among the book’s delights.

Aspiring in Oxford

Lucy would undoubtedly be considered a lightweight in Harriet Vane’s Oxford.

In spite of her publishing success, the dons of Shrewsbury College would certainly have something to say about footnotes, or accreditation, or the dodgy nature of some of her theories.

Gaudy Night is crammed with scholarly references, so that just reading the book is like doing a crash-course degree in — well, so many things.

For a start, each chapter begins with an extract from Elizabethan writers and poets such as Sir Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser. We have Planck’s Constant, the processes involved in academic publishing, Meyer-Lubke (of the neogrammarian linguistic school — duh!), a liberal sprinkling of French and Latin quotations, the Earl of Essex, Reformation polemical pamphlets, The Anatomy of Melancholy, CP Snow, the cist-graves of Theotokou, classical references…

Accustomed to erudite and elegantly expressed discourse, these clever women disdain (as well they might) the tabloid press coining of ‘graduette’. Heaven knows what they would have made of ‘uni’.

Harriet herself is no slouch in the scholarship department, but she is now a successful writer of literate detective novels (much like Sayers herself), called in by the college where she was a student to investigate a series of disturbing events.

A complex, engaging and rather forbidding character, she comes with an interesting history, (SPOILER ALERT) having been tried for and found innocent of the murder of her lover (Strong Poison).

Lord Wimsey Proposes

Supporting her case, and falling in love with her, was the rich, amusing, clever Lord Peter Wimsey, who doggedly proposes to her every year, hoping she will overcome the barriers caused by the context of their meeting and the imbalance in their relationship caused by her inevitable gratitude to him.

The tug between Harriet’s scruples in this respect, her need to be equal and independent and her growing desire for Wimsey adds a substantial layer to the narrative, and we are drawn into their rarified world of Latin dialogue (one of Wimsey’s proposals is made and rejected in Latin) and sonnet-writing (he finds an incomplete poem composed by Harriet, and adds a very clever sestet to her octave — as you do).

Pym’s O’clock

Lucy Pym’s private life is far less intense. She enjoys feminine accoutrements. She likes delicately varnished nails, nice handkerchiefs, chocolates, long baths, face cream, make-up, her expensive ‘lecture frock’.

Something is missing from her ‘fine, independent, cushioned, celebrated life’, and we may infer that it is something represented by her friend Alan, who is referred to in passing and may be Inspector Alan Grant, who appears in several of Tey’s novels.

Miss Pym is not judgemental or intellectually snobbish about those of the sisterhood who choose different paths from hers.

You’re so Vane

Harriet Vane, though, is a bit sniffy about the former classmates she meets at the Oxford reunion. She is critical of those whose early academic promise disappeared, such as her friend Mary, who, she observes, ‘had one of those small summery brains, that flower early and run to seed’. Ouch.

Those who have succumbed to the demands of marriage and motherhood are similarly dismissed, although she has more time for her pal who segues briskly from talk about her children into, oh, you know, the usual Mum stuff about biology, Mendelian factors and Brave New World.

Brandy and wine

Lucy Pym is a charming creation, and it is a pity we see no more of her.

Harriet Vane appears in four novels and is explored in more depth. She is a fierce, admirable, prickly character. She is one of those ‘difficult women’ whose company is vigorous and stimulating.

Harriet is like the brandy which Dr Johnson called the drink for heroes, while Miss Pym is like a sparkling wine which slips down effortlessly and enjoyably, with something chocolatey to follow.

On balance, Harriet Vane has to be the winner. Intellectual, independent and interesting, she faces her demons and resolves her conflicting emotions in a conclusion which promises equality for ever rather than happy ever after.

Miss Vane, ‘born’ well over a century ago, could teach modern misses a thing or two about being a strong woman.