author spotlight
Sarah Caudwell is the author of Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sibyl in her Grave and The Sirens Sang of Murder. She studied law at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, was called to the Chancery Bar, and practiced as a barrister for several years in Lincoln’s Inn. She then became a member of the legal section of a major London bank, where she found herself specializing in international tax planning. Sarah Caudwell died in January 2000.
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SARAH COCKBURN, who wrote crime fiction under the name Sarah Caudwell,
published only three books, with a fourth due out in America in July.
They were, however, of such high-quality prose, of such wit and with
such ingenuity of plot, that she deserves a storm- proof place on the
slopes of Parnassus.
With a degree in Classics from Aberdeen, two in law from Oxford and one
in French law from Nancy, she became a member of the Chancery Bar and
later had a career in banking that enabled her to devote her time to
the often fraught reaches of fiction. But she burst on to the
crime-writing scene fully armed.
Thus Was Adonis Murdered in 1981 showed her quality in its very first
sentence, ironic, mock- academic, teasing, allusive. “Scholarship asks,
thank God, no recompense but Truth.” The book was written as by
Professor Hilary Tamar, Oxford authority on medieval law, a person
whose sex in the course of the four novels is never made clear, an
ingenious ploy that has delighted readers ever since.
The hackwork of investigation is, always, in the hands of a group of
young barristers, a deliciously assorted quartet, the endearingly named
Cantrip and Ragwort, and the greatly physically attractive and
formidably intelligent Julia Larwood and Selena Jardine, neither averse
to the pleasure of the flesh, both well able to leave the grosser
details to the imagination.
Sarah Caudwell’s handling of the often tricky subject of the sexual
imperative is a sign that one is in the hands of a writer with a deep,
if prettily veiled, knowledge of human beings at their lowest and their
highest. It gives to what might have been merely frivolous books,
however laugh-aloud funny, a backbone of integrity likely to ensure
their readers for many years to come.
It applies equally to The Shortest Way to Hades (1984) and The Sirens
Sang of Murder (1989), as well as to The Sybil in Her Grave, of which I
had the pleasure of giving readings from work-in-progress at a crime
conference in America, where Sarah Caudwell, pipe for ever in and out
of her mouth, was enormously popular, as both conference speaker and
author.
The length of time between each of her publications is another
indication of the amount of work and thought that went into them, work
that ensured the flawlessly right prose, the immaculate timing. Part of
the long gap that followed the 1989 book can be accounted for by her
writing a play, The Madman’s Advocate, an intelligent and dramatic
study of the attempted assassination in 1843 of Sir Robert Peel, a case
that brought about the so-called McNaughtan Rules on what legally
constitutes insanity.
The piece was given a rehearsed reading in Nottingham in 1995.
Sarah Caudwell Cockburn (Sarah Caudwell), crime novelist, barrister and
banker: born Cheltenham, Gloucestershire 27 May 1939; called to the
Bar, Lincoln’s Inn 1965; died London 28 January 2000.
H. R. F. Keating. The Independent. London (UK): Feb 5, 2000. pg. 7
