LESSONS IN CRIME

Fifteen tales out of school, originally published between 1904 and 2000, that show how much more was happening in and out of British classrooms than you realized.

Edwards’ editorial apparatus is oddly hit-or-miss: His introduction is mainly a survey of full-length novels set in Oxford, Cambridge, or English boarding schools, and his brief biography of Ethel Lina White, whose alert governess foils a kidnapping here, never mentions White’s best-loved novel, The Wheel Spins, memorably filmed as The Lady Vanishes. But with a few exceptions—E.W. Hornung’s dated theft by A.J. Raffles, Malcolm Gair’s snappy anecdote whose title provides a major spoiler, prolific Herbert Harris’ inverted story about a killer who anticipates all possible missteps but one—the stories are worth staying after school for, as Jacqueline Wilson’s imperious instructor forces a dyslexic pupil to do with dire results. A scrap of paper holds the key to Henry Wade’s missing undergraduate. Wine salesman Montague Egg, Dorothy L. Sayers’ second-string sleuth, briskly identifies the culprit who bashed an antireligious master to death. Joyce Porter’s ignorant, irascible DCI Wilfred Dover more or less figures out which of the eight adult students murdered their teacher. Colin Watson shows the predictably disastrous outcome of the fake murder a pair of boys stage to prank a dull-witted schoolmate. In the three best stories, Miriam Sharman presents a high-stakes battle of wits between a retiring headmaster and the actor whose thieving son he expelled; Michael Innes, clearly reveling in academic jargon, uses a few moments of darkness to replace a cadaver with the much more recently deceased instructor of an anatomy class; and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Adventure of the Priory School” is just as much fun to read for the 10th time.

Warning to teachers who read this: Watch your back, and check the current beneficiaries of your life insurance.