Back To School

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Arts, Books

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

School is an enclosed world that breeds tension and suspicion and stress. No wonder it's such a perfect setting for a murder mystery. Find links to all the books mentioned and more details about my guests at shedunnitshow.com/backtoschool. Become a member of the Shedunnit book club and get bonus audio, listen to ad free episodes and join a book-loving community at shedunnitshow.com/membership. Contributors: —Moira Redmond, author of the Clothes in Books blog —Robin Stevens, author of the Murder Most Unladylike book series Books mentioned in order of appearance: —The Governess, or The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding —Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë —David Copperfield by Charles Dickens —Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes —A Terrible Tomboy by Angela Brazil —The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton —The School at the Chalet by Elinor Brent-Dyer —Moira's blog about The Silent Three —First Term at Mallory Towers by Enid Blyton —The Clue in the Castle by Joyce Bevins Webb - Rare Book —A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake —Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers —Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey —Cat Among The Pigeons by Agatha Christie —Quiet as a Nun by Antonia Fraser —The Secret Place by Tana French —Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens —First Class Murder by Robin Stevens —Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/backtoschooltranscript. Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:24.0	and 31st of December 2023.
0:26.0	Tees and C's eligibility criteria
0:28.0	and geographical restrictions apply. School is an enclosed world.
0:35.0	Perhaps you finished your education just a handful of years ago,
0:42.0	or perhaps it's been decades.
0:44.0	But either way, I bet you can still remember the claustrophobic atmosphere of the place.
0:49.0	Its cleeks, its gossip, its competitiveness, its feuds.
0:54.7	Memories of our school days are inexorably intertwined with our feelings about being young,
0:59.9	and then leaving that time behind to join the grown-up world.
1:04.4	Recalling it in too much detail can be a melancholy exercise. For a lot of these reasons, schools have long been a popular setting for fiction.
1:20.0	There's a well defined set of characters, the emotions can easily boil over, and the
1:24.8	rummer-mongering power of such a closed community can be a very useful plot device.
1:29.4	Boarding school stories in particular have a history going back a couple of centuries at least,
1:34.4	as authors have enjoyed imagining adventures for children and teens
1:38.0	relatively free of adult supervision.
1:40.3	You might have spotted though that a lot of the factors that make schools and colleges great settings for fiction in general also make them a perfect backdrop for detective stories.
1:52.0	Everything from the strict adherence to the timetable to the
1:55.5	application of school rules can help build a rigid structure for a sluth to
2:00.0	subvert. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that plenty of authors from Agatha
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