The Art of the Campus Crime Novel
The college campus is the perfect setting for a crime novel. After all, it’s an isolated microcosm with its own rules, hierarchy, conventions and language—an immersive world where eccentric characters thrive and residents can feel remote from the ties that usually bind us to everyday laws and conventions. Such dissociation can foster antisocial conduct individuals would never display at home—a factor seen all too often in the real world, where campus crime in 2021 totalled 23,400 reported incidents (NCES) in the US.
Any student population is transient—a new intake of strangers arrives every year, and all are gone forever within three. So, stakes are high on one hand—everyone wants to leave with the qualification they came for—but low on the other—because they’ll never have to cross paths with anyone else there, ever again. That is, until the college reunion… which, unsurprisingly is a recurring catalyst for many campus crime stories.
The mix of student personalities becomes particularly influential when a course involves collaborative projects, and many do, from drama to the sciences. Add to this the competitive nature of education generally, where comparisons with your fellow course-mates are hard to avoid, then the generation gap between academic staff and students—and you have a ready-made cauldron of conflict, with plenty of room for illicit affairs, simmering resentment, subtle manipulation, outright coercion and shady blackmail. In short, all the ingredients for a thrilling crime novel.
For The Examiner, I wanted to explore the potential for choking claustrophobia on a small-group course and consider what might happen when each individual brings their own agenda to the classroom. I took a masters myself—in screenwriting—in my late thirties, and was struck by the wide variety of reasons my nine course-mates had for returning to education. From the scientist keen to explore his creativity, to the mum-of-five fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition. We were all very different people, united only by our presence on this course. Meanwhile the tutor had a God-like power over what happened in the classroom—able to select or dismiss, include or exclude, pass or fail any of us. Happily, my experience was one of the best of my life, and the tutor a dream, but at the back of my mind has always been the thought: if someone embarked on a course like this with a destructive agenda, it could spell murder.
In The Examiner six students arrive in the fall for a new-style art course—one that connects art education with commerce and the workplace, where teamwork and collaboration are key skills taught alongside, and given equal importance to, the nurturing of creativity, artistic style and inspiration. Yet it quickly emerges that the tutor seems to have another agenda entirely. After all, if this course fails, she is out of the job she loves.
What follows is a satire on the dark side of teamwork, the side that reduces a person’s sense of individual responsibility and normalises the unthinkable.
The external examiner, hired to evaluate these students’ end-of-term essays, thinks he’s spotted something hidden between the lines of their coursework and intranet communications. If he’s right, then someone on this course is already dead… and all the others, including the tutor, are covering it up.
The Examiner is the latest in a long line of campus crime novels that chart the enduring potential of the college environment as a breeding ground for suspense and intrigue. Here are just nine:
About the Author
Janice Hallett is a former magazine editor, award-winning journalist, and government communications writer. She wrote articles and speeches for, among others, the Cabinet Office, Home Office, and Department for International Development. Her enthusiasm for travel has taken her around the world several times, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, Guatemala to Zimbabwe, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. A playwright and screenwriter, she penned the feminist Shakespearean stage comedy NetherBard and cowrote the feature film Retreat. She lives in London and is the author of The Examiner, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, The Appeal, The Christmas Appeal, and The Twyford Code.
The students include a talented young sculptor who is determined to graduate with top grades, a former gallery owner with limited artistic skills, a single mother more interested in a paycheck than homework, a people pleaser who struggles with technology, a marketing executive suffering from burnout, and a successful artist who seems rather overqualified for the program.
At the end of the academic year, when the examiner arrives to grade the students’ final project, he finds himself asking what happened. Because if someone in that course isn’t in mortal danger, then they are already dead. But who, and why?
He wants us to read through the students’ coursework, texts, message boards, and final essays to see if we can find the answers. Only one thing is certain: nothing about this course has been left to chance, and each of these students has their own very different agenda.
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