I’ve always loved classic school stories. In fact, the first time my name ever appeared in this paper, back in the 1980s, was when I wrote a geekily pedantic letter about a piece on Frank Richards’s Greyfriars stories.
My mother’s stories of boarding in the early 1960s were a long way from Mallory Towers, and in real life, I’m pretty sure I would have hated boarding school. But the fictional world of cheerful dormitories and snug studies, of midnight feasts and, in the case of the Chalet School, regularly falling off mountains, seemed hugely appealing.
So imagine my joy when I read Robin Stevens's young adult novel Murder Most Unladylike (Corgi, £6.99), set in a boarding school in 1935. It's both a school story and a murder mystery, in which Stevens's very likeable young heroines Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells investigate the death of a teacher. In the equally entertaining sequel Arsenic For Tea, which has just been published, the girls solve the murder of a conman in Daisy's family home.
Stevens, who was once a boarder at Cheltenham Ladies College, grew up reading both classic school and crime fiction. But while her books are enormous fun, there’s an acknowledgement of the real world that was absent from most early school stories.
Hazel is from Hong Kong, and is sometimes made painfully aware of her outsider status. And while the girls may be relatively innocent, the adults around them have more complicated private lives.
I’m not the only adult with a not-so-secret love of classic school books; the independent publisher Girls Gone By was founded in 2001 to reissue authors such as Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elsie Oxenham. But while I generally read old school stories with a mixture of amusement and affection, one author transcends the genre. On one level Antonia Forest’s four extraordinary Kingscote novels, written between 1948 and 1976 and all sadly out of print now, are classic school stories, complete with class plays, exams and rivalries. But they’re also witty, morally complex and utterly unsentimental, a reminder that a school story could also be a great novel. I loved them when I was 12, but I love them even more now.
Of course, as a 1980s child my life had little in common with those of the characters I loved, but the gulf between those books and the world occupied by today’s children seems even vaster.
Do modern kids still yearn for tales of dorms and midnight feasts? Well, yes – just look at the Harry Potter books, which are structured like classic school stories with added magic. While tales of Linbury Court, Greyfriars and the Chalet School are now hard to find, Blyton’s school stories still sell well. And Robin Stevens’s books have been a big hit with young readers.
“So many children still grow up with the same books I did… and so I think they find it easy to connect with Daisy and Hazel’s world,” says Stevens. “And, of course, they all want to go to boarding school in just the same way that my friends and I did.”
Stevens’s next book will see Daisy and Hazel investigate a mystery on a train, but she says she’ll return to their school eventually. “School stories are so universal – we can all relate to them – and I think boarding school is the perfect setting for a murder mystery,” she says. “It’s enclosed, it’s fascinating and it’s a pressure-cooker of emotions. Drama is practically guaranteed!”
Anna Carey is the author of the Rebecca series
