Friction between town and gown simmers at the center of Rogow's (The Problem of the Evil Editor) latest and entertaining literary-historical mystery. Young Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, not yet famous for his Sherlock Holmes stories (it's the spring of 1886), and his wife, Touie, interrupt a trip to northern England to aid their friend, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), when the Christ Church don becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a surly, thieving, blackmailing Oxford University scout (servant). Confined to his college by Dean Liddell, the father of Alice and her sisters—for whom the celebrated author wrote his classic children's books—Dodgson must try to solve the crime indirectly, largely from police reports and Conan Doyle and Touie's own investigation. In clear, sometimes lyrical prose, the author paints an engaging and palpable picture of Victorian Oxford with its complex society of dons, undergraduates, scouts and townspeople. Rogow is particularly good at dramatizing the status of women as university students. This solid social background tends to overshadow the mystery solving, but the main pleasure, as always in this series, lies in the interaction between the two fascinating principals, whose images, divided by a cropped photo of a servant setting a tea tray on a table near an empty bed, appear on the singularly unattractive jacket. A period picture of Oxford would have been a better choice. (Aug. 27)
