7 Intriguing Mysteries Set in British Institutions

Book 25 in Perry’s splendid Victorian detective series featuring Charlotte and Thomas Pitt takes us into the ultimate British institution—the Royal Family and their splendid London residence, Buckingham Palace. 

Queen Victoria’s son, Edward, Prince of Wales (a man whose gambling and womanising was a constant source of scandal), has invited four of the world’s most successful businessmen to ‘Buck House’ for a private dinner.

Unfortunately, part of the post-meal entertainment, a prostitute, is discovered dead in a bedroom the next morning. 

Thomas Pitt is called in to investigate a crime that could do untold harm to the already shaky reputation of the heir to the throne and, by extension, to the monarchy itself.

Sayers was the most conventionally educated of Britain’s three Queens of Crime. The daughter of an Oxford University rector, she attended Somerville College and hung out with fellow Oxford literary luminaries C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

She puts her inside knowledge of Oxford’s institutions to good use in this 1935 mystery featuring blue blood detective Lord Peter Wimsey and his future wife, the sharp-eyed actress Harriet Vane. 

Vane is called in by the Dean of her Oxford alma mater following a troubling outbreak of vandalism, obscene messages, and poison-pen letters. She’s soon joined by His Lordship, and the pair foil a vindictive plot designed to drive a vulnerable student to suicide. 

Sayers may have been part of the Oxford establishment, but she has a sharp eye for the virulent snobbery that underpinned elite British society.

A college at England’s other elite university, Cambridge, is the setting for academic Christine Poulson’s gripping first mystery novel. Her heroine, Professor Casandra James, takes over as the new Head of English after the previous incumbent’s untimely death. 

She quickly realises she’ll have her work cut out turning the place around. Her department is staffed by lazy no-goods, and the finances are a shambles. However, James’ attempts to sharpen things up have to be put on hold when she discovers that her predecessor’s death was no accident. 

The British boarding school for young ladies is the setting for classic children’s adventure series such as Enid Blyton’s The Twins at St Clare’s and The Marlows by Antonia Forest. 

US-born novelist Robin Stevens has taken those jolly dormitory romps and stirred in a wholesome pinch of Agatha Christie to produce a lovely, witty, and affectionate series of cosy mysteries set in the 1930s. 

In this, the opener, Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong, two pupils at Deepdean School for Girls, set up a private detective society and quickly have their first case when the science mistress is found dead in the gym.

In fiction, the all-male British boarding school is generally portrayed as altogether less sweet and cosy than the female version (think of the evil bully Harry Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or the brutality unleashed in The Lord of the Flies).

The school in this, the third of George’s excellent Inspector Lynley series, is no exception. 

Chambers School is home to 600 boys. When one of them goes missing and two days later is discovered dead in a nearby churchyard, Scotland Yard detective Lynley is sent to investigate. He faces a wall of silence more solid than any he’d encounter in gangland London.

Wilkinson made history in 1924 when she became the first female MP to sit in the House of Commons.  She was also an acclaimed mystery writer. This 1932 classic is set at her place of work: the Houses of Parliament.  

Young politician Robert West finds himself investigating the death of a US financier in a locked room in the Palace of Westminster. Scotland Yard unsurprisingly writes it off as suicide, but West, supported by the financier’s beautiful granddaughter, adopts a different view. 

As an increasing number of shady characters start to appear in the corridors of power, the MP discovers a notebook filled with coded messages.

Could they reveal the truth about the killing? 

The gilded and highly polished members’ only gentlemen’s clubs of London’s West End are a place where the great and the good (and the not so good) meet socially. Arguably, the most famous fictional version is the Diogenes Club, the base of Mycroft Holmes. 

A crusty and claustrophobic club for retired army officers in swanky St James’s is the setting for Huang’s cracking locked room mystery.

Huang’s sleuth is Eric Peterkin, a World War I veteran. He’s half-Chinese and—in the judgment of the British establishment—‘not strictly top-drawer.’ 

When a wager between two club members ends with one of them dead in a vault, Peterkin investigates. The trail leads the outsider sleuth across the English capital and reveals a murky world of secrets and sin.