THE scene is set in Wellende Old Hall, the “magnificent stately old pile” that has been the family seat of the Temples for centuries. But the crime novel by the granddaughter of Jane Austen’s nephew — supposedly written on the very desk used by her illustrious ancestor — has been shrouded in mystery since it fell out of print.

Now the British Library is re-issuing Lois Austen-Leigh’s The Incredible Crime, hailed as “the very essence of mystery” when it was first published in 1931. The novel is due to appear in early 2017 as part of the library’s Crime Classics series, which this year will also include works by the neglected crime novelists J Jefferson Farjeon and Alan Melville, as well as next week’s release of Christopher St John Sprigg’s Death of an Airman.

“She seems to have completely slipped out of memory — even experts in the field haven’t heard of her,” said Robert Davies at the British Library. “But she wrote four crime novels. This first one has an academic setting in a Cambridge college, and is very well done. It’s a witty take on academic life in Cambridge.”

Kirsten Saxton, a professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, and a visiting fellow at Lucy Cavendish College in Cambridge, is editing and introducing the new edition. She called The Incredible Crime “breezy fun, with some excellent and generally good-natured send-ups of university life: a cigarette-smoking brash young woman who can curse like a sailor, a Darcy-esque, as in rude and eventually adoring, academic love interest (which slightly raises my feminist hackles), smuggling, some Downton Abbey-worthy country-house life, and some really lovely Suffolk scenery”.

It opens, reads the blurb on the vanishingly rare first edition from 1931, in Wellende Old Hall, “for centuries the family seat of the Temples … a magnificent stately old pile, haunted and eerie”.

“Situated on a river, the water flooding the cellars at high tide, it was an admirable base from which smuggling might be carried on. Was it from here, then, that a particularly loathsome drug was being distributed? Scotland Yard has managed to trace the drug to Cambridge, but there the trail was lost in a maze of difficulties and false scents,” runs the text.

The Times Literary Supplement at the time of publication said that “as a piece of writing and analysis of character the book is of a much higher order”, with “some good pictures here of university life, some not too exaggerated portraits of childlike dons, and a real feeling for country life and sports”.

“Miss Austen-Leigh might consider a more serious vein of writing,” the literary magazine advised.

Another contemporary review calls the author “something more than a writer of mystery stories. True, her plot is the very essence of mystery and her characters very clearly defined, but her work contains something more … Passages of unusual beauty constantly recur, especially in her descriptions of Cambridge and the coast of Suffolk.”

Saxton praised the novel’s “brash” tone, sharing a few lines from its “terrific, self-referential, funny” first chapter, in which the characters are discussing detective fiction. “When you go to stay in a country house you do not step on corpses or meet blood trickling down the front stairs,” one says, “but what with ‘complexes’ and ‘unconscious urges’ and ‘compensations’, the people in the country house might be up to any devilment you like”.

Saxton is currently researching the life of Austen-Leigh herself. The writer lived in the Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh, where she is said by descendants to have written at her ancestor Jane Austen’s writing desk, which is now in the British Library.

“The little I know of her is delightful (she zipped about town on her motorbike and claimed she wrote so the royalties would keep her in champagne, although that quote belies her seriousness in writing a series of novels that clearly position themselves within a genre),” said Saxton.

Lois Austen-Leigh is the granddaughter of James Edward Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen’s nephew and the author of a memoir about his celebrated relative.

For Saxton, the subsequent novels also merit reprinting, though she admitted her enthusiasm was partly due to one of Austen-Leigh’s more unusual titles, a crime novel called The Gobblecock Mystery — which might prove a little difficult for any 21st-century publisher to swallow. “We’d have to think about that title,” said Davies.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2015

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