Sarah Caudwell
Sarah Caudwell | |
---|---|
Born | Sarah Cockburn 27 May 1939 London, England, UK |
Died | 28 January 2000 London, England, UK | (aged 60)
Occupation | Writer, barrister |
Education | University of Aberdeen St Anne's College, Oxford |
Genre | Mystery |
Subject | Law |
Notable awards | 1990 Anthony Award |
Relatives | Claud Cockburn (father) Jean Ross (mother) |
Sarah Cockburn, who wrote under the
Biography
Early years
Sarah Cockburn was born on 27 May 1939 in Weir Road, London.[2] Her father was Claud Cockburn, the left-wing journalist, and her mother was Jean Ross, a journalist and political activist who was the model for the character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's Cabaret.[3][4] Her parents were unmarried and her father left three months after Sarah's birth.[2]
Caudwell's three half-brothers Alexander Cockburn, Andrew Cockburn, and Patrick Cockburn are journalists.[5] She was the half-sister-in-law of Leslie Cockburn and Michael Flanders. Journalists Laura Flanders and Stephanie Flanders, and actress Olivia Wilde are her half-nieces.
During
She then studied law at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. She was one of the first two female students invited to speak at the Oxford Union, after her friends Jenny Grove and Rose Dugdale dressed in men's clothes to gain entrance to the male-only debating chamber and had then canvassed support for the admission of female students.[6] She graduated with her BCL in 1962.[2]
Career
On coming down from Oxford, she lectured on Law at the
Fellow barrister John Tackebury praised her accomplishments at the bar: "As a woman, she had to have had a first-class mind to join the Chancery bar, to have built up a successful practice and to have become a senior executive at Lloyds... All these institutions were highly resistant to women at a senior level, and certainly to a woman who smoked a pipe."[5]
Personal life and death
She was a lifelong
Writing
Hilary Tamar series
This series of four books, described as "legal whodunits", were written over a period of twenty years. Their primary setting is the top floor of 62 New Square at
Acting as a kind of parent to the group is the first-person narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar. Professor Tamar, a former tutor of Timothy Shepherd, also acts as the main detective,[8] although other characters make contributions to the eventual solutions. Professor Tamar is frequently physically removed from the action and is kept informed by a series of improbably long letters and telexes.[7] This distancing is amplified by Caudwell's strategy of not specifying Tamar's gender and never specifying the reason for the strong bond which the character enjoys with the young advocates. The plots are intricate, carefully realised, and strongly tied to the locations chosen, these being Venice, Corfu, Sark and an English village.[8] The author's expertise in tax law is frequently brought into play, inheritance law being relevant to financial motives for murder. She was particularly popular among other legal professionals, including American jurist Robert Bork, who was once quoted as saying, "In my opinion, there can't be too many Sarah Caudwell novels".[5]
Other writing
Caudwell collaborated on crime fiction-related acrostics with Michael Z. Lewin[9] and with Lawrence Block and others for The Perfect Murder.[10][9]
She also wrote a play, The Madman's Advocate, which was given a rehearsed reading in Nottingham in 1995: a study of
Awards
The Shortest Way to Hades was nominated for the Best Novel award at the 1986 Anthony awards. Caudwell won the 1990 award for The Sirens Sang of Murder in the same category.[12]
In 2010 the Japanese edition of The Sibyl in Her Grave was shortlisted for the Best Translated Honkaku Mystery of the Decade (2000-2009).[13]
Bibliography
- Hilary Tamar novels
- Thus Was Adonis Murdered (1981)
- The Shortest Way to Hades (1985)
- The Sirens Sang of Murder (1989)
- The Sibyl in Her Grave (2000), published posthumously
- Other works
- The Perfect Murder: Five Great Mystery Writers Create the Perfect Crime (1991) (with Lawrence Block, Tony Hillerman and Jack Hitt)
- Contributions to anthologies
- 2nd Culprit: An Annual of Crime Stories (1994)
- 3rd Culprit (1994)
- Malice Domestic 6 (1997)
- The Oxford Book of Detective Stories (2000), published posthumously
- Women Before the Bench (2001), published posthumously
- The Mammoth Book of Comic Crime (2002), published posthumously
References
- ^ Chamier Grove, Jenny (8 February 2000). "Witty barrister who turned her cases into crime thrillers". The Guardian Newspaper. Retrieved 16 August 2021.
- ^ required.)
- ^ Garebian 2011, p. 4.
- ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 60–64.
- ^ a b c Stasio, Marilyn (6 February 2000). "Sarah Caudwell, 60, Lawyer And Author of Mystery Novels". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 October 2012.
- ^ a b Grove, Jenny Chamier (7 February 2000). "Witty barrister who turned her cases into crime thrillers". The Guardian.
- ^ a b c Edwards, Martin. "Sarah Caudwell". Retrieved 20 July 2022.
- ^ a b Marsay, Rachel (9 November 2021). "New catalogue: literary papers of Sarah Caudwell". Archives and Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. Retrieved 20 July 2022.
- ^ a b Matre, Jonathan Van (7 October 2002). "The Compleat Sarah Caudwell". words of my neighborhood. Retrieved 20 July 2022.
- ^ "The Perfect Murder". Kirkus Reviews. 20 May 2010. Retrieved 20 July 2022.
- ^ Flanders, Laura (2000). "Crossing the bar". Free Online Library. Retrieved 20 July 2022.
- ^ "Bouchercon World Mystery Convention : Anthony Awards Nominees". Bouchercon.info. 2 October 2003. Archived from the original on 13 November 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2012.
- ^ "海外優秀本格ミステリ顕彰(2010.6)". Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan. Retrieved 16 May 2023. (in Japanese)
Sources
- Garebian, Keith (2011). The Making of Cabaret. Oxford: ISBN 978-0199732500.
- ISBN 978-0374-53522-3.
- St James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, Fourth Edition; 1990. Jay Pederson (ed.), "Sarah Caudwell", pp. 162–63.