An evening with… Alis Hawkins

We can’t wait to spend the evening with CWA Dagger shortlisted author of historical crime fiction and mysteries – and Book-ish favourite – Alis Hawkins! We will be celebrating the launch of The Hunters Club, the third book in the Oxford Mysteries series and the evening will include an audience Q&A and a book signing.

About The Hunters Club
If you’re not with them… you’re against them. Oxford, 1883. Young men are being found bound, gagged and hooded at the gates of their colleges in the small hours. Basil Rice, Jesus College fellow, is asked by the senior proctor to investigate. But matters of sexual purity are dangerous, as it lays Basil open to unwelcome scrutiny of his own private life. Meanwhile, the University Vice Chancellor’s Court has wrongly imprisoned a young shopgirl from the town, and she seeks the services of young academic and budding journalist, Non Vaughan, to clear her name. The uncovering by Basil of a secret society, The Venatores, and the murder of a student, cause Non and Basil to join forces. But is justice possible in a world so unjust and dangerous?

‘An excellent historical mystery dripping with atmosphere that exposes the chauvinism, misogyny and bigotry of late Victorian England’ The Times

‘Real figures from history rub shoulders with those invented by Hawkins – and her inventiveness is prodigal’ Financial Times‘

Fearlessly tackles taboo attitudes of the era, taking aim at misogyny, homophobia, and sexual politics. An excellent addition to the historical mystery canon. Marvellous!’ Vaseem Khan

‘Brilliantly researched, rich in atmosphere and with two likeable and intriguing protagonists at the centre’ Philip Gwynne Jones

Alis Hawkins on ‘The Oxford Mysteries’ series
“Having written five books about young men, back to back, (the first four Teifi Valley Coroner novels plus The Black and The White, I decided that I wanted to write a series with a female main protagonist. My publisher suggested that I might think of setting the new series in Oxford and, as far as I was concerned, historical crime fiction + female protagonist means only one time – the beginning of the women’s college movement. It has everything – conflict, seismic change, misogyny, female empowerment, suffragism… and did I mention conflict?

But I’m a Welsh writer, in fact I’m a founding member of Wales’s crime fiction collective, Crime Cymru, so I didn’t want to abandon Wales, or the Teifi Valley. So I took the Teifi Valley with me to Oxford in the form of Rhiannon ‘Non’ Vaughan, an intelligent, feisty young woman who runs headlong into Oxford’s genteel middle-class respectability and refuses to conform. Non is a fiery redhead who rides around Oxford on a tandem tricycle which she won in a bet (of course she did…).

And, needing somebody to put the slightly more conventional side of the Oxford story, I gave her a co-conspirator in the form of Basil Rice, also Welsh but from the more anglicised Monmouthshire. Basil is, to all intents and purposes, an establishment figure. He’s a don at Jesus College and has impeccable middle class credentials. But Basil is not entirely what he seems because he has a very well-kept secret: he’s gay in a time when male homosexual acts were punishable by imprisonment with hard labour, not to mention loss of all respectability.

Together, Non and Basil keep getting involved with suspicious deaths. And Non navigates the tricky course she’s set herself as a female student of a university which isn’t really sure that it wants women…”

You can read about Non and Basil’s exploits and the Oxford of the 1880s in the first two books:
A Bitter Remedy >>>
The Skeleton Army >>>