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siria's review
2.0
Barely average as a murder mystery. Antonia Fraser might be a decent biographer, but she's clearly better at analysing historical characters and events than creating her own. Oxford Blood takes place, rather obviously, at an Oxford college, where there's mystery about the true parentage of an aristocratic undergrad and people around him are being bumped off. All the characters in this are shallow (though not in the way she's intending) and two-dimensional, while the lead character, Jemima Shore, just isn't particularly believable. She's a bright, brittle TV reporter-cum-private investigator who has it all (... or does she? *ominous drum roll*) I guessed most of the plot except for whodunnit, and failed in that only because I didn't think it was psychologically plausible. There is also the added factor—which can't be laid at Antonia Fraser's feet—that this novel, written in 1985, needs to age for another twenty years or so. At that point, references to cassette players, answering machines and having to buy a copy of Debrett's Peerage in order to look someone up will feel cosily quaint, like an Agatha Christie novel, rather than jarringly dated.
blackoxford's review
1.0
Bloody Awful
Antonia Fraser is a person for whom silver spoons were invented. So I suppose her fictional work must be about the privileged media luvvies who feasibly share her background. Characters named Jemima, Cy, Cass are giveaways. The little white Mercedes sports car fills out the picture. Locations like Holland Park and Oxford let the reader know what sort of people these are; they’re of course people like her. One must write about what one knows, mustn’t one?
Do the rich not bleed? Of course they do. And they have secrets like everyone else that they’d rather not be made public. Their wealth and position of course are the only reason anyone would find their secrets even remotely interesting. That’s what sells newspapers (the book was written in those ancient times before the web and DNA testing). And presumably they were expected to be the reasons people would buy Fraser’s book.
I can’t think of any other reason to invest one’s time in Oxford Blood other than as an unintentionally ironic guide to English upper class mores and speech patterns. There’s little else in it worth bothering about. The premise of a dead baby swapped for a living one in order to continue a noble family line is trite as well as absurd. The contradiction of action and intention is all too obvious. The premise might serve (just) as the foundation for an episode of Midsomer Murders. But it’s more likely that it wouldn’t make it past the first script-editing conference.
The baby in question has grown by late adolescence into a Boris Johnson-like japester on the razzle in The Oxford Bloods, a rough imitation of the Bullingdon Club, an association of rich knob-heads who wreak drunken havoc in only the best Oxford eating establishments and rate the success of their nights out by the size of the bill for damages. Think Brideshead Revisited but without the restraining influence of old-fashioned college porters and limited family allowances. Others may quarrel with my taste, but it has never been my ambition - literary or otherwise - to know much about such people. To be aware that they exist as symbols of inherited privilege and intensive inbreeding is more than enough.
I suppose that England needs these genetic remnants of the Norman Conquest. They do provide comic relief during times of national crisis. Eccentricity, however, sails perilously close to buffoonery. One might ask why the Lady Antonia would write about such drivel. The answer, I think, is simply that she can, and therefore does. Lots of similar folk are there for encouragement and support. No mystery about that.
Antonia Fraser is a person for whom silver spoons were invented. So I suppose her fictional work must be about the privileged media luvvies who feasibly share her background. Characters named Jemima, Cy, Cass are giveaways. The little white Mercedes sports car fills out the picture. Locations like Holland Park and Oxford let the reader know what sort of people these are; they’re of course people like her. One must write about what one knows, mustn’t one?
Do the rich not bleed? Of course they do. And they have secrets like everyone else that they’d rather not be made public. Their wealth and position of course are the only reason anyone would find their secrets even remotely interesting. That’s what sells newspapers (the book was written in those ancient times before the web and DNA testing). And presumably they were expected to be the reasons people would buy Fraser’s book.
I can’t think of any other reason to invest one’s time in Oxford Blood other than as an unintentionally ironic guide to English upper class mores and speech patterns. There’s little else in it worth bothering about. The premise of a dead baby swapped for a living one in order to continue a noble family line is trite as well as absurd. The contradiction of action and intention is all too obvious. The premise might serve (just) as the foundation for an episode of Midsomer Murders. But it’s more likely that it wouldn’t make it past the first script-editing conference.
The baby in question has grown by late adolescence into a Boris Johnson-like japester on the razzle in The Oxford Bloods, a rough imitation of the Bullingdon Club, an association of rich knob-heads who wreak drunken havoc in only the best Oxford eating establishments and rate the success of their nights out by the size of the bill for damages. Think Brideshead Revisited but without the restraining influence of old-fashioned college porters and limited family allowances. Others may quarrel with my taste, but it has never been my ambition - literary or otherwise - to know much about such people. To be aware that they exist as symbols of inherited privilege and intensive inbreeding is more than enough.
I suppose that England needs these genetic remnants of the Norman Conquest. They do provide comic relief during times of national crisis. Eccentricity, however, sails perilously close to buffoonery. One might ask why the Lady Antonia would write about such drivel. The answer, I think, is simply that she can, and therefore does. Lots of similar folk are there for encouragement and support. No mystery about that.
smcleish's review against another edition
4.0
Originally published on my blog here in February 1999.
Jemima Shaw is an investigative TV journalist, who is the heroine of several crime novels by Antonia Fraser. The investigative reporter guise is an excellent one for an amateur detective, for it provides a plausible reason for her to get mixed up in mysterious goings on. However, Fraser avoids the problems that would follow from too much verisimilitude, for Jemima Shaw lacks the large number of researchers to be expected in the team around the star of a programme as important as the one she is supposedly making; she is thus rather more of a loner. (Her programme is, I think, rather like the BBC's Everyman, if slightly more tabloid.)
Two investigations are joined together by Jemima - avoiding the use of unlikely co-incidence on Fraser's part through this manipulation of the plot. An elderly lady in a hospice asks her to visit; a former midwife, she was present at the birth of Lord Saffron, heir to one of the richest inheritances in the country. But what she has to tell Jemima, as an act of contrition, is that she connived at the replacement of a baby which died soon after birth with another, adopted baby boy; Lord Saffron is not really who everyone supposes him to be.
The other is a programme idea which is pretty much forced upon Jemima by the chairman of Megalith Productions, which makes her series. This is to do a profile of rich, young aristocrats, with their golden lifestyle. Prompted by a half-remembered quotation from Cymbeline, he wants it to be called Golden Lads and Girls, ignoring the unpropitious next line about turning to ashes. The title is changed to Golden Kids when someone suggests the original idea may be open to a charge of sexism.
Jemima begins such a programme, deciding to investigate the other matter at the same time by centring it round Lord Saffron, currently an Oxford undergraduate. When his next-door neighbour in college is killed, her investigation takes on a more sombre tone.
Oxford Blood is an extremely well done detective novel, with convincing central characters.
Jemima Shaw is an investigative TV journalist, who is the heroine of several crime novels by Antonia Fraser. The investigative reporter guise is an excellent one for an amateur detective, for it provides a plausible reason for her to get mixed up in mysterious goings on. However, Fraser avoids the problems that would follow from too much verisimilitude, for Jemima Shaw lacks the large number of researchers to be expected in the team around the star of a programme as important as the one she is supposedly making; she is thus rather more of a loner. (Her programme is, I think, rather like the BBC's Everyman, if slightly more tabloid.)
Two investigations are joined together by Jemima - avoiding the use of unlikely co-incidence on Fraser's part through this manipulation of the plot. An elderly lady in a hospice asks her to visit; a former midwife, she was present at the birth of Lord Saffron, heir to one of the richest inheritances in the country. But what she has to tell Jemima, as an act of contrition, is that she connived at the replacement of a baby which died soon after birth with another, adopted baby boy; Lord Saffron is not really who everyone supposes him to be.
The other is a programme idea which is pretty much forced upon Jemima by the chairman of Megalith Productions, which makes her series. This is to do a profile of rich, young aristocrats, with their golden lifestyle. Prompted by a half-remembered quotation from Cymbeline, he wants it to be called Golden Lads and Girls, ignoring the unpropitious next line about turning to ashes. The title is changed to Golden Kids when someone suggests the original idea may be open to a charge of sexism.
Jemima begins such a programme, deciding to investigate the other matter at the same time by centring it round Lord Saffron, currently an Oxford undergraduate. When his next-door neighbour in college is killed, her investigation takes on a more sombre tone.
Oxford Blood is an extremely well done detective novel, with convincing central characters.
kathleenitpdx's review against another edition
1.0
Less than average mystery. I never felt I got to know any of the characters. Written in 1985: no cell phones, no caller ID and no DNA testing.
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