Mavis Doriel Hay Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of British Library Crime Classics Books

Mavis Hay
Mavis Hay was born in 1894 in Potters Bar, Middlesex, and in early life lived in north London, having been born into a middle class family. She was a novelist that fleetingly lit up the golden age of British crime fiction.

All three of her detective novels were well received upon publication. Dorothy Sayers praised “Murder Underground” in a review for the Sunday Times.

She went to St. Hilda’s, Oxford from 1913 to 1916, right about the same period as Dorothy L Sayers went to Somerville.

Besides her three detective novels, she was also an expert on rural handicraft and quilting, and wrote many books on both of these subjects, which includes “Rural Industries of England and Wales” with co-author Helen Elizabeth Fitzrandolph. This book was part of a series of works that Helen and Mavis collaborated on, which were sponsored by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University, which had them surveying all the rural industries in Wales and England.

In the year 1929, she married Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, her co-author’s brother and a member of an influential and wealthy family of loyalist Canadians.

Archibald joined the RAF but got killed during a flying accident in 1943, and was just one of a number of tragedies that struck Mavis. One of her brothers got killed at the age of nineteen when his ship was sunk during the Battle of Jutland in the year 1916, and her youngest sibling was killed when his Tiger Moth crashed in a Malayan jungle in 1939. In 1940 a third brother lost his life while he worked on the notorious Thailand-Burma railway after he got captured by the Japanese.

Once she set aside writing her mystery novels, she started working as a researcher for the Rural Industries Bureau, which was founded to encourage craft industries in more deprived areas.

It is said that Mavis was so well-connected that she was able to set up exhibitions in the homes of the aristocracy. These are connections that had probably come about from one of Archibald’s cousins marrying Sir John Dashwood as well as the fact that the cousin later became a lady-in-waiting at the court of King George V.

Her last book, called “Quilting”, was released in the year 1972, a mere seven years before her death on August 26, 1979 at the age of 85, which occurred in the village of Box in Gloucestershire.

“Murder Underground” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 1934. If you were to be discovered murdered all of a sudden, would your friends have any theories about who did the deed?

Well, when Miss Pongleton, an unpleasant and wealthy woman, meets her demise on the stairs of Belsize Park underground station in “Murder Underground”, her housemates, even though they are not especially grieved, have plenty of their own guesses at the true identity of her murderer.

As they are just airing their theories, events pop up that enable many of them unexpectedly, including Tuppy the terrier, to put them to the test.

This is a very well plotted and written mystery novel, and even if you spot the culprit early on, it’s still a delight to watch all of the clues get put together so seamlessly. Readers found this to be an amusing and lively Golden Age mystery, and it’s interesting to read a mystery from the people that are partly suspects, partly attempting to figure out who the killer is themselves or attempting to hide something.

“Death On the Cherwell” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 1935. For Miss Cordell, the principal of Persephone College, there are exactly two major evils to be feared: bad publicity for the college, and unladylike behavior among any of her students. So her cozy and prim world gets turned right upside down when the secret society of undergraduate students meets down by a river on some gloomy afternoon in January, just to discover the drowned body of the college bursar is floating in her canoe.

The cops assume that it was a student prank that got out of hand, however the resourceful Persephone girls start suspecting foul play, and take this investigation into their own hands. Pretty quick, they reveal the tangled up secrets that led to the bursar’s death, and the clues which point to it being a fellow student.

This is a fun and compelling classic mystery novel and is one that has stood the test of time quite well. It is for those that like their crime novels to be well plotted with dashes of humor mixed in. It’s also interesting to see the detective piece it all together and gather his clues and enough evidence in order to arrest his suspect.

“The Santa Klaus Murder” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 1936. Aunt Mildred declared that no good could ever come from the Melbury family Christmas gatherings. So when the family patriarch, Sir Osmond Melbury, is discovered (by some guest that is dressed like Santa Klaus) with a bullet in his skull on Christmas Day, well let’s just say it plunges down into chaos.

Almost everyone stands to reap a benefit of some kind from his death, except for the Santa Klaus, the one person who appears to have had every chance to fire the shot. Different members of the family have their own private suspicions about the killer, and the Chief Constable of Haulmshire wishes before too long that he understood them much better.

In the midst of all this mistrust, hatred, and suspicion it is revealed that there was not just a single Santa Klaus, but actually two.

Mavis Hay delivers a perfect example of the locked room mystery novel, with a cleverly performed murder, and it takes quite a bit of thought to figure out who the killer is. Mavis conjures up quite the interesting group of characters here in this one. Readers loved the descriptions of the imposing country home, and the festive atmosphere which only gets darker as things play out.