Sarah Caudwell was the
pseudonym
A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...
of Sarah Cockburn (/ˈkoʊbərn/ KOH-bərn; 27 May 1939 – 28 January 2000), a British
barrister
A barrister is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdictions. Barristers mostly specialise in courtroom advocacy and litigation. Their tasks include taking cases in superior courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, researching law and ...
and
writer
A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles and techniques to communicate ideas. Writers produce different forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, books, poetry, travelogues, p ...
of
detective stories
A detective is an investigator, usually a member of a law enforcement agency. They often collect information to solve crimes by talking to witnesses and informants, collecting physical evidence, or searching records in databases. This leads th ...
. She is best known for a series of four murder stories written between 1980 and 1999, centred on the lives of a group of young barristers practicing in
Lincoln's Inn
The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. (The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn.) Lincoln ...
and narrated by a Hilary Tamar, a
professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
of
medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with t ...
law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vario ...
(whose sex is never revealed), who also acts as
detective
A detective is an investigator, usually a member of a law enforcement agency. They often collect information to solve crimes by talking to witnesses and informants, collecting physical evidence, or searching records in databases. This leads th ...
.
Biography
Early years
Sarah Cockburn was born on 27 May 1939 in Weir Road,
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
.
Her father was
Claud Cockburn
Francis Claud Cockburn ( ; 12 April 1904 – 15 December 1981) was a British journalist. His saying "believe nothing until it has been officially denied" is widely quoted in journalistic studies, but he did not claim credit for origina ...
, the left-wing
journalist
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
, and her mother was
Jean Ross
Jean Iris Ross Cockburn ( ; 7 May 1911 – 27 April 1973) was a British writer, political activist, and film critic. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), she was a war correspondent for the ''Daily Express'' and is thought to have been a ...
, a journalist and political activist who was the model for
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical ...
's
Sally Bowles
Sally Bowles () is a fictional character created by English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood and based upon 19-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross. The character debuted in Isherwood's 1937 novella ''Sally Bowles'' published by Hogarth Press ...
character of ''
Cabaret
Cabaret is a form of theatrical entertainment featuring music, song, dance, recitation, or drama. The performance venue might be a pub, a casino, a hotel, a restaurant, or a nightclub with a stage for performances. The audience, often dining or d ...
'' fame. Her parents were unmarried and her father left three months after Sarah's birth.
Caudwell's three half-brothers
Alexander Cockburn
Alexander Claud Cockburn ( ; 6 June 1941 – 21 July 2012) was a Scottish-born Irish-American political journalist and writer. Cockburn was brought up by British parents in Ireland, but lived and worked in the United States from 1972. Together ...
,
Andrew Cockburn
Andrew Myles Cockburn ( ; born 7 January 1947) is a British journalist and the Washington, D.C., editor of '' Harper's Magazine''.
Early life
Born in the London suburb of Willesden in 1947, Cockburn grew up in County Cork, Ireland. His father ...
, and
Patrick Cockburn
Patrick Oliver Cockburn ( ; born 5 March 1950) is a journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent for the ''Financial Times'' since 1979 and, from 1990, ''The Independent''. He has also worked as a correspondent in Moscow and Washington ...
are journalists.
She was the half-sister-in-law of
Leslie Cockburn
Leslie Cockburn ( ; born Leslie Corkill Redlich on September 2, 1952) is an American investigative journalist, and filmmaker. Her investigative television segments have aired on CBS, NBC, '' PBS Frontline'', and '' 60 Minutes''. She has won an E ...
and
Michael Flanders
Michael Henry Flanders (1 March 1922 – 14 April 1975) was an English actor, broadcaster, and writer and performer of comic songs. He is best known for his stage partnership with Donald Swann.
As a young man Flanders seemed to be heading fo ...
. Journalists
Laura Flanders
Laura Flanders (born 5 December 1961) is an English broadcast journalist living in the United States who presents the weekly, long-form interview show ''The Laura Flanders Show''. Flanders has described herself as a "lefty person". The brothers ...
and
Stephanie Flanders
Stephanie Hope Flanders (born 5 August 1968) is a British economist and journalist, currently the head of Bloomberg News Economics. She was previously chief market strategist for Britain and Europe for J.P. Morgan Asset Management,[actress
An actor or actress is a person who portrays a Character (arts), character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek ...]
Olivia Wilde
Olivia Jane Cockburn ( ; born March 10, 1984), known professionally as Olivia Wilde, is an American actress and filmmaker. She played Thirteen (House), Remy "Thirteen" Hadley on the medical-drama television series ''House (TV series), House'' ( ...
are her half-nieces.
During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, she lived in
Welwyn
Welwyn is a village and civil parishes in England, civil parish in Hertfordshire, England. The parish also includes the villages of Digswell and Oaklands, Hertfordshire, Oaklands. It is sometimes referred to as Old Welwyn or Welwyn Village, ...
and
Stevenage
Stevenage ( ) is a large town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, about north of London. Stevenage is east of junctions 7 and 8 of the A1(M), between Letchworth Garden City to the north and Welwyn Garden City to the south. In 1946, Stevena ...
,
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...
with her mother and maternal grandmother. In 1945, they moved to
Cheltenham
Cheltenham (), also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a spa town and borough on the edge of the Cotswolds in the county of Gloucestershire, England. Cheltenham became known as a health and holiday spa town resort, following the discovery of mineral s ...
. She and her mother moved to Scotland in the 1950s, where she attended
Aberdeen High School for Girls
Harlaw Academy is a six-year comprehensive secondary school situated 200 yards from the junction of Union Street and Holburn Street in the centre of Aberdeen, Scotland. It is directly adjacent to St Margaret's School for Girls. The academy dra ...
.
She received her MA in
Classics
Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics ...
from the
University of Aberdeen
The University of Aberdeen ( sco, University o' 'Aiberdeen; abbreviated as ''Aberd.'' in List of post-nominal letters (United Kingdom), post-nominals; gd, Oilthigh Obar Dheathain) is a public university, public research university in Aberdeen, Sc ...
in 1960 and won a scholarship to study in
Greece
Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders with ...
.
She then studied
Law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vario ...
at
St Anne's College,
University of Oxford
, mottoeng = The Lord is my light
, established =
, endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019)
, budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20)
, chancellor ...
. She was one of the first two female students to be invited to speak at the Oxford Union, after her friends Jenny Grove and
Rose Dugdale
Bridget Rose Dugdale (born 1941), better known as Rose Dugdale, is a former debutante who rebelled against her wealthy upbringing, becoming a volunteer in the militant Irish republican organisation, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). ...
had dressed up in men's clothes to gain entrance to the male-only debating chamber and had subsequently canvassed support for female students to be admitted.
She graduated with her
BCL in 1962.
Career
On coming down from Oxford, she lectured on Law at the
University College of Wales
, mottoeng = A world without knowledge is no world at all
, established = 1872 (as ''The University College of Wales'')
, former_names = University of Wales, Aberystwyth
, type = Public
, endowment = ...
,
Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth () is a university and seaside town as well as a community in Ceredigion, Wales. Located in the historic county of Cardiganshire, means "the mouth of the Ystwyth". Aberystwyth University has been a major educational location in ...
. She then spent a year at Cité Universitaire des Jeunes Filles at Nancy, receiving a diploma in French law.
Having been
called to the Bar
The call to the bar is a legal term of art in most common law jurisdictions where persons must be qualified to be allowed to argue in court on behalf of another party and are then said to have been "called to the bar" or to have received "call to ...
in 1966, she joined the
Chancery bar.
She practised as a
barrister
A barrister is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdictions. Barristers mostly specialise in courtroom advocacy and litigation. Their tasks include taking cases in superior courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, researching law and ...
first at the
Middle Temple
The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known simply as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court exclusively entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers, the others being the Inner Temple, Gray's Inn an ...
and then at
Lincoln's Inn
The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. (The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn.) Lincoln ...
, specialising in property and tax law.
She later joined
Lloyds Bank
Lloyds Bank plc is a British retail banking, retail and commercial bank with branches across England and Wales. It has traditionally been considered one of the "Big Four (banking), Big Four" clearing house (finance), clearing banks. Lloyds B ...
, where she specialised in international tax planning and became a senior executive in the trust department. It was at this time that she started to write.
Fellow
barrister
A barrister is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdictions. Barristers mostly specialise in courtroom advocacy and litigation. Their tasks include taking cases in superior courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, researching law and ...
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."
Personal life and death
She was a lifelong
pipe-smoker, and inveterate
crossword
A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answ ...
solver, reaching the final of ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'' Crossword Competition more than once.
For many years, she lived in
Barnes, London
Barnes () is a district in south London, part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England. It takes up the extreme north-east of the borough, and as such is the closest part of the borough to central London. It is centred west sou ...
, with her mother and aunt. She died of
throat cancer
Head and neck cancer develops from tissues in the lip and oral cavity (mouth), larynx (throat), salivary glands, nose, sinuses or the skin of the face. The most common types of head and neck cancers occur in the lip, mouth, and larynx. Symptoms ...
on 28 January 2000 in
Whitehall
Whitehall is a road and area in the City of Westminster, Central London. The road forms the first part of the A roads in Zone 3 of the Great Britain numbering scheme, A3212 road from Trafalgar Square to Chelsea, London, Chelsea. It is the main ...
,
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
.
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
Lincoln's Inn
The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. (The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn.) Lincoln ...
, where four young junior
barristers
A barrister is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdictions. Barristers mostly specialise in courtroom advocacy and litigation. Their tasks include taking cases in superior courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, researching law and ...
have their chambers: Michael Cantrip, Desmond Ragwort, Selena Jardine and Timothy Shepherd.
While the last named only appears sporadically, taxes barrister Julia Larwood, who works in the adjacent premises, is a regular visitor and is in effect the fourth member of the group. These characters are in some ways thinly drawn (Selena is highly organized and efficient, Julia is clumsy and chaotic, Cantrip is casual and modern, Ragwort is elegant and conservative), never communicating in anything other than an ironic tone, so that even when they are in deadly danger the atmosphere remains uniformly light-hearted.
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,
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.
This distancing is amplified by Caudwell's strategy of not specifying Tamar's sex 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
Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...
,
Corfu
Corfu (, ) or Kerkyra ( el, Κέρκυρα, Kérkyra, , ; ; la, Corcyra.) is a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, of the Ionian Islands, and, including its small satellite islands, forms the margin of the northwestern frontier of Greece. The isl ...
,
Sark
Sark (french: link=no, Sercq, ; Sercquiais: or ) is a part of the Channel Islands in the southwestern English Channel, off the coast of Normandy, France. It is a royal fief, which forms part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, with its own set of l ...
and an English village.
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
Robert Heron Bork (March 1, 1927 – December 19, 2012) was an American jurist who served as the solicitor general of the United States from 1973 to 1977. A professor at Yale Law School by occupation, he later served as a judge on the U.S. Court ...
, who was once quoted as saying, "In my opinion, there can't be too many Sarah Caudwell novels".
[
]
Other writing
Caudwell collaborated on crime fiction-related acrostics with Michael Z. Lewin and with Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block (born June 24, 1938) is an American crime writer best known for two long-running New York-set series about the recovering alcoholic P.I. Matthew Scudder and the gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Block was named a Grand Mas ...
(and others) for ''The Perfect Murder''.
She also wrote a play, ''The Madman's Advocate'', which was given a rehearsed reading in Nottingham in 1995: a study of Daniel M'Naghten
Daniel M'Naghten (sometimes spelled McNaughtan or McNaughton) (1813 – 3 May 1865) was a Scottish woodturner who assassinated English civil servant Edward Drummond while suffering from paranoid delusions. Through his trial and its aftermath, ...
's attempt in 1843 to assassinate Sir Robert Peel
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, (5 February 1788 – 2 July 1850) was a British Conservative statesman who served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1834–1835 and 1841–1846) simultaneously serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer ...
and the resulting establishment of the M'Naghten Rule as a legal standard for defining the sanity of a defendant in law.
Awards
Caudwell was nominated for the Best Novel award at the 1986 Anthony awards for ''The Shortest Way to Hades'' and won the 1990 award for ''The Sirens Sang of Murder
The Sirens Sang of Murder () is a book written by Sarah Caudwell and published by Delacorte Press (owned by Random House) on 1 October 1989 which later went on to win the Anthony Award
The Anthony Awards are literary awards for mystery writer ...
'' in the same category.
Bibliography
Hilary Tamar novels
* ''Thus Was Adonis Murdered'' (1981)
* ''The Shortest Way to Hades'' (1985)
* ''The Sirens Sang of Murder
The Sirens Sang of Murder () is a book written by Sarah Caudwell and published by Delacorte Press (owned by Random House) on 1 October 1989 which later went on to win the Anthony Award
The Anthony Awards are literary awards for mystery writer ...
'' (1989)
* ''The Sibyl in Her Grave'' (2000)
Other novel
* ''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)
* ''Women Before the Bench'' (2001)
* ''The Mammoth Book of Comic Crime'' (2002)
References
Sources
*
*
* ''St James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers'', Fourth Edition; 1990. Jay Pederson (ed.), "Sarah Caudwell", pp. 162–63.
External links
Article on Sarah Caudwell
{{DEFAULTSORT:Caudwell, Sarah
1939 births
2000 deaths
Cockburn family
Alumni of the University of Aberdeen
English mystery writers
Anthony Award winners
Alumni of St Anne's College, Oxford
Deaths from cancer in England
English women novelists
20th-century English novelists
20th-century English women writers
Women mystery writers
People educated at Harlaw Academy
20th-century English lawyers
20th-century pseudonymous writers
Pseudonymous women writers