• The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford - The Wench is Dead by Colin Dexter
  • The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford - A Killing in November by Simon Mason
  • The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford - The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez
  • The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford - Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins
  • The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford - A Masculine Ending by Joan Smith

The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford, recommended by Cara Hunter

The city of Oxford has been a popular location for fictional murders for nearly a century, the ancient university and its beautiful buildings also lending themselves to wonderful screen adaptations. Bestselling British novelist Cara Hunter—author of the DI Fawley series and Murder in the Family—talks us through some of her favourite crime novels set in the city of dreaming spires. (If you’d like to see Cara in person, she’s speaking at two events at the Oxford Literary Festival on 16 March, 2024)

  • The Best Classic Crime Fiction - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
  • The Best Classic Crime Fiction - The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Best Classic Crime Fiction - The ABC Murders (1936) by Agatha Christie
  • The Best Classic Crime Fiction - Brat Farrar (1949) by Josephine Tey
  • The Best Classic Crime Fiction - The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

The Best Classic Crime Fiction, recommended by Sophie Roell

Since the early stories of the 18th and 19th centuries, crime fiction has been an incredibly popular and enduring genre, the investigation of murder somehow capturing the imagination of millions of readers around the globe. Here, Sophie Roell, editor of Five Books, uses strict but simple criteria to pick out the best classic crime fiction, from the Victorian age through to the 1950s.