In post-war Oxford, secrets lie behind every door.
In 1947, with rationing still biting and the black market thriving, university don C.S. ‘Jack’ Lewis finds himself pulled into a mystery straight from one of his friend Dorothy Sayers’ novels. Susan Temple, his brightest student, has hidden herself away at Rake Hall ― a hostel for unmarried, outcast mothers – and hasn’t been heard from since.
With no experience beyond catching the occasional student plagiarist, Lewis is hardly a detective. But when Susan’s absence continues to haunt him, he teams up with her concerned friend Lucy and together they delve into the disturbing rumours of a nasty racket at Rake Hall. Can Lewis’s nose for the truth separate fact from fiction?
In The Mystery at Rake Hall, Maureen Paton – whose mother lived at the real-life Rake Hall while pregnant with Maureen – brilliantly recreates a post-war Oxford world, as well as imagining an alternative life for one of its most famous residents.
The Mystery at Rake Hall : C S Lewis Investigates by Maureen Paton is published on 24 April 2025 by Swift Press. As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour today, I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you.
Normally, he never took much notice of what a female student was wearing. That way danger lay, even if you were saying something gallant about their outfit. And Jack Lewis wasn’t that kind of man. But there had been something odd about Susan Temple’s appearance at tutorials recently that had puzzled him, try though he might to set his mind on higher things than the mystifying intricacies of young women’s wardrobes.
And now, for the second week in a row, there was no sign of her. Tapping his pipe on his desk to give himself time to ponder, he eventually looked up at the long, glum face of the other pupil, Christopher Henchard, who was probably also wondering why Temple hadn’t turned up to help him out of his usual scholarly jam with some well-chosen words. Although she looked as delicate and willowy as one of the wood nymphs from Lewis’s beloved Greek mythology, Temple stood up well to intellectual interrogation.
There was something defiant about her that amused him; despite his college image as a middle-aged bachelor terrified of what the university’s young bucks called ‘totty’, he secretly relished pitching his wits against the women students. Having fought to gain admission in the first place to the tiny minority of female colleges, they were almost guaranteed to be brighter than many of the men – especially the rugger buggers heading for thirds after spending too much time on the pitch. Lewis, a clumsy, butterfingered man, detested sport and left all that to his brother Warnie.
Yet the vulnerability of someone as rashly combative as Temple also disturbed him. There were men who would see that as a challenge and take advantage – especially with her lush-lipped, high-cheekboned, dark beauty, although he tried not to be too aware of that. He had always been bothered by the potential susceptibility of the female undergrads, so vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts after leaving home for the first time – and therefore only too ripe for exploitation and domination.
He knew he was being patronising – tantamount to suggesting that they were the weaker sex, not up to the demands of academia, which was certainly not his intention – yet it troubled him nonetheless. After all, the university had yet to recover from the strange and shocking case of the girl who had been found dead in her bed in Lady Margaret Hall only the previous term. The inquest had established that she had a weak heart, a condition confirmed by her family, yet the whisper was that she had been taking amphetamines to cram overnight for her finals.
She is the author of two works of non-fiction and is a former committee member and former newsletter editor of the campaigning organisation Women in Journalism.
The Mystery at Rake Hall is her first novel.
www.maureenpaton.co.uk
X @maureen_paton