Sarah Caudwell

Sarah Cockburn was born on 27 May 1939 in Weir Road, London.[2] Her father was Claud Cockburn, the left-wing journalist, and her mother was Jean Ross, a journalist and political activist who was the model for the character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's Cabaret.[3][4] Her parents were unmarried and her father left three months after Sarah's birth.[2]

Caudwell's three half-brothers Alexander Cockburn, Andrew Cockburn, and Patrick Cockburn are journalists.[5] She was the half-sister-in-law of Leslie Cockburn and Michael Flanders. Journalists Laura Flanders and Stephanie Flanders, and actress Olivia Wilde are her half-nieces.

During World War II, she lived in Welwyn and Stevenage, Hertfordshire, with her mother and maternal grandmother. In 1945, they moved to Cheltenham. She and her mother moved to Scotland in the 1950s, where she attended Aberdeen High School for Girls.[2] She received her MA in classics from the University of Aberdeen in 1960 and won a scholarship to study in Greece.[2]

She then studied law at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. She was one of the first two female students invited to speak at the Oxford Union, after her friends Jenny Grove and Rose Dugdale dressed in men's clothes to gain entrance to the male-only debating chamber and had then canvassed support for the admission of female students.[6] She graduated with her BCL in 1962.[2]

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, where four young junior barristers have their chambers: Michael Cantrip, Desmond Ragwort, Selena Jardine and Timothy Shepherd.[7] 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 fifth 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,[8] 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.[7] This distancing is amplified by Caudwell's strategy of not specifying Tamar's gender 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, Corfu, Sark and an English village.[8] 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, who was once quoted as saying, "In my opinion, there can't be too many Sarah Caudwell novels".[5]

Caudwell collaborated on crime fiction-related acrostics with Michael Z. Lewin[9] and with Lawrence Block and others for The Perfect Murder.[10][9]

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's attempt in 1843 to assassinate Sir Robert Peel and the resulting establishment of the M'Naghten Rule as a legal standard for defining the sanity of a defendant in law.[11]