Robert Barnard's School for Murder takes on the British school tradition, using the pedants and crackpots at a private day academy for boys as the subjects of a murderous comedy of manners.

Nicholas Blake is the nom-de-crime of poet C. Day Lewis. Featuring Nigel Strangeways,these are wonderfully witty satires of academic life as well as intriguing mysteries. H. R. F. Keating included two of Blake's books in his compilation of the hundred best mysteries.

J. S. Borthwick's Sarah Deane is an English Fellow at Maine’s Bowmouth College in a series that begins with The Case of the Hook-Billed Kites. Many of the seven take Deane and Dr. Alex McKenzie off campus, but in The Student Body the college setting and faculty are central.

In The Moving Toyshop, Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford as well as an amateur sleuth. There are ten in this series of truly witty classics.

Amanda Cross, pen name of Carolyn Heilbrun (herself a well-known scholar) is the creator of Kate Fansler, a professor of Victorian literature. The dialogue is ironic, dryly amusing, and the plots frequently turn on issues related to women’s roles in academic life. Beginning with In the Last Analysis, there are eleven in the series as well as a collection of short stories in hardcover.

In Matricide at St. Martha's, Ruth Dudley Edwards introduces Jack Troutbeck, a cigar-smoking, no-nonsense woman of strong convictions called in to head a troubled woman's college. The humor here is broad, aimed at political correctness in the academic world.

Elizabeth George's Well-Schooled in Murder takes Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers to a prestigious public school to uncover unsuspected evil behind the cloistered walls.

Another satiric look at academe comes from Robert Grudin in Book, in which Professor Adam Snell disappears a few days before his post-tenure review. Here the target is not only of pedants and bureaucrats, but also those those who make their living by theorizing about books instead of reading them.

Hazel Holt's Mrs. Mallory is an Oxford graduate and literary critic. There are six in this cozy series, starting with Mrs. Mallory Investigates.

Michael Innis, himself a famous Oxford scholar, set a number of his Appleby novels in Oxford, the most notable being Death at the President's Lodging.

D. J. H. Jones began with Murder at the MLA (the annual convention of the Modern Language Association) and has recently come out with Murder in the New Age, both featuring Chaucerian Nancy Cook. The subject of the first is obvious; the second provdes a sharp and hilarious analysis of New Age subculture.

Rabbi David Small, in Harry Kemelman's fine series, insists that the prime duty of a rabbi is scholarship, so all these books have a scholarly approach to detection. However, Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red and That Day the Rabbi Resigned bring the rabbi into college settings.

In Susan Kenney's Graves in Academe, Roz Howard's English course syllabus parallels a series of murders. A delight for those who like literary jokes and have fond memories of their survey of English literature from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.

M. D. Lake provides a unique twist in that his Peggy O’Neill is neither a scholar nor a teacher, but a campus cop. Her views of and encounters with the various students, teachers, and administrators at the college are authentic and well-drawn. There are nine in the series, starting with Amends for Murder.

David Lodge's trilogy of academic satires begins with Changing Places and ends with Booker Prize-nominated Nice Work. It might be stretching to call them mysteries, but they do deal with crimes, disappearances, deceit, and intrigue in academic settings.

Charlotte MacLeod's Peter Shandy series began with Rest You Merry and there are eleven so far. Set in Balaclava Agricultural College, these tend more toward farce than dry wit, capitalizing on MacLeod’s appreciation for outrageous characters.

In Death Among the Dons, Janet Neel places Francesca Wilson in the midst of controversy and murder at London's Gladstone College.

Lev Raphael so far has written two novels about gay professor Nick Hoffman, English instructor at the State University of Michigan, and his lover, writer-in-residence Stefan Borowski. Let's Get Criminal has now come out in trade paper, whereas The Edith Wharton Murders is still in hardcover. Both are wickedly funny satires of the power plays among academics.

Gillian Roberts' Amanda Pepper series features a Philadelphia prep school English teacher. Anthony-winner Caught Dead in Philadelphia is the first of six, notable for their appealing characters, flippant insights, and nimble plotting.

Edith Skom so far has two books featuring nineteenth-century novel expert Beth Austin. The second, The George Eliot Murders, takes her to Hawaii, but the first, The Mark Twain Murders, focuses on campus life at Midwestern University. (This one was nominated for three Best First Mystery awards—an Agatha, a Macavity, and an Anthony.)

No listing of academic mysteries would be complete without the Dorothy Sayers'classic Gaudy Night, in which Harriet Vane encounters criminal intention at her Oxford reunion. Joan Smith's mystery series beginning with A Masculine Ending, features Loretta Larson, an English professor at London University. Her novels are an appealing combination of entertainment and education.

Veronica Stallwood's Kate Ivory is a novelist, not an academic, but her research for her books takes place in Oxford. Death and the Oxford Box is the first in the series, followed by Oxford Exit and Oxford Mourning.

Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes (unfortunately now out of print) takes the author of a psychology textbook to a girls’ boarding school, where she discovers that the busy cheerful surface masks murderous tension and rivalry.

Mark Zubro has six in his series about junior high teacher Tom Mason and his lover, baseball player Scott Carpenter. A Simple Suburban Murder is the first; all the books are notable for the warm, honest, normal nature of their lives and an authentic sense of place. Zubro is himself a teacher in Chicago, by the way.