Gentlemen & Players

Gentlemen & Players is a psychological thriller by the British novelist Joanne Harris, published in 2005. It is the first of three novels featuring Roy Straitley, a Classics master at St. Oswald's, a boys' grammar school in the north of England. The story is set in the 1990s, at the start of the autumn term, when Straitley, aged sixty-five, is weighing up retirement after nearly a hundred terms at a school that has been the centre of his life.

Harris drew on her own years of teaching, for twelve years at an independent all-boys' school, Leeds Grammar School. The buildings, traditions and atmosphere of the school, from compulsory Latin lessons to the academic gowns worn in class, owe much to that period, although the incidents in the novel are invented. She also acknowledged the influence of the Molesworth books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, and of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, whose castle helped her imagine the school.

The novel follows a sequence of unsettling events: a missing class register, the theft of a valuable fountain pen, a boy who goes into anaphylactic shock after a peanut is slipped into his drink, and an anonymous columnist whose malicious gossip appears in the local paper. Straitley suspects the young English teacher, Chris Keane, an aspiring novelist who keeps a notebook of sketches about his colleagues. Alongside this, the book traces the past of a former pupil, the son of the school caretaker, who once pretended to belong to the school's privileged world and whose obsession ended in tragedy.

The structure uses two first-person narrators: Straitley and the antagonist, whose identity is withheld until the end. The chapters carry chess-related titles and the narrative unfolds like a match between the two. Flashbacks reconstruct the antagonist's youth and the motives behind his thirst for revenge.

The book was well received, with reviewers comparing it to Patricia Highsmith and Terence Rattigan, and it was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2006. Its title refers to the nineteenth-century cricket matches between amateur gentlemen and professional players, a metaphor for the class divisions that run through the novel. Its main themes include revenge, adolescence, unequal access to education and class consciousness in Britain.