Good Reads meta-data is 187 pages, rated by 2.67 by a measly 3 litizens.
Genre: krimi; Species: Academic.
DNA: Oxbridge.
Verdict: Dry.
Tagline: Pass the port to the left and the sherry to the right.
It opens with a discussion of Thomas Hobbes! Regrettably Hobbes makes only one more appearance near the end. Still that opening soupçon was bait enough to hook me.
But wait! There’s more. No sooner is Brother Hobbes consulted than the foregathered Dons unite in rejecting Sociology and all sociologists! I began to wonder if the author had the University of Sydney in mind.
In 1974 when my shadow darkened the door of the University of Sydney the Vice Chancellor of the day repeatedly declared his determination to keep out the barbarian sociologists clamouring at the sandstone gates of the quadrangle. It was also a time when we endured weekly faculty meetings wherein colleagues lectured we of the hapless hosts on the errors, mortal and venal of those who did not drink but the waters of neo-classical economics. These sinners all were ‘sociologists’ by many other names! This subtext was loud, clear, and repeated weekly.
Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, Harriet Martineau, Mary Douglas, and company be damned! Derive those demand curves!
(Aside, an acolyte of that faith said to me once that original research in economics was impossible because all was known. No, I am afraid he wasn’t kidding. So pure are they of the faith that when we had a Nobel Prize winner in Economics visit, few of the local economists bothered to attend his lecture or seminar, because he was not one of them. He was…shudder…a psychologist who studied the economic behaviour of people! People! Such was completely irrelevant to those who preferred faith to facts.)
Now back to the action: The foibles, ego centrisms, obsessions of the denizens of a fictitious but very realistic Oxford college are paraded and parodied. Well, most scholars are self-parodying in their own microcosms. This college is old fashioned even by Oxford standards. In my aforementioned days colleagues assured me Sydney was second only to Oxford, and now I begin to see why. We operated according to two rules. Rule One – everyone/thing here is excellent. Rule Two – don’t question the first rule.
Leachers, idlers, incompetents, narcissists, blackmailers, egotists, drones, preachers, and deluded wielded their vices. Pareto’s keep the boat afloat, barely.
In addition to its protected species of academics with arcane ranks and specialities there are students, who typically do not figure in the story, porters, administrators, and the visitors. Some of that later cross the stage.
This well-ordered world is jarred by the need to raise money for its long-neglected physical plant, starting with the roof of the chapel no one attends in this secular age. A professional fund raiser arrives to take stock of the needs and prospects. He expects members of the college to assist in this project in their own common interest and is puzzled by their unwillingness to lift a finger for the greater good. Clearly he has not spent much time among this congregation or he would not have been surprised by this solipsism.
Then comes a second and greater shock when one of the oldest and most senile Fellows of the college is murdered in the library where he goes to sleep away the day between meals.
Enter plod who ever so deftly and politely asks questions. Being questioned, [shudder…] by an outsider is not something these cosseted men can abide, but needs must. Yes, they are all men.
Among their number is one person whom they all despise – the only thing they agree on – and soon every finger of blame is pointed at him. The plot thickens when it becomes apparent that he could not possibly have done it.
Yikes.
Plod plods on.
By the way, Plod is Inspector Barnaby. Yep. Same as…. (If you don’t know, then you don’t know. Got it?)
It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it. Glad I did.