Relaxed Dons

Press, Volume C, Issue 29626, 23 September 1961, Page 3

Relaxed Dons

At one of England’s greater universities there is an idyllic bathing place, known as Parson’s Pleasure, where dons of all shapes and sizes, may shed their sober sub-fusc, casting off all fetters of past or present and bathe at ease in a state of nature. Yet if it be the pleasure of sundry parsons to swim with nothing between them and the cooling currents of an ancient stream, there is an equally delightful reaim where less extrovert academics may take their pleasure, dipping a tentative toe not in water but in blood. It is, of course, the realm of detective fiction reigned over jointly by Mr Michael Innes and Mr Nicholas Blake. It might happily

be entitled Don’s Delight. Many dons read detective stories (for intellectual exercise, of course), a number of dons write them. It is hardly surprising then that Collins should have run a dons’ crime novel competition and published the works of the joint winners. “Message to Sirius.” by Cecil Jenkins, (Collins, 288 pp.) is hardly the sort of detective story one would have expected a university man to have writtten. Here is no study of petty academic differences flaring up into a burst of murderous rage, nor is there murdei on the grounds ot intellectual dishonesty, set against a background of intellectual discussion in the courts and quadrangles of some ancient and venerated institution of learning. Instead Mr Jenkins plunges us into the atmosphere of London night life, of anonymous letters sent to, newspapers, and the slow, methodical work of police investigation. Tony Bayre, filmstar, impreesario, and idol of the masses is murdered dramatically in the course of his own night-club act. The police are called in; an investigation gets under way. Mr Jenkins has obviously

made a close study of the methods of the police and from this point of view his book is extremely convincing and most effective. But we expect good documentation from any don worth his salt What spoils the novel is Mr Jenkins’ insistences on indulging in social reform; he attacks the Press, the cult of the matinee idol and the general state of morality in the modern world. All this is most commendable but not in a detective story. On the other hand, R. J. White, with “The Smartest Grave”, (Collins, 286 pp.) is far more at home. A lecturer in History at Cambridge, Mr White has turned to the past for the bones of the book, and around the sequence of events of the Moat House murder, which actually took place, has woven an excellent character study of the chief actors and created a very fine piece of ' period reconstruction. The setting is late Victorian; an age when men were men and respectable women refused to admit it. Captain Dugdale, a fine, upstanding bearded gentleman, brings his wife to live in the old Moat House, which he has leased with her money. After a short time the wife disappears. Apparently undismayed, the captain takes another and settles down to become a cheery, beery, Edwardian squire, a friend of the Vicar and beloved by the • countryside. Unhappily his second wife follows the first The Captain goes on regardless until brought to book by the suspicious Inspector Brock (a figure bearing comparison with Wilkie Collins’s. Sergeant Cuff) who has been on the trail of the captain for some years. Mr White’s style is fittingly Edwardian. He never descends to the “Aha! my proud and haughty beauty” sort of stuff, but be keeps the reader ever aware of it and uses it to good comic effect The section where the Vicar discovers the Captain indulging in what appear to be “ancient fertility rites” (shades of Sir James Frazer) leaves one painfully twisted with mirth.