Murder At The College

Victor L Whitechurch’s last detective novel has two titles: Oleander Press have kept the original British title, but in the USA this was known as Crime At Exbridge. There is a connection: the murder takes place in an Oxbridge-like university college.

Whitechurch was a clergyman who wrote in his spare time, and had at one time been chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford (the cathedral in that city is the chapel of Christchurch College), but Exbridge seems a smaller town than Oxford. This provides part of the difficulty the police have in solving the crime: while the windows of college rooms might be seen from across the street, the college itself at lunchtimes during vacations might be empty of potential witnesses.

A group of architectural advisors to the Bishop meet monthly, often as this month, in the college rooms of an acquaintance. At lunchtimes they go their separate ways to fill the inner man (they are all men, of course), but on this one day Francis Hatton has stayed behind to eat his sandwiches. And meet his death. On their return, the members of the party find Hatton’s body slumped in a chair under a newspaper. A knife which had been thrown down at the foot of the stairs might be the murder weapon but the police pathologist is unsure.

The diners and college servants, when investigated, have alibis. The case seems to be broken open when a witness from an office across the street identifies a figure who appeared at the college window but social difficulties arrive when that figure is identified as a lord of the manor of one of the outlying villages. Readers might have realised that this is a novel of that period when, earlier, the college servant was spoken to: “I ought to warn you, Williams, that you are in a delicate position.” None of the consultative committee members got that warning.

Meanwhile, Detective Sergeant Ambrose has gone to Carnford Manor, in another of the outlying villages, to visit the home of the deceased Francis Hatton and discovered that he was interested in codes and code-breaking, for such as cypher was found on a slip of paper in the dead man’s pocket. It is this discovery with its implications that keep Ambrose on the case when the Chief Constable would rather he was working on a long-running series of thefts, where small, valuable and portable items were discovered to be going missing all over the county.

Given the date of Murder At The College (1932) that makes it pretty certain that the crimes are linked. How Whitechurch does it, which involves identifying broken shoelaces and knowledge of international travel timetables, is what makes this another good read from the Golden Age, and another worthy reprint.