The Cambridge Murders

Sir Richard Cherrington #1

by Dilwyn Rees

Fisher College at Cambridge lies between St John's and Trinity Colleges, a fact which may escape those who visit Cambridge trusting only to the official guide books and seeing no more than a gap of twenty feet between those two great houses of learning. Here one morning the bedmakers and gyps, clamouring for admission on the last day of term were admitted to find, lying across their path, the body of one of the College porters. The murder of the porter begins a mystery which deepens when it is found that the unpopular Dean of the college is missing. The search for the murderer is conducted in part by the police and partly by the Vice-President of Fisher College Sir Richard Cherrington, an eminent but slightly eccentric archaeologist with a penchant for amateur detection. The Cambridge Murders is a story of murder at high table, of death and detection amid good living and scholarship.

Genres: Mystery, Crime

287 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

The name Dilwyn Rees is the pseudonym used by Glyn Edmund Daniel.

Reviews

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened to the audio with my husband on a long trip. Enjoyable.

[Aletha Tavares · Rating 3 out of 5]

It didn't strike me at first, but this is one book all my archaeology friends would love to read- yep the same Glyn Daniel of The Three Ages of Man, which we all had to go through in the early 80's. Well my friends, its only after I picked up Cambridge Murders and read about the author, that I realised I certainly picked a prize here... and it really helps to be an archaeologist, as powers of observation are required when solving the mysteries of the past or present...

It reads like any other mystery- suspicion somehow placed on the central character. Unfortunately, it turns out very lame. But well, I still liked it for it focuses on what archaeology teaches us all to do- observation, without which relationships are hard to form and related to. And also it draws attention to knowing the geography of the the land. Interesting for an archaeologist to turn his mind from observations of the past to playing out a murder in his own backyard!

[Trevor Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable murder mystery, but mainly because of the setting in Cambridge. The story itself was overfilled with details and possible suspects.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is quite a long book: too long in fact. My copy was printed in 1945, no doubt under wartime economy standards i.e. very thin paper with very small print and it still had 223 pages!

Although it's not a bad story it was very slow to get going and the reader had to go through the entire thought processes of firstly the local detective, then of the amateur sleuth, Professor Sir Richard Cherrington, and then the Scotland Yard detective, Detective Superintendent Robin Robertson-Macdonald. This latter probably having the longest name in detective fiction.

To be fair, the author gives the reader all the information (several times over) to solve the crime but it just seems to go on forever. The ending, I found, a little unsatisfactory. Two and a half stars would have been fairer.

[Šári · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up in a used book store at a train station and it immediately caught my eye because of its setting inter-war Cambridge University. I'm an academic myself and I do love an old-school detective story with telegrams, butlers, and huge suitcases. I noticed multiple people complaining about the length in their reviews... Have you guys read any crime fiction recently? 255 pages is pretty tame. I do agree the storytelling was rather slow but what I appreciated about that is nobody shoots at people and runs places like mad. It's a Poirot-style thing. Y'all just too hung up on the fast-paced stuff...

[Blasr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly enjoyable, but you do need your wits about you to follow the plot. I wish the authors had written more crime novels.

[Bev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sir Richard Cherrington, Vice President of Fisher College, Cambridge, and eminent archaeologist, decides to use his abilities to uncover the mysteries of the past to unravel the mysteries of the present. Things are bad enough when one of the college porters is found shot to death in the path between the inner and outer courtyards. But when a very unpopular Dean goes missing, things look very black indeed. And then the body of Dean Landon is found stuffed in the trunk belonging to Cherrington's nephew. Inspector Wyndham of the local Cambridge force begins to look at Cherrington with a very suspicious eye, but when Scotland Yard arrives the focus is turned to Evan Fothergill who has been having an affair with the Dean's wife. Those aren't the only suspects though. There's Roger Westmacott who though he might have a chance with Anne Landon before the Dean scooped her up and who has had many run-ins with the Dean since then. And there's John Parrott, an undergraduate whom the Dean had just sent down from College for flouting the rules about late leave once too often. And Westmacott's nephew who was also kicked out--and would have been reported to the police for theft if the Dean had lived. Of course, Anne Landon might also have wanted to get her husband out of the way permanently. Then she and Fothergill would have been free to marry.

Cherrington, not suspecting that any of the police seriously suspect him, sets out to solve the mystery for purely academic reasons. He's always been interested in crime (he has whole shelves of crime texts and detective stories--very fishy from Inspector Wyndham's view) and wants to see if he can put theory into practice. Some of his activities in the detecting game make him look even more suspicious to the authorities and even Superintendent Robertson-McDonald of the Yard begins to believe that Cherrington can't be as innocent as he claims. Will our amateur sleuth track down the real villain before the Yard decides to charge him?

First of all, thanks to Kate from Cross Examining Crime for including this in my Secret Santa goodies a few years ago [sorry it's taken so long to get to it, Kate, but you know how vast my TBR pile is...]. She knows how much I love getting new-to-me academic mysteries. Glyn Daniel does at least one thing really well in this one--he gives us very good look at academic life at Cambridge, albeit at a very fictional Fisher College. One really believes in the stairways leading to the Dean's and Cherrington's and the others' room as well as the courtyards separated by the Screens (where the porter was found) and walk leading down to the River Cam. I feel like once I make it to England (fingers crossed for this summer) that I could go to Cambridge and find this place. Daniel shares Sayers' gift for creating a College so real that it comes alive on the page.

He also does a very good job with most of his characters. The best is Robertson-McDonald. I enjoyed his quirk of arriving on the spot, gathering up all the reports and files, and then taking himself off by himself for a really good think before getting started. It was also fun to watch him build up a beautiful theory and then think it all came to smash over one tiny little detail--a seemingly unshakeable alibi. [Surely a Superintendent at the Yard has learned by now to distrust the unshakeable alibi...] The one character who doesn't shine as much as I'd like is our amateur sleuth, Cherrington (and I noted this in Welcome Death when I reviewed it last year). I'm just not completely sold on him. He does a bit better at sleuthing in this debut than he did in his second outing, but he's not as engaging as I'd like my academic detective to be. I think one thing that's off-putting is that he has way too much sympathy with the suspects. He says he wants to pursue the investigation for academic reasons and then he doesn't want see any of the suspects get in trouble with the police--even when they're telling blatant lies.

Overall, a well-plotted academic mystery--engaging story with an interesting motive behind the killings. ★★★ and 1/2 [rounded up here]

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1945 as by Dilwyn Rees then republished in 1965 under the author’s real name, this was the first of two mysteries featuring the don-detective Sir Richard Cherrington. Set in the fictional Fisher College, Cambridge, it turned out to be a rather tortuous read, with theories about the murders of the Dean and one of the porters being spun out rather as they are in academic settings when dinner is over and port is being sipped or,less exaltedly, by undergraduates after the pub and the quaffing of ale.

Despite the setting and Daniel’s credentials- he spent his entire career apart from war service at St John’s Cambridge and was Disney Professor of Archaeology- I thought it was a fairly mediocre effort. The most prominent features are the amount of direct lie-telling which goes on and the lack of logic in most of the theories-but then none of those concerned appears to have any philosophical training. The author emphasises how the observational techniques and approaches taken by archaeologists may be applied to detection but falters at the next and very necessary steps of deduction and analysis.

It is one of those novels which are prolonged unduly by having three investigations , the two professional ones led by local Inspector Wyndham and Scotland Yard’s Detective Superintendent Robertson-Macdonald alongside the amateur one by Cherrington. The ending too is odd, not helped for me by the perpetrator being the person I suspected from the moment they appeared.

Cherrington,who is based on Sir Mortimer Wheeler, bumbles and bungles, getting things wrong and drawing suspicion on himself throughout the book in a way I found less than endearing as was his tendency try to play the role of the big fixer. Many of the characters are eminently unlikeable and there is peculiarity in the way women are depicted.; Mary Langdon, for instance,appears to have married the Dean for no particular reason,and to have regretted it almost instantly. There are two characters about whom I would like to have heard more, the Librarian , Gough Clarke, who effectively gave the clue which led to the solution,and his mother who provides the police with vital background on the dons but does not actually appear.

3.25 stars.

[Phyllida · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is reminiscent of Agatha Christie but not as good. The solution is ingenious but the book spends far too long on the ruminations of three or four detectives instead of showing them doing anything.

[Basil B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was masterful. Was thinking 4 stars but then the ending blew me away. Really held up well for a book written in 1945, and I loved visualizing the streets and buildings

[Sara Tilley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stuffy but great- first third dreary but picks up

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my full review click on the link below:
https://crossexaminingcrime.wordpress...

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two things I learned reading this book: Glyn Daniel liked food and drink and Glyn Daniel liked academia. This book felt at times like an academic research paper and would have been complete with some footnotes. Yet, since I like this kind of stuff, it was enjoyable even if I was constantly hungry due to the mentions of food throughout.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

An amusing mystery, in an era before computers, cell phones, credit card receipts and security cameras.

[Les Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little long, but filled with story not sex and violence.

[Chris Constable · Rating 4 out of 5]

If it had not been written by Glyn Daniel it would be a 3 star book.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: the murder of a Fisher College porter leads to the college Vice-President Sir Richard Cherrington assisting the police.