The Boat Race Murder

by R. E. Swartwout

The Cambridge Eight rowing team is only days away from the highly anticipated boat race.

In an effort to ease their minds, detective fiction becomes a welcome distraction for the team. But when one of the team members is found dead in a perplexing and suspicious manner, the distraction turns into a full-blown investigation.

Was it suicide or murder, and which member of the team had a motive? And if murder -

is anyone else due to die?

Scotland Yard detective Angus MacNair must unravel the mystery in this classic locked-room whodunit, originally published in 1933.
Robert Egerton Swartwout (1905-1951) was a poet, humourist and, more importantly, the first American to cox the Cambridge University Boat Club to victory in 1930. He is also the author of Rhymes of the River and Other Verses (W Heffer and Sons, Limited. Cambridge 1927).

Genres: Mystery, London, British Literature

241 pages, Paperback

Published June 24, 2022

Reviews

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable enough but never really did explain why the corpse was discovered as it was. It felt like a loose end that really needed to be tied up and instead just got left behind. I learned a neat new cipher, though!

[Adelyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars. A really enjoyable Golden Age mystery, and I always enjoy reading books with themes that are local or familiar to me. Full review to follow.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting locked door mystery. A Cambridge men's rowing crew are sitting around, joking about murder. The next morning, one of their own is found murdered in the locked bathroom. Soon, one of them is arrested but then eventually released for lack of evidence. The Scotland Yard, Angus MacNair, keeps digging to sort out the real clues from the false ones.

The biggest problem I had with this novel was that there are several college-age men in this mystery, and these characters are all more or less created in very ordinary ways. There is nothing that identifies one from another, so it is extremely difficult to follow this storyline. There are no physical characteristics ("with his jet-black hair...") no specific clothing attire ("Sam always wore red socks..."); very little about family backgrounds about family backgrounds ("Ralph was the only one who didn't have any brothers..."), so it is not only hard to follow, it is also hard to care. I finished the book, but it didn't affect me one way or the other who the culprit was.

Ho-hum.

[Matt Gurtler · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable murder mystery. Feels a bit cliché in some ways - but it's a product of its time. A nice bit of cosy crime fiction. Slightly archaic posh language, but that adds to the irritating upper-class-ness of the characters and so is a positive thing in a book about the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race!

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to get acclimated to all the characters. Sometimes I find detective fiction from the 1930s hard to focus on, but once I got about halfway through the book I was really into the mystery, and it had a lot of fun twists.