Robert Robinson. Landscape with Dead Dons (1963)

     Robert Robinson. Landscape with Dead Dons (1963) UP and AR gave me this in 1987, for Christmas. It’s been languishing on the shelf ever since. The plot is set in an Oxford college; the author apparently went down shortly before he wrote this book, and it’s an ironical hymn of love towards the University.
     A Vice Chancellor is murdered, then a Fellow, and finally a pornographer is almost drowned, too. Inspector Autumn is the cop, and he would have made a nice series, but I suppose Robinson didn’t have any more stories in him. Autumn’s not from Oxford, so he would have to do his stuff in various parts of the kingdom. A new-found poem by Chaucer (The Book of the Lion, alluded to by Chaucer himself, but never found), a little decorous hanky-panky, academic infighting, and so forth, along with a nice smattering of eccentrics make for a pleasant entertainment. A police procedural this is not – perhaps that’s another reason Robinson didn’t make a series, not having sufficient knowledge to make it believable – but with the usual suspension of disbelief, it works quite well. There are a few oddities, which disappear when one remembers the date of composition. **-½ (2003)