V. C. Clinton-Baddeley

 V. C. Clinton-Baddeley's Dr. Davie books, published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, have long been favorites of mine.  Dr. R. V. Davie is an elderly fellow of St. Nicholas' College, Cambridge University, who has a fondness for detective novels and opera.  His natural curiosity about people and the world often leads him into unusual situations. 

 
The sudden death of a university lecturer during the course of a public speech in Death's Bright Dart leads Dr. Davie to investigate the speaker's murky past, a stolen blowpipe, and the production methods and use of arrow poisons. This one involves some tricky calculating of the college's internal geography that I found confusing, although there is a map to help figure it out.  Grade:  B for the mystery, Grade A for the pleasure of Dr. Davie's company.   

My Foe Outstretch'd Beneath The Tree finds Dr. Davie involved with a mysterious death at his London club; a member, a former police officer, has been found dead in the club's central garden apparently a victim of suffocation.  Only a few hours earlier, Dr. Davie had enlisted the man's help to play a cassette tape recording or a language lesson with a strange addition and a few bars of a familiar opera aria.  Again, Grade: B for the mystery (I really don't think it would work), Grade:  A for the wry humor and captivating writing.   

Only A Matter Of Time finds Dr. Davie attending the King's Lacey music and poetry festival.  Dr. Davie's quiet and entirely unofficial investigation of the deaths of an old antique dealing friend and of the secretary of an industrial corporation  raises the question:  were the murders the product of events in the past, or the result of modern industrial espionage?  Grade:  A.  

Revisiting the Devonshire village where he was born for the funeral of his boyhood friend Robert, Dr. Davie encounters unsettling information about Robert's interest in the death of a neighbor in No Case For The Police.  His curiosity soon leads him to poke his nose into that matter, of course.  Grade:  A.  

Dr. Davie attends a student commedia dell'arte performance at a London drama school in To Study A Long Silence during which one of the actors is killed shortly before he is due to go on stage to take final bows.  Naturally, Dr. Davie wants to know how and why.  Grade:  A.  

Sadly, the author died shortly after completing the last book, and after rounding up the investigation in London, Dr. Davie returns to his beloved Cambridge and falls asleep in his chair.