An aging Oxford professor of English is travelling across Australia,
giving “guest lectures” at all of the institutes of higher learning
(so called) in that country. It is the mid-1970s; he wrote the two lectures he is
giving in the 1920s, when he was a young don, and has been giving them
unchanged, word-for-word ever since. He is deadly dull.

And at one of his stops, a particularly back-water sort of University
even for Australia, he is murdered for no discernible reason.

If you’ve detected a note of disdain for Australia in this review, it’s
simply because I’m trying to maintain the tone of the book itself, a
so-called “satire” in which Australia is shown to be in every way
dirtier, shabbier, and coarser than the mother country, even down to its
academic politics (which, heaven knows, are pretty shabby no matter where
you go).

But if, on the one hand, you’ve got a book that repeats all of the usual
pommie slanders, then on the other the mystery is fairly lightweight.

The book is, I hasten to add, well-written–the characters are all
marvelously well-drawn and very much themselves. But one doesn’t like
them, or the constant English snobbery, and the mystery does little to
make up for it.

Oh, well.