The Oxford Despoiler, by Gary Dexter
Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman
Windows on the Moon, by Alan Brownjohn
The Oxford Despoiler is a collection of eight stories introducing Henry St Liver, a Victorian detective, and his biographer and assistant, Olive Salter. Henry is tall and lean, with a lofty bearing but the habits of the most dishevelled bohemian. Olive drifted to London and met Henry, and in very little time became his invaluable foil.
If it sounds familiar, it should, since this is in part a warm and cleverly observed pastiche of the Victorian detective genre and of the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. Nods to Conan Doyle include the regulation half-witted policemen, the fact that many of the cases contain no real crime, and the trademark references to other investigations too shocking to be set before the public (such as ‘the affair of the Moist-Handed Madonna’ and ‘the strange case of the Fifteenth Ewe’).
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