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Lessons in Chasing the Wild Goose (Cambridge Fellows Mysteries)
By Charlie Cochrane
Published by the author, 2018
Five stars

The chief joy for me in reading a long series of books that cover an extended period of time is that I get to know the characters in a way entirely different from a series in which the action covers only a restricted period of time. Charlie Cochrane’s Cambridge Fellows books started for me long before I routinely wrote reviews of every book I read. It was my first experience of a novelist who could successfully put men like Orlando and Jonty in a historical context without seeming either forced or polemical. The mysteries were always fun, but—for me—it was the relationship of these two young men that drew me back book after book.

Now—it feels like forever—Jonty and Orlando are middle-aged men, a couple (clandestinely, discreetly) for sixteen years. The traumas of the Great War are behind them, but never far from mind. They are very fortunate to have both family and friends who understand them and love them all the more. Cochrane doesn’t make a big deal out of this, but it is a very big deal, and completely colors the way Orlando and Jonty see the world.

Memories of the War loom again as our professors, in a quiet moment at Cambridge before the “dunderheads� return to spoil their quiet days, are drawn into a strange accidental killing that might not be accidental. Their investigation—aided by both Jonty’s sister Lavinia and the wife of the Master of St. Bride’s college—take them back to their wartime experience, seeing it through the eyes of other former soldiers. Orlando and Jonty an see beyond what they are told, understanding the circumstances and the emotional burdens that every survivor of battle shares.

The striking thing is that Jonty and Orlando, who would be widely seen as monstrous in the eyes of their culture, have a deep appreciation of what true monstrosity is. It’s not always obvious, and it can be motivated by pain and suffering. Our two professorial sleuths never forget what they themselves have survived.

Without undue violence, but with a genteel persistence that is worthy of the best Christie character, our two gentlemen probe into the dark parts of their nation’s collective psyche. Marginalized in spite of their evident privilege, Jonty and Orlando bring a clear-eyed compassion to their work.

One can only assume they actually care about their students more than they pretend to.