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Product Description
A hardcover Gollancz Crime Detective reissue, 1982 of the 1956 novel, Landscape With Dead Dons, in the classic Gollancz yellow jacket. Not an ex library copy, as was the fate of many Gollancz titles.
Landscape with Dead Dons was a bit of a one-off by the late Robert Robinson. In the UK he is remembered as a journalist, broadcaster and presenter of such long-running BBC quiz shows as Call My Bluff on TV and Brain of Britain on radio. But before that came this darkly comic story of death and bibliomania at Oxford.
Robinson came from a working class background but was able to gain a scholarship to study English at Oxford University, the setting for this novel, which he wrote not that long after graduating when he heard that friend and fellow journalist Godfrey Smith has just had a novel accepted for publication. Thus imbued with a competitive zeal, he used his recent student experiences as the background for this comic campus whodunit.
Robinson studied at Exeter, Oxfords fourth oldest college (and said to be the basis for Jordan College in Pullmans His Dark Materials series) but the events here all take place at the fictitious Warlock College. When a precious edition of Paradise Lost in the Bodleian Library is desecrated, Inspector Autumn is set to investigate what appears to be but one of a spate of acts of cultural vandalism. The authorities are concerned that this could escalate following the recent discovery of a long-lost work by Chaucer, The Book of Lion, by one of the dons at Warlock.
Condition - some very light edgewear, not price clipped, unmarked internally.
