Susanna Gregory's 'The Chancellor's Secret' 2021

 

Sphere paperback edition - 2022

This is the 25th and final chronicle of Cambridge's Matthew Bartholomew - and I have collected the stories from the first and read the lot. Increasingly formulaic as time went on, Susanna Gregory was wise to call it a day. 

I recall buying the first volume on a bookstall outside Loughborough All Saints church in 1996. Two books came out that year; from 1997 onwards, it was an annual purchase. Only 2018 was a fallow year. It says much for Gregory that she kept up the imaginative story lines, admittedly usually on the rather claustrophobic canvas of the small town of Cambridge. Quite often the plot revolved round town v. gown; on other occasions it was inter-collegiate rivalry. Perhaps the reader got a little tired of the Benedictine Brother Michael's gluttony (he was of the opinion that a princely girth was a sign of healthy living, not because he ate too much), the Franciscan William's disreputable habit (the grubbiest friar in Christendom), John Clippesby (Michaelhouse's gentle Dominican...it was generally assumed that Clippesby was either insane or a saint in the making) talking to and surrounded by a variety of feathered and other animals. Others came and went - often by being murdered. The women rarely played other than bit parts - why Matilde kept hanging on for so many years hoping for marriage with Bartholomew (she got her man in this final volume) was very unlikely. Sometimes they were the murderers.

The 25th Chronicle sees Michael finally getting the job as Chancellor (he had been Senior Proctor controlling the previous Chancellor for some while) and Bartholomew finally leaving Michaelhouse. Not before a rather drawn out search by the latter for a murderer (then murderers) of a variety of unappealing coves. The book could have been fifty pages shorter and thus being much improved. Too many false alleyways or red herrings, which necessitated Bartholomew repeatedly criss-crossing the town and rarely uncovering anything. He didn't finger the evil genius until right at the end. I am not surprised as it seemed beyond belief that the youngster, bad as he was, could have choreographed such manoeuvres. The body count was rather high, but so it is in many 'modern' crime stories.

Susanna has sensibly finished with Bartholomew and Michael but she still has the Thomas Chaloner Adventures on the go, only into his fourteenth spying service at the court of Charles II. Yes - I have all these too.