Books for Christmas – Bernard Knight

And now for the Christmas pick of Bernard Knight, author of the Crowner John series, the latest being The Noble outlaw:

Murdering Americans – Ruth Dudley Edwards

"This was another delightful satire using the crime genre to carry the author’s outrageously iconoclastic themes. In this book, she assaults ‘political correctness’, specifically that as inflicted upon the American educational system, but with plenty of digs and parallels with Britain.

As usual, her heroine is Baroness ‘Jack’ Troutbeck, the eccentric Mistress of a Cambridge college, who is offered a ‘freebie’ semester in a small-town university in Indiana, who are under the misapprehension that she is a radical socialist like the majority of those ‘loonie-lefts’ who now run many American seats of so-called learning – to quote, ‘academia in the United States is now dominated by knee-jerk liberalism, contempt for Western civilisation and the institutionalisation of insane political correctness’.

She is soon appalled by what is going on there, as the college administration has been hi-jacked by a woman Principal and her sinister enforcer, whom she suspects have murdered the previous sensible Provost. A student group is protesting at their denial of a proper education, in favour of ‘dumbing-down’, heavily censored teaching and positive discrimination carried to such extraordinary lengths that a young white male is looked upon as a pariah. Jack Troutbeck rallies the forces of dissent, even to the extent of toting a pistol; more deaths occur, but of course right triumphs in the end. Though a rumbustious and often farcical tale, there is no doubt that Ruth Dudley Edwards is using the story to grind a damned great axe and I loved every paragraph, as it accorded with my own view of this awful Western World."