Gavin Scott, The Age of Treachery

Gavin Scott, The Age of Treachery
Titan Books
© 2016 Gavin Scott
ISBN978-1-78329-7-801


This is the first of three (so far) mysteries in which the main character is Duncan Forrester, set beginning in the immediate aftermath of World War II.  Forrester was a Fellow of Barnard College (which is a fictional institution) at Oxford University before the war, and he returns there at the war’s end.  During the war, he was a commando, participating in a number of operations (some of which are mentioned in the book.  He still has some flashbacks to those experiences.


He is one of a small number of Members of the College invited to attend a dinner in honor of Arne Haraldson, a Professor of Norse literature at the University of Oslo, and to a reading after of a reading of one of the Norse sagas (which was reconstructed by the Master of Barnard College, Michael Winters), along with a small group of other members of the faculty.  Before the reading, at dinner at the College’s “High Table,” one of the faculty, David Lyall manages to offend Haraldson and get into a scuffle with Gordon Clark (who is Forrester’s closest friend).  Haraldson, for obvious reasons, is invited to (and, in fact, participates in) the reading.


Lyall, as it happens, is having an affair with Clark's wife, which, while not directly the cause of the scuffle, is clearly an outgrowth of it.  Neither Lyall nor Clark attend the reading.

As the reading reaches its climax, it is interrupted by the sound of breaking glass, and by Winters’ wife (who looked out the window in response to the breaking glass, tells her husband (and the assembled readers and audience) that something has happened…”Below a  broken window on the second floor a body lay spread-eagled in the snow.”


The body is Lyall’s.  And the police are summoned.  And they discover, in fairly short order that Lyall and Clark had that altercation at dinner and that Clark’s wife is having an affair with Lyall.  Clark has no alibi—he was alone at the time of Lyall’s death.  Unsurprisingly, Clark is arrested.  Also, probably unsurprisingly, he asks Forrester to help him by calling on his solicitor; Forrester decides, based so on his knowledge of Clark and Clark’s avowal if innocence, to investigate as well.

Forrester’s investigation results in his enlisting the assistance of an undergraduate (who, because of the war, is beginning his college career at the age of 25), consulting with various people (in the War Office, as a start), and travelling to Berlin and subsequently to Oslo in search of evidence that will exonerate Clark by discovering the real killer.  Assuming Clark, is in fact, innocent.


On the whole, the story is a strong one.  Scott does a good (if occasionally heavy-handed) job of making us aware of conditions in England, Germany, and Norway in the immediate post-war days.  And, while I found the denouement to be a bit weak (the guilty party confesses, although Forrester’s evidence is not particularly strong).  He also handles very well the political ramifications of the Soviet Union’s growing presence and relative strength in Germany and in eastern Europe generally.


Scott’s style, on the other hand, caused me a few problems.  None of these are terribly significant, but they annoyed me.  For example, he has Forrester slipping and sliding—metaphorically—too much.  Forrester slipped around the corner, he slid into the shadows, and so on.  As another example, he has Forrester fall asleep instantly (more than once) when he lies down (some people may do that, but no one I’ve ever known).  Another thing I found somewhat annoying was the use of the names of actual people—Kenneth Tynan, Ian Fleming, J.R.R. Tolkien (at least there’s some excuse for this, as Tolkien knew as much as anyone about Norse sagas), C.S. Lewis, and one or two more.  This may have been done as verisimilitude, but none of these “real” people had anything like a significant role, so it seemed more like name-dropping than anything else.

These issues are minor, however, and the book is well worth reading.  I have, and will be reading the second (The Age of Olympus) and third (The Age of Exodus—no wondering what that book’s going to be about, s there?) books soon.