Cambridge Noir

In Cambridge, only the brave pass below open windows, especially during an exam term …

Standards were slipping. Here we were on the Feast of St Raymond, popularly known as Trench Coat Thursday, and not a Fedora in sight.

Eventually a Vice Chancellor with a sense of history has to ask the eternal question of university management. Who would my predecessors have killed by now?

While the exam results had been taken down outside the Senate House, the blood stains were proving harder to shift …

Once you’ve dipped a body in concrete, Cambridge offers a suprising number of places to conceal it.

The church looked to constitute about a quarter cathedral; which, of course, is also Cambridge slang for a £250 bribe.

In Cambridge, steeplechase normally refers to flight across a church roof. I’d like to claim pursuit by homicidal clergy was optional …

Webster once made a big deal about death having a lot of doors for men to take their exits, and most of them so curious they opened both ways. I was setting off for a College where E staircase alone would have blown old Webster’s eyebrows right off …

A storm was gathering over the darkened streets of Cambridge, and once again I suspected I would require more than an umbrella to weather it.

Traditionally, on the first sunny day of the Cambridge Spring, the boat clubs gather to erect a few whipping posts and sharpen flensing knives.

It’s a good morning in Cambridge when only lanterns are found hanging above the streets.

This was going to be tough. The Inter-Collegiate Assessment Board had tightened security quite a bit since the 2008 “enhanced examination techniques” scandal.

The only question, of course, in a murderous town like Cambridge is what they’re using as organic fertiliser …

My thoughts lay in the type of jumbled, half-ordered confusion normally found only in library bicycle racks.

I knocked at the Dean’s door with some trepidation. This was not an invitation to cake and tea one could decline lightly.