Forgotten Book - Reduction of Staff

Francis John Whaley (1897-1977) was an obscure Golden Age detective novelist whose books have long since vanished from sight, with the exception of his second, Trouble at College, which was republished by Ostara in its series of Cambridge mystery reprints some years back. Whaley was a Cambridge man himself: he studied history at Corpus Christi College, although his academic career was interrupted by the war, in which he earned a Military Cross for his bravery before being invalided out of the army.

After finally graduating, Whaley became a schoolmaster, spending several years at St Bees in Cumberland, where he met his future wife (her first husband named him in a divorce petition), whom he married in 1938. Before that, he had in 1936 published his detective fiction debut, a novel pleasingly entitled Reduction of Staff. On the principle of 'write what you know', it is set in public school and narrated by a Cambridge man who also writes fiction. 

Judged by the standards of Golden Age mysteries, Reduction of Staff strikes me as a pleasing effort. The narrative style is readable, and as a result, although I guessed the culprit (not difficult) and saw through the red herring involved in the first murder, this didn't spoil the book for me. The precise means by which the crime was committed eluded me, as it usually does, because the 'howdunit' element of books of this kind appeals to me much less than 'whodunit' and 'whydunit'.

As regards motive, there are some relevant facts which are not disclosed to the reader (I also wondered if the motive drew some slight inspiration from events in Whaley's private life), but overall I rather liked this novel. Whaley wrote nine mysteries in all, but by the time his short career came to an end in 1941 he had turned to espionage rather than detection. After the Second World War he taught in Sussex, but he seems to have lost interest in writing, even though he lived into the era of Colin Dexter and Inspector Morse. His obscurity is unsurprising, but this book at least is worth reading.