Parting Breath: Catherine Aird

Parting Breath is an academic mystery set in Catherine Aird's fictional county of Calleshire, England; it features Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Berebury CID, and his assistant, Detective Constable Crosby.

The first sentence of the book is:

“The trouble with universities,” pronounced Professor Tomlin, “is the undergraduates.”

A protest by students is threatened because a student has been sent down (suspended or expelled?). The protesters plan to take over the Almstone Administration building for their sit-in.  After the sit-in begins, a dead body on the Quad of Tarsus College is reported. Inspector Sloan is assigned the case and DC Crosby accompanies him to the scene. The dead man is a student and his last words before dying were cryptic: "twenty six minutes". 

Soon after that, the porter locks down the administration building, so that the college and the police know where the students taking part in the sit-in are. This limits the suspects to students who ignored the strike or faculty or staff who were not locked into the building. But there are still a lot of suspects to sift through, and the investigation is very complex.

My thoughts:

• I enjoy the subtle humor in Catherine Aird's writing. There are jokes and sly comments about education and teaching undergraduates and getting along with the professors. 
• There is not a lot abut the personal lives of the policemen in the Sloan and Crosby series. But in this case, Inspector Sloan's wife is pregnant with their first child. Sloan assumes the child will be a boy, and mulls about which rugby position the child will play while he investigates. He also worries how it will be for a child to grow up as the child of a policeman. This shows the reader another side of Sloan. 
• The only negative element of this one is the complexity with so many characters it is hard to keep track. Other reviewers pointed out that the reader does not have enough information to solve the mystery; too many important clues show up too late. That did not matter to me. I enjoyed the academic setting and the characters very much.
• I have now read eight of the Sloan and Crosby series by Catherine Aird, and I can say that she is one of my favorite mystery writers. The first book of the series was published in 1966 and the 28th book in 2023. Some of the books in this series are more serious, although they all have elements of humor. I would put Henrietta Who? and A Late Phoenix in that category. The Stately Home Murder, on the other hand, is lighter and has some very funny moments.

I finished reading this book on January 1st. After I finished the book, I was doing some research and saw at Martin Edward's blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?, that Catherine Aird died on December 21, 2024 at age 94. See his remembrance post about her and his review of Parting Breath.

Curtis Evans of The Passing Tramp blog has also written a RIP post for Catherine Aird, with much information about her life and her writing.

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Publisher:   Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1978 (orig. pub. 1977)
Length:      186 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Inspector Sloan #7
Setting:      UK
Genre:       Police procedural
Source:      On my TBR shelves since 2010.