Hoyle the Writer

Whodunnit?

During the 1990s Hoyle wrote a series of 36 short detective novels. The main character is Magnus Warboys, Carrington Professor of Catastrophe Theory at the University of Cambridge. Fluent in French and an Olympic-standard fencer, Warboys is a glamorous, dare-devil hero who investigates all manner of strange goings-on in the University and beyond. The stories are set in Cambridge in the 1990s and feature several fictional colleges including St Stephen’s, Erasmus, St Mark’s, St Thomas’ and St Simon’s.

In Death by Cricket in Oxford an exploding cricket ball wreaks havoc at a match between the Oxford and Cambridge Seniors at the Parks Cricket Ground in Oxford. Warboys, the Cambridge fast bowler, who was fielding at square-leg at the time of the explosion, works out, with a Detective Chief Inspector of the Oxford police force, how the explosive ball was ingeniously substituted for the normal ball. Together with his mysterious Finnish girlfriend, Iloui Tuominen, he uncovers a plot with its origins in the 1978 fall of the Shah of Iran.

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