In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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A murder story in which the action takes place over four days in June. A pretty woman Tory MP is murdered in the Palace of Westminster during an all-night sitting. Who has done the deeds? This is a humorous mystery puzzle, with many accurate asides on the foibles of politicians.

Review: I first became aware of the Conservative MP Julian Critchley about twenty-five years ago when he used to regularly participate in Radio 4’s Today programme as one of the ‘three wise men’. Alongside Austin Mitchell (Labour MP for Grimsby) and Charles Kennedy (Liberal Democrat member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber) he offered oblique, and often very amusing, comments on recent political news. The crux of their contribution was that all three of them were firmly fixed on their respective party’s back bench, with limited expectation of career progression. This gave them greater scope for scurrilous comment, being unshackled by the tenet of shared responsibility that prevailed for the front bench representatives. This formation was terminally curtailed by Charles Kennedy’s subsequent election as leader of the Liberal Democrat party and Austin Mitchell’s brief tenure in a junior ministerial post in Tony Blair’s first administration. Critchley himself remained untainted by public office, though he was subsequently knighted for his contribution to public service.

I had enjoyed his volume of memoirs, ‘A Bag of Boiled Sweets’, though I had been struck by its strong undercurrent of bitterness. Since his preparatory school days he had been a close friend of Michael (now Lord Heseltine) and seemed almost to resent much of Heseltine’s marked success in both politics and business. The book did, however, retain the mischievous humour so prevalent in his radio work with Mitchell and Kennedy. I was, therefore, looking forward to this novel, but found myself woefully disappointed. The basic plot surrounds the murder within the confines of the Palace of Westminster of Emma Kerr, an up and coming young Tory MP who had traded on her physical attractions to secure precocious advancement within the party. Critchley does give some interesting portrayals of political types, and offers an early critique of the expenses mechanism which would, fifteen years after the novel’s publication, cause such devastating difficulty for MPs across the political spectrum. He also includes cameo appearances from some fifty or sixty genuine MPs, which lends a great verisimilitude to the background and plot. One would think from this that the auguries were all very promising. Sadly Critchley is lamentably deficient when it comes to plot. The novel leaps around with no coherence, and features far too many characters, most of whom blur into an inchoate mass of platitude and cliché. This book could so easily have been very entertaining but actually became rather a burden.

Sir Julian Michael Gordon Critchley (8 December 1930 – 9 September 2000) was a British journalist, author and Conservative Party politician. He was the member of parliament for Rochester and Chatham from 1959 to 1964 and Aldershot from 1970 to 1997.

Sir Julian Critchley, who has died of cancer aged 69, was a long-standing Conservative back bench MP who never obtained political office or exercised much formal influence. But he did win much acclaim, and had a public reputation that was far greater than was accorded to most ministers, because of his writing; it was witty and urbane, gently satirising Westminster from an avowed liberal standpoint. He maintained this gift even after he had been physically disabled by the recurrence of teenage polio. His early political life, at Shrewsbury school and at Pembroke College, Oxford, partnered that of Michael Heseltine. They were close friends and Critchley was the best man at Heseltine’s wedding. Even in those days, Critchley showed clear traces of robust independence and a commitment to Tory liberalism.