Charters and Caldecott

By Stella Bingham

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140089985
• ISBN13: 9780140089981
• Release Date: April 1986
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 1.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A Sticky Wicket

Charters and Caldicott are characters who originally appeared in Hitchcock's 1938 movie "The Lady Vanishes". They're a pair of genteel cricket-obsessed stiff-upper-lip English types who (at the time of this novel, based on the 1985 BBC miniseries) have retired from decades of overseas service as civil servants. Modern audiences probably would identify them as being gay lovers; certainly their lives revolve around one another. And cricket, of course. Their ordered existence is jarred one day when Caldicott finds a corpse in his flat and the duo find themselves thrust into a complicated murder mystery connected to the recent death of an old friend of theirs. This threatens to cut into their cricket schedule, and makes them unpopular at their stuffy club when the police keep barging in to interview them. Almost as a protective measure, the pair embark upon their own extremely vague investigation, which is mostly dictated by the timing of upcoming test matches. It's great fun to watch these two lifelong friends bumble their way earnestly (and irritably) through one baffling situation after another, constantly and rather huffily affronted by the sad degradation in manners, public accommodations, and society in general. The supporting characters (Grimes and Snow in particular) are well-drawn and the mystery itself is reasonably complex for such a short novel. I haven't actually seen the miniseries itself, but I found these characters so delightful in the Hitchcock flick (as did many others--Charters and Caldicott subsequently appeared in other unrelated movies and a radio series) that when I learned of this book, I had no choice but to pick it up. It's easily devoured on a lazy afternoon, and I would recommend that you read it at a cricket match--but that, of course, would be heresy.

Two Amicable Cricket Enthusiasts Are Distracted by Murder, Cryptic Messages, and Confused Identities

"Venables, the gold, and the murders were alike forgotten in their enjoyment of the only really important thing in life." The last sentence of this delightfully, comical murder mystery, Charters and Caldicott by Stella Bingham, does not reveal the solution, but it does succinctly define our two protagonists. Cricket is ever in their background, much like the sound of ocean waves. For no particular reason other than perhaps cricket is contagious, I have recently read several novels in which cricket plays a notable role. This is not my first reading of Charters and Caldicott, but it has been more than decade since I visited with these two cricket enthusiasts. I had forgotten how much I had enjoyed their company. (About two decades ago Charters and Caldicott were quite popular on PBS Mystery Theatre. These two characters first appeared in The Lady Vanishes, a film by Alfred Hitchcock.) Charters and Caldicott are two amicable, retired civil servants, the foreign office variety, that often argued about trivial elements of cricket history. Returning to Caldicott's flat to consult the 1979 volume of Wisden, they encounter the body of a dead girl, an apparent stranger, that subsequently proves to be, or at least appears to be, the daughter of a recently deceased old school chum, Jock Beevers. Charters and Caldicott successfully blends murder, suspense, and comedy. It was first published in 1985 in Great Britain by the BBC. My copy is a Penguin Book paperback (1986).