Ruth Dudley Edwards Books In Order

Corridors of Death

Battered to death with a piece of abstract sculpture titled ‘Reconciliation, ‘ Whitehall departmental head Sir Nicholas Clark is claimed by his colleagues to have been a fine and respected public servant cut off in his prime. Bewildered by the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Whitehall, Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Jim Milton recognizes a potential ally in Clark’s young Private Secretary, Robert Amiss. Milton soon learns from Amiss how Whitehall works: that it can be Machiavellian and potentially homicidal, that Sir Nicholas was obnoxious and widely loathed, that he had spent the weeks before his murder upsetting and antagonizing family and associates, and that his last morning on earth had been spent gleefully observing the success of his plan to embarrass his minister and his department publicly. And they still need to discover who wielded the blunt instrument. This is the first of Ruth Dudley Edwards’ witty, iconoclastic but warm hearted satires about the British Establishment. Dr. Ruth Dudley Edwards was born and brought up in Dublin, Ireland. An historian and prize winning biographer, she uses her knowledge of the British establishment in her satirical crime novels. She has three times been short listed for awards from the Crime Writers’ Association. www. ruthdudleyedwards. com

The Saint Valentine’s Day Murders

Life in a dismal bureaucratic cul de sac is not what the irreverent, high flying Robert Amiss expects when the British civil service lends him for a year to the British Conservation Corporation. Morale in this all male environment is not improved by the arrival of Melissa, a radical feminist lesbian separatist. It is only Amiss sense of humor and the joys of visiting his new love Rachel that keep him sane.

The English School of Murder

Can anyone British teach English as a foreign language? It’s murder…
. ‘Adroit, inspiring, and written with a rare lightness of touch,’ The London Times Literary Supplement ‘Believable plotting, a memorable cast of characters, and three count ’em three beguiling sleuths in a warm, gently raunchy, crisp, and literate caper.’ Kirkus Reviews ‘Amiss is bumblingly appealing and howlingly funny.’ The Chicago Sun Times He’s also a civil servant down on his luck and out of a job and thus ripe for a post as a police spy at the Knightsbridge School. Robert’s cover will be to teach English as a foreign language. His mission soon becomes, well, murder…
. ‘Quirky, highly intelligent, and thoroughly entertaining…
.’ The Washington Post Book World

Clubbed to Death

Robert Amiss is persuaded by his friend Detective Sergeant Pooley of the CID to take a job as a waiter in ffeatherstonehaugh’s pronounced Fanshaw s, a gentlemen s club in St James . The club secretary has allegedly jumped to his death from the gallery of this imposing building. Against most of the evidence, Pooley believes he was murdered.
Amiss finds himself in a bizarre caricature of a club, run by and for debauched geriatrics, with skeletons rattling in every cupboard. Why are there so few members? How are they financed? Will Amiss keep his job despite the enmity of the ferocious, snuff covered Colonel Fagg?

Matricide at St. Martha’s

St. Martha’s College, Cambridge, had been staggering along on a shoestring for decades. Then alumna Alice Toon leaves her old school a huge fortune. The dons immediately fall to fighting over the spoils. The Virgins, led by Dame Maud, believe the bequests should be spent on scholarships. The Dykes fewer in number but better streetfighters want to raise a center of Gender and Ethnic Studies. The Old Women mostly men dream of fine vintages to be laid down in a decent new wine cellar. Impasse! They’ve reckoned without the Bursar, Jack Troutbeck. She elects to infiltrate her own agent, Robert Amiss, a former civil servant with a talent for sorting things out. No sooner does he arrive on the scene where the Virgins are getting the upper hand than Dame Maud is murdered, leading us into ‘An acidly funny romp…
Superbly bit*chy on the none too fragrant groves of academe.’ Mike Ripley, Daily Telegraph

Ten Lords A-Leaping

The House of Lords will never be the same again. Disinclined to watch her language or moderate her manners, Jack Troutbeck, assisted by her old friend Robert Amiss, plots vigorously with others to scupper an anti hunting bill of which she violently disapproves. But she hadnt reckoned with the campaign of intimidation mounted by the animal activists and the attempt on the life of one of her allies, shortly followed by scenes of horrifying carnage amongst the peers…

Murder in a Cathedral

For many years Westonbury Cathedral has been dominated by a clique of High Church gays, so when Norman Cooper, an austere, intolerant, happy clappy evangelist, is appointed dean, there is shock, outrage and fear. David Elworthy, the gentle and politically innocent new bishop, is distraught at the prospect of warfare between the factions; contentious issues include the camp lady chapel and the gay memorial under construction in the deanery garden. Desperate for help, Elworthy cries on the shoulder of his old friend, the redoubtable Baroness Troutbeck, who forces her unofficial troubleshooter, Robert Amiss, to move into the bishop’s palace. Amiss, Troutbeck and the cat Plutarch address themselves in their various ways to the bishop’s problems, which very soon include a clerical corpse in the cathedral. Is it suicide? Or is it murder? And who is likely to be next?

Publish and be Murdered

British satirist Edwards continues to skewer the Establishment with the misadventures of civil servant Robert Amiss and the keen deductions of his sleuthing partner, the irrepressible, irreverent Baroness ‘Jack’ Troutbeck. Edwards, who’s filleted the Foreign Office, clobbered a Cambridge college, jeered at gentlemen in their clubs, and defrocked the clergy in past books, now pulverizes the world of magazine publishing where to uphold traditions runs fatal risks. Fictionalizing some of her own experiences as a journalist, Edwards creates the revered political rag The Wrangler, then sends in Amiss to sort out a hemorraghing cash flow, the succession plans of its most noble patron, a takeover bid from a strong minded Australian woman who has her eye on Jack, antiquated procedures that will have you rolling on the floor, preservation of a beautiful and historic London town house as company headquarters, and the inevitable little murder…
. Amiss, long mired in inertia, is encouraged to break out of the civil service mentality, sort out his own emotional life, and Get On With It. Truly a lovely, very funny, and provocative book that asks how we can balance what’s worth keeping from our past with where we need to go to survive the future?

The Anglo-Irish Murders

Foolishly, the British and Irish governments have chosen the tactless and impatient Baroness Troutbeck to chair a conference on Anglo Irish cultural sensitivities. She instantly press gangs Robert Amiss, her young friend and reluctant accomplice, into becoming conference organizer. When a delegate plummets off the battlements, no one not even the authorities can decide whether it was by accident or design. The next death poses the same problem and causes warring factions to accuse each other of murder even as the politicians are busily trying to brush everything under the carpet in the name of peace. The Anglo Irish Murders is Ruth’s ninth satirical crime novel.

Carnage on the Committee

As the judges of a literary prize chip away at the author list, someone else is chipping away at them…
. When the chairperson of the prestigious Knapper-Warburton Literary Prize dies in suspicious circumstances, Robert Amiss the token sane member of the judging panel wastes no time in summoning Baroness ‘Jack’ Troutbeck to step into the chair. Speculation that a killer may be targeting the judges worries the baroness not in the slightest – it’s the prospect of immersing herself in modern literature that fills her with dread. But noblesse must oblige, even when it means joining the ranks of the superciliati sitting in judgement of the literati. With the baroness at the helm, the judges resume the task of whittling away at the short-list. But the killer, too, has resumed work and is whittling away at the judges one by one.

Murdering Americans

‘Academia n.: a profession filled with bad food,

knee jerk liberalism, and murder…

Being a member of the House of Lords and Mistress of St Martha’s College in Cambridge might seem enough to keep anyone busy, but Baroness Jack Troutbeck likes new challenges. When a combination of weddings, work, and spookery deprives her of five of her closest allies, she leaps at an invitation to become a Distinguished Visiting Professor on an American campus.

With her head full of romantic fantasies inspired by 1950s Hollywood, and accompanied by Horace, her loquacious and disconcerting parrot, this intellectually rigorous right winger sets off from England blissfully unaware that academia in the United States is dominated by knee jerk liberalism, contempt for Western civilization, and the institutionalisation of a form of insane political correctness.

Will the bonne viveuse Baroness Troutbeck be able to cope with the culinary and vinous desert that is New Paddington, Indiana? Can this insensitive and tactless human battering ram defeat the thought police who run Freeman State University like a gulag? Does she believe the late Provost was murdered? If so, what should she do about it? And will she manage to persuade Robert Amiss who describes himself bitterly as Watson to her Holmes and Goodwin to her Nero Wolfe to abandon his honeymoon and fly to her side?

An Atlas of Irish History

Combining over 100 beautifully crafted maps, charts and graphs with a narrative packed with facts and information, An Atlas of Irish History provides coverage of the main political, military, economic, religious and social changes that have occurred in Ireland and among the Irish abroad over the past two millennia. Ruth Dudley Edwards and Bridget Hourican use the combination of thematic narrative and visual aids to examine and illustrate issues such as: the Viking invasions of Ireland the Irish in Britain pre and post famine agriculture population change twentieth century political affiliations. This third edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to include coverage of the many changes that have occurred in Ireland and among its people overseas. Taking into consideration the main issues that have developed since 1981, and adding a number of new maps and graphs, this new edition also includes an informative and detailed section on the troubles that have been a feature of Irish life since 1969. An Atlas of Irish History is an invaluable resource for students of Irish history and politics and the general reader alike.

The Pursuit of Reason

The story of a powerful newspaper, and of how quality journalism is made. Features a new foreword by Bill Emmott, editor of The Economist since 1993. DLC: Economist London, England History.

The Faithful Tribe

If there is any more controversial body of men than the Orange Order and, with the exception of Ruth Dudley Edwards, who has been admitted to an honorary position in her very own lodge, they are all men in the British Isles, it is hard to think who they might be. To most outsiders, grown men parading in bowler hats, white gloves, coloured sashes or collarettes, rolled umbrellas and banners showing scenes from the Old Testament or from a war that ended three centuries ago, are anachronistic, silly and provocative; to their enemies they are triumphalist bigots; to most of their members, the lodges’ parades are a commemoration of the courage of their forefathers, a proud declaration of their belief in civil and religious freedom, a demonstration of their Britishness, a chance to catch up with old friends and a jolly day out. Ruth Dudley Edwards is an unlikely Joan of Arc for the Orangemen, but that she is; a trusted and liked sympathizer, a woman, a Catholic from southern Ireland; one who sees them as possibly rather bumptious and certainly their own worst enemy, endlessly outpaced by the nimble Republicans in terms of PR which the Orangemen scorn to meddle with. She writes a fond but not uncritical, indeed rather exasperated, portrait of this strange tribe. The book intends to appeal not only to Orangemen and their sympathizers but to all those intrigued, horrified or scientifically interested in the clans.

Newspapermen

Opposites in most respects, Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil Harmsworth King were the ‘Barnum and Bailey’ of Fleet Street. Together they created the world’s biggest publishing empire, but their relationship foundered sensationally in 1968 when, as King tried to topple the Prime Minister, Cudlipp toppled King.

Aftermath

The Omagh bomb was the worst massacre in Northern Ireland’s modern history-yet from it came a most extraordinary tale of human resilience, as families of murdered people channeled their grief into action. As the bombers congratulated themselves on escaping justice, the families determined on a civil case against them and their organization. In Omagh, on Saturday, August 15, 1998, a massive bomb placed by the so-called Real IRA murdered five men, fourteen women, nine children, and a pair of unborn twins. Although the police believed they knew the identities of the killers, there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. Taking as their motto ‘For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing,’ families of ten of the dead decided to pursue these men through the civil courts, where the burden of proof is lower. This is the remarkable account of how these families-who had no knowledge of the law and no money, and included a cleaner, a mechanic, and a bookie-became internationally recognized, formidable campaigners and surmounted countless daunting obstacles to win a famous victory. How these mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers turned themselves into the scourge of the Real IRA is not just an astonishing story in itself. It is also a universal story of David challenging Goliath, as well as an inspiration to ordinary people anywhere devastated by terrorism.