In my recent piece about the new reissue of Tracey Thorn’s ‘A Distant Shore’ record I made reference to attending a 40 year high school reunion. If you have never been to a high school reunion then I have to say that, in my limited experience, they are fascinating and enormously enjoyable experiences. That said, I also understand something of the feelings of the apparent multitudes who believe there could be no worse fate imaginable. I felt much the same in the immediate post-teenage period, when the very idea of attending a ten year reunion would have filled me with dread, had I even known that one was being planned. I’ve since learned that it did indeed take place and I have seen a photograph from the local newspaper that proves it. There are no reports in that paper of any ‘Gross Pointe Blank’ style reconciliations of former high school sweethearts, and as far as I know no-one used a fountain pen as a deadly weapon, but you never know… Regardless, had I been in the proximity of that particular event then I suspect that I would have shrivelled and died. Doubtless everyone would have been sweet and kind, but ten years is not long enough to dissipate the delectable poisons of one’s teenage years, not for some of us anyway. Some of us would have still been happy to nurture those feelings of rejection, to scratch those mental scars of sorrow and the anger of the self-perceived years of failure. Fuel for Art or whatever it was we needed to write in our diaries.

I have been to three reunions since, however, and each time those anxieties and deeply rooted antagonisms of teenage and post-teenage years have been fainter and fainter, to the point of now being barely distinguishable. The natural divisions of social connection still exist of course, but the boundaries are blurred and no-one much cares. The ties that bind us are frayed and may even be largely imagined but are no less valuable for all that. I suspect that many of us feel warmth despite ourselves, or at least despite our younger selves. There are echoes of pain, certainly, but they seem to belong to someone else. Ghosts of our pasts drift beside us but I am not sure we recognise each other. This is not an unpleasant realisation, or at least it isn’t for me.

And did anyone feel the urge to murder one of our former classmates? Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I should say the answer to that question would be (just about) a resounding ‘no’. Then again, we didn’t have a ‘Rhino’ in our midst. And whilst I dare say that at least one of the former rugby playing chaps in my school might have carried the same nickname once upon a time, it would be safe to say that none of them were ever quite as thoroughly unpleasant as Colonel Bernard Garstang V.C., D.S.O., M.C., the titular character in Clifford Witting’s 1950 novel ‘A Bullet For Rhino’. It is tempting to suggest that one reason none of our rugby boys reached such storied heights/despicable depths would be to do with the fact that our school was a local authority comprehensive, unlike the fee-paying fictional Mereworth School attended by both Rhino and, fortunately enough as it turns out for the local police force (and more importantly – faint spoiler alert – for the murderer), Inspector Harry Charlton. I say it’s tempting to use this distinction between school types because that distinction is a proxy for social and economic divisions, and whilst admittedly a shade clumsy and stereotypical, one has to admit that stereotypes often hold true. A myriad of mediated depictions of fee-paying boarding schools down the decades can’t be entirely wide of the mark, after all, can they?

One suspects then that there are barely veiled truths in Clifford Witting’s account of the Mereworth School reunion, in which former students return to relive their youthful exploits on the cricket field and in which too the Younger Generations rater bizarrely run around with autograph books, seeking the signatures of Old Boys, of whom Rhino’s is by far the most prized. It’s all rather peculiar to a 21st Century eye, or at least to a 21st Century ex-state comprehensive schoolboy’s, and that is part of the appeal. It’s the same thing that makes Country House Murder Mysteries and Blyton’s Famous Five or Saville’s Lone Pine adventures so enjoyable, in that the context of the stories is at least a degree or two alien. Part of this distance is historical of course, but a larger part is, I think, to do with class, or at least one’s personal backdrop of economic and cultural capital. It is entirely possible that there is an audience for such stories where this feeling of alienation is almost entirely absent, and that where many of us feel distance from our experiences this audience instead sees familiarity and comfort. It’s a rum old world, after all.

Regardless, with Clifford Witting being the excellent writer he is, the sense of place, character and period is elegantly captured and acts as an excellent backdrop for an entertainingly difficult mystery in which, as one might expect from the title, Colonel Garstang gets his comeuppance courtesy of, erm, a bullet. Witting being Witting, and Inspector Charlton being Harry Charlton, the book never falls into the trap of being overly complicated for its own sake (a trap which, in translation, means a writer trying to show how educated and clever they see themselves as being) or of outstaying its welcome. It clips along nicely and characters are marvellously drawn, with multiple possible motives for wanting Colonel Garstang disposed of dropped tantalisingly into our laps. Indeed, it is the characters and their potential motives that lend the book its almost comedic appeal, for their is a degree of gaudiness to them that is for the most part lacking in Witting’s other books. This isn’t a criticism either way, for the previous Harry Charlton books are masterful pieces of restrained detective fiction writing that tread the golden line of mystery narrative with aplomb, and here the rather more exaggerated application feels entirely appropriate to the setting. One gets the feeling that Witting may be using this particular novel as a means of expunging some of those ghosts of his own school days, and the physical similarities between Mereworth and Witting’s actual alma mater of Eltham College (as pointed out by Curtis Evans in his excellent introduction to this Galileo reissue) certainly lend this argument credence. Indeed, just two years after the original publication of ‘A Bullet For Rhino’, Witting published a history of Eltham School titled ‘The Glory Of The Sons’, and as Evans points out, in the novel “a pompous character paying tribute to Rhino in a speech emphatically pronounces Gloria Filiorum Patres – ‘the fathers are the glory of the sons’”. This theme of father/son relationships is certainly one that threads throughout the novel, and Evans suggests too that there is perhaps an echo of Witting’s own relationship with his son Jeremy who tragically died at the age of five a year before the novel’s publication.

There are, too, perhaps more than in any of Witting’s previous novels, many references to contemporaneous global events that certainly root the book in time and place but sadly too lend it a shroud of relevance in the 21st Century. Colonial Imperialism takes a bow (it is easy to picture Rhino and his acolytes as proto-Farage following xenophobes) as does the seemingly eternal conflict between Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs. Such references are as much to suggest multiple motives for the murder of Rhino as anything else, but they certainly perform the admirable purpose of reminding modern readers that there is little new under the sun. Indeed it is ultimately the age-old questions of honour and justice that lastingly permeate Witting’s novel, with the issue of personal versus professional duty being the one that Harry Charlton eventually has to grapple with. These are tricky tropes to handle, and plenty of better known authors of detective fiction have fumbled them or laid things on so thickly that one’s eyes inevitably roll with the crass obviousness of it all. In Witting’s hands however everything is handled deftly. A delicate nod here. A cough and a nudge there. An eloquent turn of phrase and an elegantly humble reveal. As Evans notes, “Bafflin’ fellah, that Witting”. And classy. So, so classy.