It was thanks to Vijay Fafat's mathematical fiction detective work that I learned of the existence of this old mystery novel in which the plot revolves around a purported proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. And, thanks to the magic of I.L.L., a copy of the original 1948 publication showed up in my office mailbox after traveling halfway around the world from Australia! So, I now can say quite a bit more about it and put it in context within the larger body of mathematical fiction.

The first murder victim is the chair of the mathematics department at a British university. He is widely loved by the public to whom he is a popularizer of math and science (somewhat like Bill Nye today). But, he is despised by his wife and the faculty in his department, who know him to be a rather pathetic human being. Therefore, there is no shortage of suspects who would have wanted to see him dead when his body is discovered in his office, having been slain by a blow with a gyroscope. Asmun Hill, an amateur detective whose previous exploits I am presuming were already known to readers, happens to have been on campus that day. His academic background is particularly helpful to the police when a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is found hidden in the victim's desk.

Many of the characters in the book are mathematicians. Not the police, Hill, nor the victim's wife, but almost everyone else we meet is. It is therefore interesting to me to consider the portrayal of the field of mathematics and prejudices about mathematicians that may be revealed. For instance, at one point Asmun Hill addresses the reason that he does not initially suspect that any of the faculty in the mathematics department are responsible for their chair's death:

Perhaps that viewpoint is not entirely complimentary, but I prefer it to the suggestion in The Bishop Murder Case that mathematicians have psychopathic tendencies which predispose them to murder.

I was particularly interested in the portrayal of two female mathematicians which I see as stereotype-breaking. "Miss Carter", was fired from the math department shortly before the murder (making her a suspect as well). The reason given for her being let go was that, even though she was very good at math research, she was too shy to be a good lecturer. Later, when she is interviewed by the police, they are impressed that she is actually much more confident and outspoken than he "mousy" appearance suggests. The other female mathematician character is a graduate student from India with whom the murder victim flirted. A lot of attention was paid to her beauty (and to the color of her skin, discussed in ways which would not be considered appropriate today), but it was also made clear that she was a talented mathematician.

I think it may be that the author was intentionally trying to dispel stereotypes of mathematicians. I know almost nothing about the author and so this may be off-the-mark, but I consider the way that the prejudices of the police are explicitly disproven to be evidence to support this hypothesis. They express surprise at the realization that there is such a thing as math research, and also that the mathematics department is so filled with emotion, romance, ambition and other strong emotions (when they had imagined mathematicians as cold and emotionally flat). Perhaps I am projecting, but to me it seems as if the author has given the police these opinions that one might expect many readers to also share so that the story could serve as a form of propaganda to correct these misconceptions.

The book sometimes gets math confused with physics. For example, the gyroscope used to kill the chair is described as a "mathematical implement" used in "mathematical demonstrations". And, the descriptions of the chair's public lectures suggest they are about quantum physics rather than mathematics. Indeed, physicists use a lot of mathematics, mathematicians are often inspired by physics, and there is a large gray area in which it would be hard to distinguish one from the other. Still, Fermat's Last Theorem plays a major role in this book, and almost all of the characters are faculty in the Department of Mathematics. So, even if the description of the gyroscope leaves one wondering whether the author is confusing physics and math, there is enough math to justify viewing this as a work of mathematical fiction.

For much of the book, one is led to believe that the author of the proof was the mathematics department's associate chair. The idea is that the chair was intending to steal the proof from this other professor working under him and publish it as his own. (In this context, there is some discussion of the controversy involving Newton and Leibniz over who should receive credit for the invention of calculus.)

However, it turns out that the associate chair was not the author of the proof after all. The proof was actually discovered by the blackmailer. He did not create the proof. Rather, he ran across it in an old book and recognized it for what it was: the proof that Fermat himself had discovered but which had been lost for centuries. Since he was more interested in money than fame, he decided to monetize the discovery by selling it to the chair who would be able to publish it under his own name and take credit for being the author of the proof. But, the associate chair kills the chair to steal the proof for himself. He also ends up killing the bookseller to keep him from revealing its true origins.

Overall, not a bad murder mystery and also decent as a work of mathematical fiction, especially in regards to its portrayal of female mathematicians in 1948.