The Kittiwake's Nest

Oxford academic Patrick Grant sees a retired head-mistress fall to her death from the Acropolis, and when her closest friend dies in a fall down steps at the British Museum, he decides to investigate.

I wasn't that impressed by the detective, who is one of those people who seem to trip over corpses wherever they go.

Think of that quarter-deck. At the forward end, looking across the waist to the forecastle, there was only an open rail. That is where your Horatio stood. Think of him there, dressed impeccably, full uniform, cocked hat, silk stockings, buckled shoes, Immaculate. Unoccupied, fully aware of his danger, carnage all around him. Like a rock, Charles, like a rock. That is the way, that is the way forward, Horatio is your lifeline, stay with him, he will get you out and about. Join the Nelson Club, there must be one - in London there is a club for everything under the sun. I'll get my secretary to find the address.

As a child Charles Cleasby became interested in Lord Nelson, encouraged by having a schoolteacher who was a Nelson buff, but his interest faded during his teens. When he had a nervous breakdown at university and refused to leave his room at all, his psychiatrist suggested that he take up his hobby again, as a way of rekindling his interest in life, but unfortunately his hobby developed into an all-consuming interest, and Charles started to see himself as Nelson's other half.

He never went back to university or got a job, and at the age of fifty he is a virtual recluse living in the house he inherited from his father, and his only social life is attending the twice weekly meetings of the Nelson Club in Bloomsbury. He keeps a large collection of Nelson memorabilia in his basement, where he also re-enacts all of Nelson's battles on their anniversaries, even if that means getting up before dawn to start the battle on schedule, moving his model ships across the glass table in the basement at the exact time they did so in the real battle.

When he employs a secretary to come in twice a week to help him with the biography of Nelson that he is writing, he is perturbed by her wilfulness in seeing Nelson as a vain man, interested in money and honours, who cares nothing for the lives of his men, rather than as the patriotic hero revered by Charles as a bright angel. What makes things worse is that he has just reached a very difficult point of the book, when he has to decide how to approach the events in Naples in June 1799 which may not show Nelson in a good light at all. I seem to remember reading something else in which the exact meaning of the word embark is vital.