June 2025

The Lost Language of Oysters is the upcoming novel in Alexander’s Professor Dr Von Igelfeld series. Below is an extract from the beginning of the novel, setting the scene for simmering tensions between von Igelfeld and his colleague at the University of Regensburg, Professor Unterholzer.

The Lost Language of Oysters

Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was mid-afternoon on a sultry June day, and he could easily have dropped off to sleep, had it not been for the fact that he was at a conference, sitting in the front row, and there were seventy other people in the room. Of these seventy, at least forty, perhaps more, would have been delighted to see his head beginning to nod. They would not have been charitable in any reporting of the event, unlike those of us who sympathise with those who doze off at odd times. Quite the opposite, in fact: they would have taken considerable pleasure in telling others that they had seen Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult.) Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, author of that towering work of Romance linguistics, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, falling asleep in the middle of a conference.
‘Right there,’ they might say. ‘Before our eyes. Falling asleep in the middle of the conference session.’
‘You would have thought,’ they might continue, ‘that somebody in his position would be more careful.’ And that statement would be accompanied by a knowing look, tinged with reproach, implying that von Igelfeld was perhaps beginning to slip a bit. After all, Portuguese Irregular Verbs has been published over a decade ago, and nobody could be expected to remain at the top of his game indefinitely…
That is what such people might have been expected to say, and their motivation, in almost every case, would have been pure jealousy. For von Igelfeld, on his academic mountain, on the Parnassus that was Portuguese Irregular Verbs, has many detractors those tents were pitched on the less fortunate plains below. None of these lesser professors, of course, had ever published anything approaching Portuguese Irregular Verbs in its scope and magisterial authority. It was true that some of them had produced monographs that had attracted a certain degree of attention, but none of them, von Igelfeld was confident, would have written anything with quite as many pages as his groundbreaking disquisition on irregular verbs. Of course, the length of the book was no guarantee of quality, anything but, in fact – many second-rate books were excessively prolix, sometimes prolonging the discussion of a minor point for twenty or thirty pages, without counting a lengthy coda of obscure and long-winded footnotes. In the case of Portuguese Irregular Verbs, however, every page earned its keep, as von Igelfeld put it, and an Occam’s razor approach to footnotes had reduced the length of that particular section of the book to a mere one hundred pages.
But it was not only the status of Portuguese Irregular Verbs that triggered jealousy among other scholars: it was the fact that von Igelfeld’s Institute in Regensburg was better funded than any other linguistics department in Germany. This was the result of a historical error made by the University as long ago as 1973, when a misplaced decimal point had resulted in the Institute of Romance Philology receiving ten times more funding than it needed. Attempts by the University to rectify the mistake the following year were met with outrage from the wider academic staff, who realised that if one department could be singled out for budgetary cuts, then none of the rest of them was safe. The cause had even attracted the attention of a faction of the Baader-Meinhoff gang, a radical terrorist group of the time, that saw in the threatened reduction of the Institute’s funding a chance to pick a fight with the University, which they considered to be a pillar of the system they were seeking to overthrow. The Baader-Meinhoff warning that they would be prepared to blow up the entire University if the proposed cut in funding went ahead had been taken seriously. The University was keen to protect its staff and was in no mood for a showdown with a group that had a vivid track record of kidnapping and assassination. The whole matter was quietly dropped; the Institute continued to benefit from its over-generous funding, allowing it to offer high salaries and better conditions than any of its competitors at other German universities. It was this comfortable financial situation than enabled von Igelfeld to occupy a chair with no teaching responsibilities whatsoever, and with almost limitless funds for conference attendance.
That particular benefit had been ruthlessly exploited by one of von Igelfeld’s close colleagues, Professor Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Unterholzer, who was the author of what von Igelfeld considered to be a minor work on the subjunctive mood, never lost an opportunity to attend a conference. Not only that, but he was also known for his willingness to chair sessions, in which he had a tendency to speak at great length about himself before cutting off other speakers on the grounds of limited time. Unterholzer also insisted on travelling first-class to any conference, usually taking one of the Institute’s assistants (travelling second-class, admittedly) to help him with his luggage. This practice was very much disapproved of by Professor Dr Dr Florianus Prinzel, whose modest and unassuming nature precluded such profligacy. ‘Our dear colleague, Professor Dr Unterholzer, is certainly not prepared to rough it,’ Prinzel commented to von Igelfeld.  ‘I see that he is booked into the Walforf Astoria for that conference in New York next month.’
Von Igelfeld shook his head in a disapproving manner. ‘There are some who have to make up for what they otherwise lack,’ he observed. ‘Dear Professor Dr Unterholzer is perhaps one such. We must be patient, though, with the weaker brethren, and their little failings.’

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The Lost Language of Oysters is available to pre-order now (publishing Feb 2026).