After his colleague Collingdale is killed hunting for a double agent selling British agricultural formulas to the Russians, Bognor is sent to replace him.
After surviving an attempt on his life, Bognor strikes up a friendship with an unusual monk called Xavier. Meanwhile, the local madman, Batty Tom informs him he might have seen the murderer.
Batty Tom turns up dead and so does a letter supposedly written by him in which he confesses to the murder of Collingdale. Bognor is not convinced especially after noticing suspicious goings-on in a mysterious locked room in the shed.
Even after solving the mysteries of the running monk and the locked backroom, Bognor's troubles are not over, especially after Batty Tom's father, Lord Collingwood, shows up and blows his cover.
Bognor is suspicious when he learns that one of the monastery's regular visitors, a schoolmaster called Jones, is actually the high-level civil servant Graymer Burton.
While nursing a nasty bruise, Bognor has to find his nightly assailant, find the clue in an ominous poem, and deal with a suspicious journalistic union official.
Bognor gets drunk at a political party event and meets up with an old Oxford pal. Meanwhile, Port gets into a fight with Gringe after Gringe accuses him of being a Russian spy.
Bognor follows Gringe to a rundown motel while Monica helps him solve the dying man's poetic clue with the help of a painting and the 1932 edition of the Wisden's Cricketer's Almanac.
A drunken debacle at a rugby game leads to Bognor having a revealing heart-to-heart with Eric Gringe. Meanwhile, Monica begins suspecting he's having an affair with Molly.
Flanders arrests his prime suspect, but Bognor, who's just survived a poisoning attempt, suspects the secret behind the killer's true identity may be in a secret merger agreement.
Chased out of the countryside by a grumpy police inspector, Bognor travels to Denmark where he hopes to find a missing dog who can identify a certain brand of chewing gum by taste alone.