Mon 21 Feb 2011
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: SIMON BRETT – A Comedian Dies.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[5] Comments
by Newell Dunlap & Bill Pronzini
SIMON BRETT – A Comedian Dies. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1979. Reprint paperbacks include: Berkley, 1980; Dell, 1986; Warner, 1990. UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1979.
Making good use of his background in radio and television, and of his interest in the theater, Simon Brett has created one of the most likable characters among recent series sleuths: Charles Paris, a middle-aged and not very successful radio actor whose vices include drink, women, and stumbling into murder cases that he is forced to solve.
The Paris novels are distinguished by solid plotting, well-drawn entertainment business backgrounds, and a nice interweaving of humor that often borders on spoof.
One of the first things the reader of A Comedian Dies, which has a modem British vaudeville background, will notice is that there is a gag at the beginning of each chapter. A gag such as:
Comic: Typical inefficiency.
Having discovered this, most readers will no doubt be tempted to flip through the book and read all of the gags immediately, like gulping popcorn. You should refrain from doing this, however. Taken one at a time, every dozen pages or so, each will provoke an amused and tolerant groan; taken all at once, they are sort of like listening to a Bob Hope monologue and may therefore cause severe trauma, if not a sudden desire to take up golf or vote Republican.
On the other hand, the novel itself is worth reading all at once. Paris and his estranged wife, Frances, trying once again to mend their marriage, are attending a vaudeville show at the Winter Gardens in Hunstanton, a small English seacoast town. But the show the star performer, comedian Bill Peaky, puts on is not at all what Paris anticipated: Peaky is electrocuted on stage while clutching his electric guitar and microphone.
At the inquest, the coroner decides the death was accidental, due to faulty wiring, but Paris has his doubts and starts an investigation of his own. Suspects abound, owing to the fact that Peaky was not a very popular fellow. Paris is something of a bumbler, which only enhances his appeal; and he does get to the bottom of things eventually, in spite of the eighteen gags Brett throws at him along the way.
Comic: Ah well, that’s because bullets don’t drink.
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
February 21st, 2011 at 9:27 pm
I read the first seven or so Charles Paris books before apparently becoming tired of them. I can’t think of any other reason.
It was me, that is, not Simon Brett.
The last Paris book was Dead Room Farce (1997) — there were seventeen in all — then perhaps Brett ran out of things to say about Paris, for he began a run of 12 books (so far) in his Fethering series, of which I have read none.
Fethering, one source says, is “a self-contained retirement settlement on England’s southern coast,” which does not prevent it from being a place where a good many murders occur.
Overlapping these two series were six Mrs. Pargeter novels, published between 1986 and 1998.
Simon Brett writes books faster than I can read them, no doubt about it.
February 22nd, 2011 at 1:50 am
Much as I enjoyed the Paris series Brett eventually outpaced me or I overloaded. It happens with some prolific writers — at least to me. The same thing happened with me in regards to Robert Parker and Spenser.
It’s no fall off on the author’s part, but at some point you start to curtail all your other reading just trying to keep up.
I know I should go back and read a few of the Paris books I missed (and the Spenser’s), but I know I probably won’t.
For those of us who read a good deal by many writers in different genres and sub genres sometimes one writer will just overwhelm our capacity to keep up. When I start buying entries in a series as a duty rather than because I am looking forward to them I know I am near that point.
February 22nd, 2011 at 11:21 am
In Robert Parker’s case, they kept reissuing his books with different covers. I gave up trying to figure out which were the books I had not read and which were the books I had. So I stopped buying them.
I still read them at work (I was the book buyer for a retail store) and found them rushed. I wished he had taken more time to make each book better than churn them out at the speed of a pulp writer.
As for Brett, never made it through one of his. I hate writers who use real people as fictional characters and did not enjoy the book enough to forgive him (the book had Groucho Marx in it).
February 24th, 2011 at 4:35 am
My experience with later Parker’s was I noticed a tendency for the books to be full of action, incident, and bright passages of dialogue, but relatively little plot — at least in the Spenser series. There were so many elements that had to be crowded into every Spenser novels — Spenser and violence, Spenser and Hawk, Spenser and Hawk and violence, Spenser and some innocent and violence, Spenser and Susan Silverman, Spenser and Susan and violence … that sometimes I felt I got to the end of the book without it ever actually starting. At least for me the books began to feel like novel length vignettes set in Spenser’s world.
When you reach the end of a mystery and you not only aren’t sure who done it, but what, if anything, was done there is a tendency to question the whole purpose of reading the book in the first place. I still enjoyed Parker’s many skills, but for me at least he seemed to be employing them without actually going anywhere.
That wasn’t as true of the other two series he wrote or the westerns he was doing, but in the Spenser series it too often felt as if he was marking time, keeping up just enough of the old style to keep hard core fans and editors happy, but no longer possessing the passionate belief in the character and his milieu that marked the best of the series.
February 25th, 2011 at 1:16 am
Parker’s hardcore fans stuck with him, no matter what he wrote — and there were more of them than us, speaking of general hardcore mystery fans — a smaller crowd, no matter how you look at it. If you were to illustrate with a Venn diagram, you’d have two circles, one smaller than the other, but with a certain amount of overlap — mystery fans who stayed with Parker all the way, unlike you and I, David, who sort of abandoned him. In my case not because of any particular dislike, but by simply going on to other authors.
To make money at writing crime fiction, like Parker did, I assume, and fellows like Lee Child and James Patterson, you’ve got to appeal outside of the smaller circle. Whether that requires settling for a lower standard, I wouldn’t want to say, but at least it’s a different standard.