Welcome to the third of my 'Reading the Rainbow' posts, in which I take the books I received in my 2023 book advent - each cover representing a different colour - and review them for you!
March is GREY and the book is Coffin, Scarcely Used by Colin Watson.
Read on to find out more...
Blurb: In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia.
But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows had led the late and rather unlamented Mr Gwill to commit suicide by electrocution. ('Power without responsibility', murmurs Purbright.)
How were the dead men connected, both to each other and to a small but select band of other town worthies? Purbright becomes intrigued by a stream of advertisements Gwill was putting in the Citizen, for some very oddly named antique items…
Witty and a little wicked, Colin Watson's tales offer a mordantly entertaining cast of characters and laugh-out-loud wordplay.
Review: This old-fashioned British mystery still has the power to entertain modern readers, even if some of the references and attitudes are dated and writing styles have changed since this book was first released.
For one thing, there is far more dialogue and less description of setting and characters than you find in murder mysteries today so it took a little while to adjust to the style the author was using for the story.
For another, the humour was plentiful but not really my style, but while I didn't find it particularly amusing, it did strike a nice, light, easily-readable tone. And actually, once I had adjusted my expectations I found the book wasn't anywhere near as dated as I had expected in style, tone or content after all!
There is plenty of vice in the quiet little community of Flaxborough, once the police start really digging around in secrets of various prominent citizens, and I enjoyed how character-focused their investigation was - solving mysteries through interviews and human knowledge rather than an abundance of physical clues.
I particularly enjoyed the pairing of main character DI Purbright with the rather innocent and unworldly Detective Sergeant Love and while I did manage to guess the solution to the mystery before the reveal, I still enjoyed getting there with Purbright and his team.
Coffin, Scarcely Used is a gentle snarky mystery, ideal for a quick cosy-police procedural read - something of a cross between Heartbeat and The Bill, but with added humour. And there are twelve books in the series, so it's perfect for binge-reading fans!
Detective Sergeant Sidney Love was gloomily trudging around in the grass, followed closely by a confused-looking uniformed constable. As Purbright joined them, he saw a small wooden stake driven into the ground a few feet from the base of the power supply mast.
Love eyed him without enthusiasm. 'We've taken measurements, sir.'
Purbright gazed up at the pylon. 'What an odd perch for a newspaper proprietor,' he murmured. 'Power without responsibility, I suppose.'
'Is there anything else we can do?' Love asked. 'It's jolly cold here.'
'Have you measured the height of the cable arm?'
'What, climbed up, do you mean, sir?' The sergeant looked incredulously at the steel network.
'Maybe it's pointless,' Purbright conceded. 'Call it twenty-five feet, shall we? No, twenty-seven - that'll sound as if we really know.' He walked slowly round the stake, scuffing the grass here and there with his shoe. 'Nothing round here, Sid?'
'What had you in mind, sir?'
Purbright looked at Love from under his brows. 'Clues,' he said. 'Cloth fibres. Nail parings. Dust from a hunch-backed grocer's shop. You know.'
'Wilkinson here found a mushroom.'
'In December?'
'It wasn't up to much. I advised him to throw it away.'
- Colin Watson, Coffin, Scarcely Used
About the author:
John Colin Watson (1 February 1920 – 18 January 1983) was a British writer of detective fiction and the creator of characters such as Inspector Purbright and Lucilla Teatime. Born in Croydon, Surrey, he is best remembered for the twelve Flaxborough novels, typified by their comic and dry wit and set in a fictional small town in England which is closely based on Boston, Lincolnshire. He worked as a journalist in Lincolnshire and the characters in his books are said to be highly recognisable caricatures of people he encountered in his work.
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