A Shot in the Dark: A Twitten Mystery (A Constable Twitten Mystery)

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The August bank holiday is approaching and after two extremely high-profile murder cases, Constable Twitten is eagerly anticipating a quiet spell at work. But then they find the bodies – and the milk bottles. Meanwhile, there’s a plot afoot, a murder takes place, a prisoner who beheads police officers has escaped and is heading to Brighton, a local is missing, and many characters from the first three books return to tie up loose ends! I love that Ms. Truss has done that, as it really rewards faithful readers and I do hate when there are loose ends that just dangle. I suspect she does as well. This is the third Constable Twitten book. These are funny cop stories set in Brighton, England in the 1950s. Twitten is a very clever upper class twit who is obscessed with being a police detective. His fellow policemen resent his smarty pants stuff. I have to admit, with the Keystone Cops scenarios, the vaudeville theater show and general language, the period described felt more like the 1920s/1930s than 1957. Regardless, if a cozy mystery with a grand swath of farce is your cup of tea, then this book is definitely for you. The August bank holiday is approaching and after two extremely high-profile murder cases, Constable Twitten is eagerly anticipating a quiet spell at work. But then they find the bodies – and the milk bottles. Three seemingly unconnected victims have all been killed with the same highly unusual murder weapon.

When I saw this title, I immediately thought of the old copyeditor’s joke about the Judy Garland song of the same name: He must have been an English teacher. Since the author of this second Constable Twitten mystery is none other than the perpetrator of that definitive usage guide, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I eagerly awaited mention of the who/that conundrum. I liked the other book that I read out of context in the series but was not fascinated by it. When I saw this as an audiobook, I had to give it another shot. I was originally drawn in to this book by its strangely odd title and its comically mild but aesthetically pleasing cover. I read the blurb and didn’t know what to think...obviously I dived right in!

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But, you know, it was there. I had to buy it or I wouldn't have remembered it existed until the next time I was annoyed by a greengrocer's apostrophe and I suddenly went 'wait, Lynne Truss ... didn't she write another novel? What on earth was it?' This book brings together so many threads and characters from the earlier instalments in the series and mixes them all together into what initially looks like a complete and total mess but turns out to be quite an ingenious plot. We follow several crimes including a breakout from a mental hospital, the assault and robbery of a local photographer and the usual murder this time of a visiting American academic. Are all these things connected? The answer is yes and no which is fantastic. I really did some of the twists and turns coming. I got number 3 as an arc a little while ago, and I've just been granted number 4 as an arc also, but I wanted to read the missing ones first! This is number 2 in this fantastic series and it is as good as the others I've read. the concept—low key but near universal incompetence in a detective series is (from where I'm sitting) refreshing

As well as a lot of returning characters we get a few new ones including a formidable secretary for Inspector Stein after the events of the last book have not only made him famous but a target for various villains. Has Mrs Groynes finally met her match? I do feel that the author should have limited these references. For instance, at one point she has mentioned pathetic fallacy. And that is something about which I learnt in my Masters. Obviously a layman doesn’t know what pathetic fallacy means. So what’s the use of making such references when they are lost to the reader. Besides this I was disappointed by the ending to some extent. The way it all ended and the final revelation were not at par with the rest of the book. But I did enjoy the rest of the book. I would recommend this one for the sake of the “bally” quirky Constable Twitten. I was attracted to this book because it was described as the beginning of a new mystery series featuring a brilliant and driven police detective, Constable Twitten, and written by a New York Times best-selling author, Lynne Truss. That this first book featured a theatre critic who holds the keys to an unsolved murder made this doubly appealing to me. Yes, I said "fun reading this mystery". Because it's not your usual serious "bad guys do bad things and the good guys work hard to solve the mystery and put the bad guys away" type of mystery. As a matter of fact, it's a bit hard to decide who to root for here. And the end doesn't have the usual unambiguous resolution of most crime stories. Not only does this book hit my funny bone right away, it also features a more complex, well balanced plot, and more character development. Until now, I had assumed no real character development was being attempted, because it’s satire, satire, satire, but now, it appears one can do both, and Truss does both bally splendidly.Brighton on the south coast of England is the location for ‘A Shot in the Dark’ and it begins with the re-telling of the infamous Middle Street Massacre of 1951, which brought instant fame and adulation to the newly appointed Inspector Steine (pronounced Steen). Steine announced his arrival in town that year with the proclamation that visitors could “Come here to have fun, enjoy yourselves; get drunk; throw up; copulate under our stately piers like beasts of the field if you must; but don’t commit crime matey, not on my patch” The setting is Brighton, 1957. A bumbling Police Inspector is still basking in his presumed glory days of 1951 regarding an event which in his mind, eliminated all organized crime in the community. He just wants everyone to get along and peaceably go about their business. Of course, that's the perfect environment for covert organized crime. Enter newly minted policeman, Officer Twitten. He's bright, eager and cannot seem to avoid trouncing on the corns of his superiors. Murders are most foul and there's at least two yet to be solved, much to the Inspector Steine's chagrin.

I also thought that the book was trying to be a little too "P G Woodhouse", and felt that this also didn't help the overall experience. Truss has a lot of fun at the expense of conceited but idiotic policemen, pretentious and narcissistic theatre folk and so on, and I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot. However, it did begin to pall a bit; the plot moves slowly and rather predictably and the comedy is so broad-brush that it lost its appeal rather. Inspector Steine's colossal idiocy and vanity became just annoying and the rest of the developments weren't funny enough to maintain the book. I know that it is intentionally absurdly pantomimic and a parody of old-fashioned police dramas, but even Lynn Truss couldn't keep it going for me. These books are very, very English and I think you may need to be above a certain age and born in the UK to really appreciate all of the references and witticisms. However there is still lots of fun to be had by any reader as Twitten continues to try and convince everyone that Mrs Groynes, the police station charlady, is actually a master criminal. Set in Britain, it could almost be a noir mystery given some of the dialogue, although there were plenty of corny characters that would have no place with the jaded cast of a true old time detective novel. There’s also the minor fact that the book is clearly meant to be laugh-out-loud funny, which it is. It’s a comedic mystery. Despite this being the fourth in the series it does standalone well, as the previous events are explained at the beginning.

In the second instalment of Lynne Truss's joyfully quirky crime series, our trio of detectives must investigate the murder of a hapless romantic; an aristocratic con man on the prowl; and a dodgy Brighton nightspot...

I always seem to have this trouble with Truss's novels. Her writing is excellent, but her sense of humour just doesn't quite align with mine. Her main comedy trope is extreme and eccentric characters. And I just don't find that sort of thing funny. For my taste, if you want to be funny, you have to be funny, not just set up a row of grotesques, bump them into each other and expect us to laugh. Her style and humour can feel a bit like a Punch and Judy show in places ... appropriately enough for the setting, in this case. For this Waiting on Wednesday I will be looking at a book that I have no doubt will be one of the funniest novels of this year, The Man That Got Away, by Lynne Truss. The Man That Got Away is the second book in the Constable Twitten series, which follows on from last year’s comedic tour-de-force, A Shot in the Dark.THE ACCLAIMED MURDER MYSTERY FROM SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR, PERFECT FOR FANS OF RICHARD OSMAN There is no doubt that A Shot in the Dark is a clever novel with a great sense of the absurd so I have awarded it 3* for these merits as I personally didn't enjoy it. I found the arch tone grating and slightly condescending and the humour was wasted on me as I didn't find it funny. The whole idea of an extremely stupid policeman, Inspector Steyne, landing on his feet at every turn is, as I said, clever but distinctly unappealing to me. Weedy Petey” is murdered and a bumbling group of keystone cops nearly prevents the only two people in the constabulary with brains from figuring out the whole mess. This book definitely has one of the more unusual titles of any book reviewed in recent memory. It definitely gives a lot of information right off the bat and lets you know precisely the common thread of the book.