Dead Early

My first review, from that doyen of crime critics, Mike Ripley:

The Chandler Protocol

I have always been guided by the sentiment of Raymond Chandler as expressed in a letter to Jamie Hamilton, his British publisher in 1951:

Publishers may apologize to authors and to

other publishers and to other writers. But with

agents it is enough that you let them live.

I am, however, prepared to make an exception for veteran agent Peter Buckman who has returned to the novel after a brief hiatus as a publisher, a non-fiction author and a television scriptwriter, with the first in a projected series of cosy crime stories by-lined the Pumpernickel Mysteries.

Pumpernickel is a black poodle belonging to Soho solicitor Leo Wengrowski, still active (in more ways than one) and working beyond retirement age, and so doesn’t get too many of the really good lines handed out by Buckman. In particular, I like the world view of Dennis Arbuthnot the self-styled ‘world’s most fearless reporter’ who, when told of the numerous additives listed on the label of the wine he is quaffing, he retorts: Which is precisely why I don’t read them. There is enough bad fiction in the world without adding wine labels.

Dead Early [Word of Mouth Books], which is great fun, begins with a suspicious suicide pact and a fatal shooting, all of which involves members of a local Golf Club. As Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs might have said: so, no real people then?

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