The Charles Paris Mysteries Books 1-6 - Simon Brett ****

By Brian Clegg

All too often, bargain basement murder mystery collections aren’t worth reading – but I was pleasantly surprised by this collection of six of Simon Brett’s Charles Paris books, dating back to the 1970s. One aspect of them is very much of its period, but they are really well written.

The amateur detective here is actor Charles Paris, who ages from 48 to 52 in the sequence, and is very much the acting equivalent of a mid-list author. Paris stumbles on various crimes and discovers he has enthusiasm and skill for getting the bottom of what has happened.

Although inevitably a series of murders solved by an amateur detective can feel an increasingly unlikely coincidence, Brett was able to avoid the format going stale as each book takes place in a different setting where the jobbing actor is involved. Whether he’s doing a voice-over for an advert, appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe, working in a musical heading for the West End or deep in the complexities of the BBC, this gives a freshness to each new story.

The aspect that does feel very much of the period is the way that Paris is regularly ending up in bed with women – often significantly younger than himself. You can see this as the kind of male wish-fulfilment writing that wasn’t uncommon back then, though Paris is genuinely aware of his own shortcomings in this respect. I was reminded somewhat of the way another disappeared writer of the period, Leslie Thomas, handled relationships.

It’s also worth mentioning that there was a very different attitude to alcohol consumption back then – Paris knocks back the whisky, while some of the other characters drink impossibly large amounts. Most shocking, perhaps, to modern eyes is that one such totally sozzled character then proceeds to drive home. But I suspect this is a more accurate portrayal of the period than that of a fifty-ish jobbing actor’s sex life.

If you can see these attitudes as very much of their time, and not expect every era to live by our current standards, these are excellent light murder mysteries, well worth reading, even if they weren’t so ludicrously cheap on Kindle. Many of them are also available as audio books, read by Bill Nighy.

You can buy The Charles Paris Mysteries on Kindle from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com 

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.