Kate’s 2¢: “Fethering mysteries: Books 17 20” by Simon Brett

“Fethering mysteries: Books 17 20” by Simon Brett

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

The Killing in the Café,

–The reason I’m socially excluded is is pure old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

–Village gossip had never let respect for accuracy interrupt its flow.

–The body found on the beach appeared to be a Fethering floater.

–Amateur sleuths Jude and Carol eventually solve the mystery

   There were several red herrings in this story and the ending was unsettling.

The Liar in the Library,

–There is a nasty sub-stratum of racism, very close  to the genteele surface of the English country village.

–As an author, one is frequently in the God-like position  of deciding whether a character could live or die.  That is a responsibility one should take seriously.

–Amateur sleuth Jude is the primary suspect as the murderer, so her cohort, Carol, takes the primary lead  (or so she thinks) on finding the true murderer.

–There are some people you cannot help   .

–Sometimes, the crime novelist is tempted to test his narrative arc.

   The pace of this tory sure picked up when the back story began to emerge.

The Killer in the Choir,

–It is the Vicar’s job to mend rifts among his flock.

–Jude withholds information from her neighbor and amateur sleuth, Carol.

–Having suffered during a deeply unhappy marriage, she may have been making progress in rebuilding the social side of her life, but, she  still had difficulties in more intimate situations.

–They had lived all their lives, just the two of them, in a capsule of togetherness.

Guilt at the Garage

–Carol’s car is vandalized and a threatening note has been left in her kitchen.

–Sometimes in life, you get into a positions where there’s nothing that isn’t going to hurt someone.

–Exposing the charletons must be done

   I like knowing the two amateur sleuths and their small town. Then, each mystery unfolds in a linear arc. simonbrett.comActions for this site

Welcome to my official website. I am Simon Brett, the writer responsible for the Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter, Fethering and Blotto & Twinks series of crime novels.

   I was born into the lower reaches of the middle class on the 28th October 1945.

The venue was a nursing home in Worcester Park, Surrey. My parents, older brother and sister lived in Ewell, where I spent the next four years of my life. After a year with my grandparents in Ealing we then moved to Banstead (also in Surrey), a quintessential outer suburb not far from Epsom Racecourse, and stayed there. My father worked as a Chartered Surveyor for a firm most of whose work seemed to involve sewerage systems. He was with the same company, quaintly called Lemon and Blizzard, from the age of nineteen till he was sixty–seven, when he still did a couple of days a week for them.

I was educated at the Beacon School in Banstead (where my mother taught the reception class), and then a boy’s prep school called Homefield in Sutton. Rather than staying there to do Common Entrance, I took the Eleven Plus and was fortunate enough to win a Direct Grant (i.e. free) place at Dulwich College. There I specialised in History and got very involved in drama, playing Richard II, Prospero and, at a younger age, Titania in school plays.

In 1963 I passed History A–Level and that autumn took the Oxford entrance examination. I was awarded a Major Scholarship in History at Wadham College, and left Dulwich the following term to teach in a primary school. As a result, I only have one A–Level (though I’ve never been asked about it in any job application).

After two terms at Oxford I changed subjects from History to English, in which I got a First Class Honours degree in 1967. I spent almost all of my spare time doing theatre. For the Oxford University Dramatic Society, of which I was President in my final year, I played Edgar in King Lear, Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (‘callow and splenetic’ – Oxford Times). Contemporary luminaries of the university theatre scene included David Wood, Diana Quick, Nigel Rees, John Sergeant, Bruce Alexander, Nigel Williams and Alison Skilbeck.

I was also very involved in writing, directing and performing in revues. In 1966 and 1967 I was part of the Oxford late–night show on the Fringe of the Edinburgh Festival. The second year’s show, which I directed, raised sufficient interest for me to be offered a year’s contract as a Trainee Light Entertainment Producer for BBC Radio.

But that wasn’t my first job out of university. For seven weeks in 1967 I was employed as Father Christmas in the department store Shinners of Sutton. Just twenty–two and master of my own grotto! (It does look great on a cv too.)

Radio Light Entertainment at the time was a lively and varied department. I found myself producing music programmes (Late Night Extra), sketch shows (David Hatch and I started Week Ending in 1970, then The News Huddlines and The Burkiss Way), panel games (Just A Minute, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue), anthologies (Frank Muir Goes Into…, for which I wrote over a hundred scripts) and light drama (Lord Peter Wimsey). It was after working on the last–named that I started thinking seriously about crime fiction. I had by then written three – or possibly four – very properly unpublished novels, but working with actors on Lord Peter Wimsey gave me the idea of creating an actor detective. My manuscript was picked up off the slush pile at Victor Gollancz and the first Charles Paris novel, Cast, In Order Of Disappearance, was published in 1975.

There were two significant high–spots of my career in radio. One was guiding through the BBC machinery and producing the pilot episode of The Hitch–Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams in 1977. It was practically the last programme I recorded as a BBC comedy producer, because I was shortly to take up a similar role in London Weekend Television, and so Geoffrey Perkins went on to produce the rest of the Hitch–Hiker series.

The other excellent thing about BBC Radio was that it was there I met my wife, Lucy. She worked as a Studio Manager on a lot of my programmes, and we got married in Leeds in 1971.We subsequently had three adorable children, Sophie (1974), Alastair (1977) and Jack (1981). Sophie and her husband Jeremy have now given us two equally adorable grandchildren, Jake (2005) and Isla (2007). Alastair is married to the lovely Sarah and the adorable Wilbur was born at the end of May 2013. His sister Daisy arrived in March 2016. Jack is married to the equally lovely Lien and the adorable Max was born in September 2012, followed by the adorable Alicia in April 2016. How well organised of all my children to produce a boy followed by a girl. (Too many ‘adorable’s and ‘lovely’s perhaps… but they are.)

My time at London Weekend was not one of the high–spots of my career. After the bustle of radio, where I’d be working on half a dozen projects at any given time, I found the television process painfully slow. Amongst programmes I produced there were Maggie And Her (Irene Handl and Julia McKenzie), End Of Part One (written by David Renwick and Andrew Marshall) and, showing my radio roots, a television version of The Glums from Take It From Here. I think the main problem with my time as a television producer was that the writing was starting to take off and I spent most of the two years I was at London Weekend poring over a calculator, trying to work out whether I could afford to write full time.

(There’s an interesting point – well, it interests me – about the correlation between my employment and my facial hair. Soon after I joined the BBC I grew a beard, because I wanted to look older than my years. When I went to London Weekend, I seemed to be surrounded by pushy whizz–kids, so I shaved it off to look younger. Now when I look at photographs of myself with a beard, I cannot imagine why I sported it for so long. I’ve come to the conclusion that beards are like baseball caps – almost everyone who wears one would look better without it. At the time of my wedding, incidentally, my facial hair was reduced to a moustache, which made me look like an unctuous Italian waiter trying to force parmesan on one of his diners.)

I did finally make the break from London Weekend in 1979 and since then I have never had another day–job. Series of crime novels (Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter, Fethering and Blotto & Twinks) have been the continuity of my output, though I have also written one–offs like Dead Romantic, Singled Out and A Shock To The System, the last of which became a feature film starring Michael Caine.

I was very honoured to be awarded an OBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours ‘for services to literature’. Round the same time I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, thus providing me with some more letters to put after my name.

 From NLS/BARD/LOC         :

Fethering mysteries. Books 17-20 DB102181

Brett, Simon. Reading time: 28 hours, 8 minutes.

Read by Abigail Maupin.

Mystery and Detective Stories

Four mysteries, written between 2015 and 2020, featuring amateur British sleuth duo Carole and Jude. Includes The Killing in the Café, The Liar in the Library, The Killer in the Choir, and Guilt at the Garage. Some strong language. 2020.

Downloaded: July 3, 2021

Download Fethering mysteries. Books 17-20