Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy. I run this review in conjunction with the Can’t-Wait Wednesday meme that is currently running at Wishful Endings. Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them.
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.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Constable Twitten series is that it is an adaption of Truss’s comedic Inspector Steine radio series. The Inspector Steine series is set in Brighton in the 1950s and follows the misadventures of Brighton police force members Inspector Steine, Sergeant Brunswick and Constable Twitten. Brighton in both the radio and book series is filled with as much crime as the infamous film Brighton Rock portrays; however, this goes completely unnoticed by the head of Brighton’s police force, Inspector Steine, who is convinced that his famous role in allowing a massacre of rival gangs to occur has wiped out all crime in the city. Since the massacre, his biggest problem has been the badgering of his second-in-command, Sergeant Brunswick who is obsessed with going undercover despite the fact every criminal in the city knows who he is and can easily see through his disguises, and usually ends up shooting him. What Steine and Brunswick don’t realise is that their amiable cockney charlady, Mrs Groynes, is actually a criminal mastermind who runs all the crime in the city while using her position within the station to keep the police as ineffectual as possible (not that it requires much work).
However, the entire status quo of the Brighton police is upset when the young and keen Constable Twitten is assigned to them. Twitten is an unrepentant know-it-all who is determined to sniff out criminal activity in the city, despite Steine’s insistence that none exists. Twitten is quickly able to uncover Mrs Groynes’s true identity as Brighton’s criminal mastermind (to be honest she isn’t working that hard to hide it). Unfortunately for Twitten, neither Steine nor Brunswick will believe him, especially after Mrs Groynes convinces them that Twitten’s claims of her criminal actions are the result of an unfortunate hypnosis accident. Thus, Twitten must try to uncover Mrs Groynes while also dealing with the other myriad crimes being committed in Brighton.
I only just found out that there was an upcoming sequel to A Shot in the Dark and I immediately started writing a Waiting on Wednesday for it. When I randomly received A Shot in the Dark last year from the publisher, I had not heard about the Inspector Stein radio series before, and only decided to make time to read because I was in the mood for a historical crime book. I am extremely glad that I decided to check out A Shot in the Dark in the end, as I found that it contained an incredibly funny story that got an easy five stars from me, and I couldn’t stop laughing as I read it. Since then, my future wife (and, more importantly, the person who edits all my posts), Alex, introduced me to the radio series, which I absolutely loved and has deepened my appreciation of the humour and storylines within the Constable Twitten novels. It was also intriguing to see how Truss utilised the various storylines from the radio show in the book, as A Shot in the Dark featured plot points from several different episodes, in addition to some new content, to create a fresh iteration of the story.
As a result, I am very much looking forward to the second book in the series, The Man That Got Away. I should note that this book is actually already out in some formats as of 11 July 2019. However, as the physical copies of the book will not be available in Australia until mid-September, I decided to feature it in a Waiting on Wednesday post. I have no doubt that The Man That Got Away is going to be another humorous read, especially as it has an intriguing plot synopsis.
Goodreads Synopsis:
1957: In the beach town of Brighton, music is playing and guests are sunning themselves, when a young man is found dead, dripping blood, in a deck chair.
Constable Twitten of the Brighton Police Force has a hunch that the fiendish murder may be connected to a notorious nightspot, but his captain and his colleagues are—as ever—busy with other more important issues. Inspector Steine is being conned into paying for the honour of being featured at the Museum of Wax, and Sergeant Brunswick is trying (and failing) to get the attention of the distraught Brighton Belles who found the body. As the case twists and turns, Constable Twitten must find the murderer and convince his colleagues that there’s an evil mastermind behind Brighton’s climbing crime rate.
Our incomparable team of detectives are back for another outing in the second instalment of Lynne Truss’s joyfully quirky crime series.
This sounds like it is going to be another fantastically fun story, and I cannot wait to check it out. I will be extremely curious to see which Inspector Steine episodes The Man That Got Away will draw inspiration from, and I look forward to enjoying a good laugh through the course of this book.
The Unseen Library 