Book Review

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The Man That Got Away, by Lynne Truss

I wouldn’t go quite as far as the Daily Mail reviewer of this book, that it is a “farce”, knockabout or otherwise, but there are some amusingly implausible elements in it. This is by no means her first fiction book; she is best known as the author of a best-selling book on punctuation, would you believe [in these less grammatically aware days], called Eats, Shoots & Leaves; but it is the second outing for her police series featuring a character whose name is surely chosen to refute nominative determinism: Detective Constable Twitten. This book was published in 2019, by Raven Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, paperback ISBN 978-1-4088-9057-8; a further story, Murder By Milk Bottle, has also been published. Aside from the [for me] uncomfortable title of this book*, which could be the author’s little joke, given that popular songs of the 1950s figure in it, I would have expected this to be a well-constructed & articulate story [notwithstanding the “farce” element], which it mostly is [although like 99.9% of the British-writing world, she commences sentences with And & But, but I’ll leave that there], and that is a pleasant change.

Another literary convention of the police procedural which Truss stands on its head is the one which dictates the middle-ranking officers are the cleverest, whereas the top brass are hidebound and often corrupt, and the novices are too green to be of much help. Here, Constable Twitten is not long out of police training at Hendon and only a couple of months into his sojourn at Brighton police, but he is by far the cleverest officer there [although obviously well-bred, evidenced by his habit of using “bally” as an expletive]; his immediate superior, Sergeant Brunswick is well-meaning but slow and somewhat naïve; Inspector Steine [my own preference here is that the final vowel should be pronounced, as with Porsche, given that the word clearly has German origin] is next to useless, and a chauvinist at that, but it is 1957, so not unexpected. The cleverest person in the station is a civilian, the charlady Mrs. Groynes, who might give the convincing impression [to those of a credulous disposition] of being a cheerful & regularly foul-mouthed cockney, but Twitten has every reason to believe that she is a devious criminal mastermind [not mistressmind, then?] who is in the ideal position to have her finger on the pulse, and her ear to the ground, when it comes to access to often confidential information which could be crucial to planning & perpetrating heinous crimes.

Unfortunately, despite Mrs. Groynes being well aware of Twitten’s suspicions, neither of his superiors is prepared to believe him [considering him obviously deluded by a stage hypnotism act], so he has to act alone most of the time. This story is somewhat convoluted, involving confidence tricksters, murder, an old mansion house, behind which [occupying the site of its former orchard & ornamental garden] are a nightclub run by a criminal family, and an adjacent waxworks, in the style of [but nowhere near as good as] Madam Tussaud’s in London, so there are plenty of different characters to remember, but it is an enjoyable romp, even if it isn’t as knowingly [or even archly] funny as Terry Pratchett’s books, for me anyway. All the threads in the narrative are neatly tied up at the end, so that the next story [and there are a couple of chapters as a taster at the end of the version of the book which I read] can follow straight on from this one, without it being a sequel, as such. I’m not sure if this decade is the most popular for books set in Brighton, but there are quite a few of them; Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is actually mentioned as context for one element in this story. I would be happy to read the other two books in this series, anyway.

*This clunky habit would appear to be virtually ubiquitous, so I must be one of the few abstainers who prefer to refer to people as who, not that: I blame my grammar school education. I shall continue to be a voice in the wilderness with this little peccadillo [with no prophetic aspirations, I hasten to add].