Andrew Barrow

Basil Peyton-Crumbe is a multi-millionaire landowner. An embattled man known to all, even his dogs, as ‘Banger’, he claims to have despatched at least 41,000 pheasants with the cheap old 12-bore he’s had since childhood. Shooting pheasants, he believes, is ‘an exquisite accomplishment’, as complex as writing a sonata or designing a cathedral. On the first page of this bloodthirsty novel, Banger’s trusty old gun explodes in his hands and blows half his head off. No one seems particularly upset. Not his half-brother William, who succeeds to the estate, and certainly not his Springer Spaniel, Jam.

At first glance, these books have an awful lot in common. Indeed, all three might have been produced by the same self-centred chatterbox, so similar is the slightly manic, self-consciously jokey, self-interrupting, lower-middle class vernacular in which they are all written. Fluent, full of ideas and, above all, conversational. All three authors treat their imaginary readers like members of a live audience. ‘Sorry, I’m rambling,’ confesses Jo Brand at one point. ‘Tear this bit out and use the pages to make paper aeroplanes or something,’ advises Jack Dee at another trick moment.

This brilliantly murky novel describes a nightmarish ten days in the life of a famous, highly successful but deeply dysfunctional family. The action takes place in prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes — and the House of Commons. Involved in this brutal tale are three tall, handsome, Old Etonian brothers — a Labour MP, a stinking rich criminal prosecutor and a rather wayward journalist — and their more downmarket adopted brother who’s become a Catholic priest and a diminutive sister called Portia, devoted to helping poor, uneducated Mexican peasants. The parents are out of the picture but very much in the story. The father, a lawyer raised to the peerage, has lately become a victim of Alzheimer’s.

During the post-war years, the author of this book was a much-talked about variety artiste, famous for breaking ten-inch nails, bending steel bars in her teeth and throwing Bob Hope over her shoulder. Billed as the Mighty Mannequin, Joan Rhodes enhanced her appeal by looking and dressing as if she had stepped out of the chorus line — at the height of her fame she had a 20-inch waist — and accompanying her feats of strength with plaintive little odes delivered in a girlish voice which apparently made her sound ‘like the bleedin’ Queen’.

Listing page content here This heavy, clanking, finely wrought adventure story is set mainly on or around York station in the winter of 1906 and washed down with handfuls of soot, clinker, ‘bacon and eggs and related matters’ and, I would estimate,  some 90 pints of Smith’s ale. The Lost Luggage Porter is Andrew Martin’s third novel about a train-spotterish railwayman called Jim Stringer, whom we first met in The Necropolis Railway and then saw struggling on the footplate in The Blackpool Flyer.

This is a thoroughly rotten book, a squelchingly well-researched period piece with sex, lust, over-ripeness and what one character calls the ‘odour’ of the scholar permeating every paragraph. It is also, let me quickly add, a remarkable tour de force, jam-packed with poetry, verbal fireworks, vitality and charm. Set during the overheated summer of 1784 and composed entirely of letters and diary extracts, A Factory of Cunning describes a visit to London by a foreign lady calling herself Mrs Fox. On the first page, this tricky character asks one of her correspondents, ‘Does all mankind wish me harm?’ but rapidly reveals herself to be hell-bent on corrupting innocent lives and seeking out people, as a form of sport, to kill or ruin.

This beguiling little book, nostalgically illustrated with faded family snapshots, describes the long and arduous life of a tortoise who died earlier this year at Powderham Castle near Exeter, aged 160. According to the blurb, Timothy survived six monarchs, two world wars and many generations of the family who looked after him. The story that unfolds is one of the most deceptively sentimental and carefully contrived I have ever read. It chiefly concerns not so much the tortoise as the ups and downs of the Earls of Devon, family name Courtenay, and their successful fight to keep Powderham Castle and its estate going through thick and thin. The reptile quietly residing all along in the castle’s rose garden is sometimes dragged into the story by the skin of its teeth.

This provocative, titillating and seductive novel is about upper-class affectations and ‘the mystery of unearned greatness’. It focuses on a network of rich, blue-blooded and slightly dim grandees which apparently stretches ‘far beyond national boundaries’. Snobs describes in forensic detail a world where duchesses are ‘taken in’ to dinner and desperate, social-climbing women feel deeply ashamed that they never ‘came out’. Can such people still exist? Can this fascinating story really be set in modern times, or at least in the late 1990s? A few contemporary references to Volvo estates and Partridge’s upmarket food stores are not enough to convince me.

Behind many great stars of stage and screen lurks a mysterious, sometimes sinister manager figure, minder or mastermind, whose precise role in their protégé’s life, especially in terms of creative input, may be hard to define. Richard Burton’s career was kick-started by the Welsh schoolmaster whose surname he took. Tommy Cooper’s affairs were handled for years by a character called Miff Ferrie who lived in Eaton Square. My fragile friend Michael Barrymore was frogmarched to precarious stardom by his amazing wife Cheryl. And even poor little Tom Thumb had the great P. T. Barnum to give him stature.

This queer, black novel is mainly concerned with the special funeral train service which once plied between Waterloo Station and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Its hero is an intensely innocent young railway apprentice, who dreams of becoming an engine driver 'of the better sort', and its villains - or so it seems - are a bunch of hard-bitten, foul-mouthed colleagues who are apparently up to something dark and dirty. Set during the closing months of 1903, this book is, as its publishers rightly claim, 'fabulously rich in atmosphere and period detail', but this backdrop material is so skilfully woven into the story that it comes across as playfully invented rather than laboriously researched.