New Zealand Listener - October 13, 2018

52 LISTENER OCTOBER 13 2018

BOOKS&CULTURE

by PETER CALDER

T

he protean English broadcaster,

columnist and sportswriter Lynne

Truss is best known internationally

for Eats, Shoots & Leaves, her 2003

lament for the decline in standards

of punctuation. It was a delight to pedants

everywhere, including this one, not least

because they enjoyed spotting its several

dozen errors and internal contradictions:

the first appears in the subtitle, The Zero

Tolerance Guide to Punctuation, a phrase

that, as she makes clear at some length in

the text, requires a hyphen between “zero”

and “tolerance”, because it is a noun

phrase being used as an attributive adjec-

tive (as in “stainless-steel saucepan”).

A reviewer of this playful, not to say

arch, comic crime thriller, billed as “the

first ... in a charming and witty new ...

series” will struggle to find punctuation

errors (though Truss often muffs the

sequence of tenses), but their absence is

amply compensated for by the profusion

of clumsy and infelicitous writing: an

actor who retires is described as “hanging

up his tights”; a positive pregnancy test is

called a “whisper of ovary”.

Truss also has a jarring habit of stepping

outside her own narrative frame – the

book is set in 1957 – to offer a present-

day perspective. At one point, she notes

that modern academic accounts of the

1950s overlook the fact that variety-show

audiences drank a lot: the writer’s duty to

show rather than tell is too often ignored.

Simultaneously pillaging and sneering

at the fancifulness of Graham Greene’s

Brighton Rock, Truss’ crime caper concerns

the murder, mid-performance in the

stalls, of a noted critic who, word has it,

is bent on a poisonous review. When the

supposed killer – the playwright/director

• is himself bloodily slaughtered, the plot
  thickens enough to excite an ambitious
  new constable, who is a thorn in the side
  of his complacent local colleagues.
  Truss’ high concept belongs to a
  grand English tradition that goes back to
  Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and

GK Chesterton, but her forced style is

closer to Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books.

Her Brighton is a world in which even

hardened criminals use curse words such

as “ruddy” and “flaming heck” and the

shaggy-dog plot becomes so contorted,

the reader would benefit from a flow

chart. It is all much

harder work than it

ought to be, and far

from being a distinc-

tive addition to a

genre that now seems

rather passé. l

A SHOT IN THE DARK,

by Lynne Truss (Raven,

$32.99)

Firing blind

A high-concept comic

crime thriller aims

to update the grand

English tradition but

hits wide of the mark.

Even hardened criminals

use curse words such as

“ruddy” and “flaming

heck” and the shaggy-

dog plot becomes so

contorted, the reader

would benefit from a

flow chart.

GETTY IMAGES; ALAMY

Lynne Truss: clumsy writing.