Rating: 5/5
Review:
A real treat
Bump In the Night is the second book of the Flaxborough
series (after Coffin, Scarcely Used) and if anything I enjoyed it even more
than the first. This time, a series of
small nocturnal explosions destroys a drinking fountain, a statue and the like
in Chalmsbury, and eventually Inspector Purbright is called in from
neighbouring Flaxborough to investigate as matters become more serious.
It's a decent plot which maintains interest (although I'd
spotted the culprit well before Purbright did), but the chief pleasures of
Colin Watson's books are his wonderfully dry, witty style and his brilliant
portraits of the characters which inhabit his small, fictional towns. People like the editor of the local
newspaper, his over-eager, cliché-prone cub reporter, the local Councillors and
others are quite brilliantly drawn and the reality beneath outward
respectability is very neatly skewered.
It is also worth saying that the book is about half the length of a
typical modern crime novel and is all the better for it, in my view.
A couple of brief passages may give you a flavour. Purbright spends a night at a supposedly
superior small-town hotel "where he had been ill-fed and insulted by a
staff who behaved like émigré dukes," and later visits a room in a
boarding house: "The room was as he had last seen it; tidy, ordinary, and
wear the faintly depressing air common to all apartments, whether prison cells
or bed-sitters, in which a man must share his dreams with his shoe
brushes."
I have only recently discovered Colin Watson, but I am
coming to regard him as a treat to be looked forward to. I have no doubt that I shall read the whole
Flaxborough series as they are reissued, and I'm looking forward to them enormously. Very warmly recommended.
(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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