Karen Chisholm
REVIEW
THE NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE - Toby Clements
Reviewed By
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Lovers of Precious Ramotswe, Kurt Wallender, Rebus and Kay Scarpetta may wish to look away now. Toby Clements in his second book THE NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE, rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in.
When Junior Tutor at Cuff College Oxford, Tom Hurst, joins the faculty of the world's most famous crime fiction college he's startled, firstly by his fellow faculty and then a body, in the library, with a spear and the price tag of an IKEA duvet.
Hurst sets off to recruit four of the college's most famous graduates to kind the killer. He journeys to Botswana to see Mma Delicious Ontoaste, then to Sweden and Inspector Burt Colander, before heading for Scotland and Inspector Scott Rhombus, finishing up in America and (well you guessed it) Doctor Faye Carpaccia. Together they must stop arguing and get to IKEA before it shuts.
NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE is really a loosely connected set of parodies of each of the 4 popular crime fiction characters, wrapped up in an overall investigation around the college which has the distinct feel of a Michael Innes or like-minded cloistered academic setting.
According to the bio provided, Toby Clements reviews crime novels for a national newspaper and keeps a who's who in crime fiction on his desk. He obviously knows the nuances of the big name writers he's having a go at incredibly well. Each of the sections is written with a very similar feeling / tone to the original authors, although he's possibly the most successful with Mma Delicious Ontoaste where the lampooning seems to be at its largest and the behaviour of the central character at its most outrageous and unexpected.
Whether or not you like the idea of vicious parody will probably dictate whether or not you like this book. Whilst there are some moments of inspired hilarity - there were some periods where you just wish the author would stop trying to be too clever and get on with it.
Silly, tongue in cheek, having a go at some of the well known names in Crime Fiction, THE NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE has that feel of a book that somebody will buy for a friend they think takes their crime fiction too seriously.
BOOK DETAILS
BOOK INFORMATION
BLURB
Cuff College of Transgression and Pathology, Oxford: The quiet of the evening is shattered by the discovery of a Body In The Library. The police are Baffled. Tom Hurst, a junior lecturer at the College, breaking every rule of the whodunit genre, follows a trail of arcane clues that leads him to Botswana and Mma Delicious Ontoast. His investigations then take him to Sweden and Burt Colander; to Edinburgh, where he is grudgingly helped by DI John "Just-Now" Rhombus; and to Richmond, Virginia, where he meets the brilliant, attractive-in-a-powerful-way, midnight-blue-pantsuited forensic pathologist Dr. Su Carpaccio. Sometimes one supersleuth just isn't enough. The No.2 Global Detective revisits and rewrites some of the most famous crime novels of recent times, taking the genre and its heroes to an ultimately hilarious extreme.
| Review | THE NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE - Toby Clements | Karen Chisholm
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Thursday, October 4, 2007 |