Just Finished Reading

My sadly now deceased mother-in-law of Irish descent was a huge fan of a chat. Regardless of whether or not you were in the room when she started the story, had the slightest idea who she was talking about, or what on earth the point of the whole thing was. There was something about the cadence of her style that I was reminded of when listening to A PLOT TO DIE FOR, written and read by Ardal O'Hanlon. Who I must admit I know of mostly from his work as a stand up comedian and then his turn as the central detective on Death in Paradise. 

The blurb for this mentions it's for readers who enjoy the warmth of Graham Norton and that show in particular, and I have to admit I selected it from my audio queue mostly because of the potential of the accent. Which was lovely to listen to, made the rambling byways and side shuffles of the whole story worth every listening minute. 

A cosy style mystery, with the deathly seriousness of a Tidy Towns competition at its heart, the main characters in this one are celebrity gardener Finn O'Leary, his aging mother, her carer, his mildly batty father, and a whole lot of people in a small town that if Finn didn't go to school with them, there was a very close relative involved. Like his best friend's sister, Aoife, the other "main" character in this tale which involves some murdering, a lot of vandalism, and the deadly serious and very closely followed Tidy Towns competition. There's a spot of gardening, a lot of personal stuff, some really funny dialogue, and a bit of romance. And I cannot tell you how grateful I was for a recent QI episode because one character deploys "Dundee" quite a bit and I knew exactly how disparaging that is, why and where it came from.

Highly recommended in audio format, for the gentle distraction and bit of fun (craic?) that this whole thing provided, I do hope they do another in this series. Finn and Aoife were lovely to take along on the endless car journeys.

Back in 1986 I wouldn't have had as much understanding of the opening line of this blurb as I do have today, as 70 year old Phoebe and her two similarly aged friends Eva and Dave are escaping from the back of the arts school near the National Gallery of Victoria, stolen painting in hand:

'Can we try escaping just a little slower?'

Nowadays I get it 100%. As would a lot of us who distinctly remember, and were in Melbourne, at the time of the real life heist of Picasso's Weeping Woman. (At this point can I highly recommend Marc Fennell's investigative TV series - Framed, which the author of this fiction based on real life story mentions in his acknowledgements).

As the blurb puts it - Fact: In 1986, Picasso's Weeping Woman was stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria. To this day, the culprits have never been identified.

The culprits at the time referred to themselves as the Australian Cultural Terrorists, and their demands were about the lack of funding for the Arts in Victoria, including some massive (abusive alas but funny with it), of the then Minister for the Police and Arts (I kid you not), Race Matthews. The names of the main players - the Minister, the Head of the National Gallery of Victoria etc have all been changed in this novel, but it will be very very easy for readers of a certain age to instantly recognise the bouffant hairstyles, and the flamboyant dress senses of some of the then main players.

The idea that three retiree art students - Phoebe, Eva and Dave - are the real perpetrators is, one assumes, a work of fiction, but there was something gloriously appealing about the idea that somebody of a certain age could hide out in a major cultural institution, luck out on moving around the gallery dodging a couple of older security guards, find the right sort of screwdriver, snaffle a painting worth a few million, and stroll out of the building with it, all on a whim. There is also something very telling about the age gap between the "right on student activist group" who spend a lot of time talking about what they want to do, whilst actively rejecting the older three as too old to be anything but plants. All the while it's the older ones who have actually done something very radical about the funding cuts, and the threat to their beloved art school.

THE PICASSO RANSOM is cleverly done - being based on a still unsolved real life case - the author has had the opportunity to mix the known in with speculation in a way that makes the whole story sing. Having created three terrific central characters helps as well, although Phoebe is the star of the show. An older woman who has spent her life being conventional until retirement from teaching, a divorce, and the realisation that her life has devolved into nothing much, enrols in art school to follow a lifelong passion for painting, only to find herself in a situation she would never, ever have dreamed of. In her personal life, her criminal endeavours and her future. 

This book is quite an undertaking, enormous fun, hugely entertaining and cleverly constructed, it also has that little kick in the messaging - about age, capacity and openness to new experiences. Filled with references to Melbourne in the late 1980's when it was still fun, vibrant, slightly chaotic (or at least it seemed that way to me at the time - not so now), this is serious mum, when it wasn't (TISM reference - read the novel).