A Decent Interval

Starred review from June 10, 2013
Brett’s actor-sleuth, Charles Paris, makes a long-overdue comeback in his droll 18th outing (after 1998’s Dead Room Farce). Paris, a has-been, is delighted to get steady work in a new, offbeat English production of Hamlet, featuring reality-show stars Jared Root and Katrina Selsey as Hamlet and Ophelia, and set inside a gigantic model of the Danish prince’s skull. Root’s lack of acting talent raises the tension level on the production, as do his and Selsey’s efforts to out-diva each other. Before long, an “accident” and a murder allow Paris the chance to play amateur sleuth again. Golden-age fans will appreciate the fair-play whodunit, which demonstrates that the form can be adapted to a contemporary setting. Satirical touches, such as Paris’s reaction to a documentary about the 1455 Battle of St. Albans partially set in a shopping mall, keep the atmosphere on the lighter side. Brett has a rare gift for balancing humor and detection.

June 29, 1998
Not On Your Wife! is a poor excuse for a stage comedy, all dropped trousers and double entendres. But then Charles Paris (Sicken and So Die, 1997) is a poor excuse for an actor--and husband, father and lover. Yet he's proved to be an enduring amateur sleuth, whose cases take place during his sporadic moments of gainful employment. This latest dire dramatic vehicle is debuting in Bath, and Charles, between boozing bouts with his beloved Bells whiskey and romantic bouts with Cookie Stone, an aging actress unaccountably smitten with him, has landed a nice gig on the side reading books on tape. Mark Lear is in charge of the recording facility. He's a former BBC man and a bigger and more bitter drunk than Charles. His lover, Lisa Wilson, is concerned. Charles fancies Lisa more than poor Cookie and gets a rare chance to act chivalrous when Mark dies and all the signs (especially a locked sound room as the likely place of death) point to foul play. Brett is no stranger to the dramatic arts; his A Shock to the System was a Michael Caine movie, and he scripted a popular sitcom on British television. His characters are all priceless--haughty ham actors, melodramatic drunks, driven company hacks. The play itself is trite and bawdy and rendered by the author with leering panache. Charles is once again in for bloody awful reviews, but he does find the killer after discovering that Mark once supplemented his wages with the manufacture of gay audiotapes that starred a few names familiar to Charles. Brett, who remains better known on his own side of the pond, is a master of breezy, boozy buffoonery.