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    A Decent Interval
    A Decent Interval
    A Decent Interval
    Ebook270 pages3 hours

    A Decent Interval

    By Simon Brett

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Meet Charles Paris: a washed-up actor with a taste for wine, women . . . and solving crimes! A binge-worthy cozy mystery series from the original king of British cozy crime, internationally best-selling, award-winning author Simon Brett, OBE. For fans of Richard Osman - but with added bite!

    "Like a little malice in your mysteries? Some cynicism in your cosies? Simon Brett is happy to oblige" THE NEW YORK TIMES

    "Few crime writers are as enchantingly gifted" THE SUNDAY TIMES

    "One of British crime's most assured craftsmen . . . Perfect entertainment" THE GUARDIAN

    "A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans" P.D. JAMES

    "Murder most enjoyable" COLIN DEXTER

    _______________________

    A middle-aged actor - and sometimes sleuth - takes on Hamlet
    Two TV talent show winners are in the star roles . . .
    Who has murderous intentions towards Hamlet and Ophelia?
    That is the question in A DECENT INTERVAL!

    Eternally struggling, jobbing actor Charles Paris is relieved to be offered the roles of Ghost and First Gravedigger in a production of Hamlet opening at the Grand Theatre, Marlborough. The star roles of Hamlet and Ophelia have been entrusted to TV talent show winners Jared Root and Katrina Selsey to attract a younger, social media savvy audience.

    With tickets already sold out, it's on the verge of being an overwhelming success - until one of the stage's giant skull bones crashes on to Jared during rehearsals. And when Katrina is found dead during the opening night interval, Charles suspects foul play. Is there a connection between Jared's injury and Katrina's demise? Diva Katrina was roundly disliked, but who despised her enough to commit murder?

    Fans of Agatha Christie, The Thursday Murder Club, Anthony Horowitz, Alexander McCall Smith, M.C. Beaton and Faith Martin will love this hilarious cozy traditional mystery series featuring one of the funniest antiheroes in crime fiction. Written over a fifty-year-period, it perfectly captures life and contemporary attitudes in 1970s London - and beyond!

    READERS ADORE CHARLES PARIS:

    "Brett has a rare gift for balancing humor and detection" Publishers Weekly Starred Review

    "More than worth the price of admission" Booklist Starred Review

    "An exhilarating read" Daily Mail

    "A brilliant, extraordinary whodunit" Ryan, 5* Goodreads review

    "Effortlessly readable" Adrian, 5* Amazon review

    "A marvellous book" Paulinderwick, 5* Amazon review

    "Another great Charles Paris mystery" David, 5* Amazon review

    THE CHARLES PARIS MYSTERIES, IN ORDER:

    1. Cast in Order of Disappearance
    2. So Much Blood
    3. Star Trap
    4. An Amateur Corpse
    5. A Comedian Dies
    6. The Dead Side of the Mike
    7. Situation Tragedy
    8. Murder Unprompted
    9. Murder in the Title
    10. Not Dead, Only Resting
    11. Dead Giveaway
    12. What Bloody Man is That
    13. A Series of Murders
    14. Corporate Bodies
    15. A Reconstructed Corpse
    16. Sicken and So Die
    17. Dead Room Farce
    18. A Decent Interval
    19. The Cinderella Killer
    20. A Deadly Habit
    15. A Reconstructed Corpse
    16. Sicken and So Die
    17. Dead Room Farce
    18. A Decent Interval
    19. The Cinderella Killer
    20. A Deadly Habit

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSevern House
    Release dateJul 1, 2013
    ISBN9781780104126
    Author

    Simon Brett

    Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full time. As well as the much-loved Fethering series, the Mrs Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series, he has written a number of radio and television scripts. Married with three children, he lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs. You can find out more about Simon at his website: www.simonbrett.com

    Read more from Simon Brett

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    Reviews for A Decent Interval

    3.5/5

    33 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It was fun to spend some time with Charles Paris again. Hope he makes another appearance.
    • 4/5
      So nice to have Charles Paris back after a lengthy interval. Brett has not lost his sense of humor. However, he does seem to take a dimmer view of the viability of Charles’s lifestyle. In the 80s Charles was the funny side of the aging, alcoholic English actor. Now something darker has crept in. The detection is up to snuff.
    • 2/5
      Simon Brett's books had been on my radar for quite some time, so when I found a BBC radio production of A Decent Interval - starring Bill Nighy - I had to give it a shot.

      The story basically focused on an out-of-work actor who finds work as a minor part in a production of Hamlet - to his annoyance the leading roles are given to two reality tv "celebrities" who can't act. As the story goes on, Hamlet is found seriously wounded and Paris (the actor) is dragged into the who-dunnit.

      As far as murder mysteries go this one was decent, but nothing to shout about. I am not sure it would have held my interest if I had read this in book form.
    • 4/5
      It has been a decent interval since readers last had the chance to meet up with dipsomaniac actor Charles Paris. This is #18 in the series which began in 1975 with CAST IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE. Our last outing was DEAD ROOM FARCE in 1997Nothing much has changed in Charles' life including Charles himself who doesn't seem to have aged much. He is still in and out of work, but probably much more out than in. His agent Maurice Skellern hasn't contacted him for 8 months, he hasn't talked to his estranged wife Frances for nearly five months, and he seems to have been living on Bell's Whisky. Maurice contacts him for some small part work for a documentary on the English Civil War and then he lands a job in a production of Hamlet. The main players are winners of a singing star contest.The mystery action takes off when would-be pop star Jared Root (Hamlet) is felled by some stage scenery, and shortly after that there is what seems to be a murder.There's an undercurrent of commentary in this novel about the state of the theatre, the difficulty of getting good plays into London's West End in the face of reality and talent shows which attract much younger audiences and encourage more audience participation. Charles has remained a bit of a Luddite as far as internet technology and social networking goes but even he comes to understand the power of social media like Twitter in sparking interest in live performances where fans can see their idols perform. The other side of the coin of course is the accountancy that drives the theatre world - if you can't make a profit, it is not viable.Though written in the third person, we see the world and the mystery through Charles Paris's aging eyes, although to be quite honest he doesn't seemed to have aged much since earlier books. There's a peculiar humour in these novels provided particularly by review comments about Charles' performances on stage. While Charles Paris fans will be glad of this outing, I don't think it is as good as the series at its height. Simon Brett has used a tried and trusted formula to create a very readable cozy
    • 4/5
      As my romp through the Charles Paris crime novels comes towards its inevitable conclusion, I find that the humour is being replaced by a sadness at Paris' inability to organise his own life. It may be true that a drinker becomes a sad, lonely alcoholic but, I don't need it in an, ostensibly, humerous whodunnit.The crime side of the book is up to its usual high standard and, despite my moan, I am sad to be reaching the end of the series.
    • 3/5
      witty and fun.

    Book preview

    A Decent Interval - Simon Brett

    ONE

    It’s been a while, thought Charles Paris. A while since I’ve been dressed as a Roundhead for a part. A while since I’ve had a part – any part, come to that.

    Later in the day he would be dressed as a Cavalier. Because Charles Paris was fighting the Battle of Naseby. Alone. Still, it was work.

    It had indeed been some time since he’d had any of that precious commodity, work, but then that wasn’t unusual in what he laughingly called his ‘career’. Like most actors, when unemployed, Charles Paris went into a kind of half-life. Yes, he met up with friends in the business, he continued to drink Bell’s whisky either with them or more often alone, but the animating spark that made him fully alive was missing. And he kept wondering, as members of his profession in their late fifties tend to, whether he had already received his last ever job offer. An actor’s career does not have a retirement cut-off point like more regulated types of employment. No farewell parties, gifts of carriage clocks and private pensions kicking in (few actors even know what the word ‘pension’ means). No, for them the end is a slow process of attenuation, six months of being offered no parts being followed by another six months of being offered no parts, and so on until the realization dawns that, yes, the moment of retirement did indeed occur, almost unnoticed, some years previously.

    Charles Paris had therefore been extremely surprised to receive a call one Thursday morning in his studio flat in Hereford Road from the man who he supposed was still his agent, Maurice Skellern.

    ‘Charles, how’re things?’

    ‘What things did you particularly have in mind?’

    ‘Oh, work, you know, that kind of thing.’

    ‘Maurice, if I had any work you of all people ought to know about it. You are my agent, after all.’

    ‘Maybe, but you do hear of artistes who take jobs without telling their agents.’

    ‘And have I ever done that?’

    ‘Well, not in my recollection, no. But you do hear of these things. I mean, you know Edgar, the very clever boy I represent who’s just finished a stint at the National and is now off filming with Tom Cruise—’

    ‘No, I don’t know him – and what’s more I don’t want to hear about him.’ One of his agent’s many annoying habits was going into excessive detail about the successes of his other clients while providing absolutely no work for Charles. ‘Anyway, Maurice, to what do I owe the pleasure of a call from you out of the blue after eight months of total silence?’

    ‘Eight months? Surely it hasn’t been—?’

    ‘Eight months,’ Charles confirmed implacably.

    ‘Well, everything’s been very quiet in the business recently.’ How many times had Charles heard that from his agent? ‘Television budgets being cut back, the West End filling up with jukebox musicals or ones based on old movies. It’s not a good time, you know. I mean if I hadn’t got Edgar filming in the States and Adrian playing the name part in that cop series and Xanthe giving her Cleopatra at the RSC, I’d—’

    ‘All right,’ Charles interrupted. ‘That’s enough! I don’t want to hear about your other clients. So once again I ask: to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?’

    ‘Ah, well, something’s come up.’

    ‘Work?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘For me?’ Maurice Skellern was quite capable of ringing Charles simply to crow about the fabulous contract one of his other clients had just netted.

    ‘Of course for you, Charles.’

    ‘What is it?’

    ‘It’s a television …’

    Wonderful.

    ‘… directed by Tibor Pincus.’

    Even better. Tibor Pincus was one of the legendary television directors. Having escaped from Budapest when the Soviet tanks moved in in 1956, he had quickly risen through the ranks of British television drama. He’d directed a play for ABC’s Armchair Theatre, before joining the BBC and working on The Wednesday Play, a series which transmuted in 1970 into the Play for Today strand. Tibor Pincus had been at the top of his game at a time when the one-off play was one of the nation’s glories, when it made headlines and prompted furious debate about the issues of the day.

    Charles had had a tiny part in one of Tibor Pincus’s productions in the early 1980s. He couldn’t remember what the play was called, but it was one of the proudest entries on his CV – unlike his performance as Sir Benjamin Backbite at the Bristol Old Vic. (‘In this Restoration comedy Charles Paris himself looked in need of restoration.’ – Western Daily Press.)

    Charles was touched that someone of the stature of Tibor Pincus should have remembered him (and surely there could be no other reason for this unexpected summons). He was also slightly surprised that the acclaimed director was still alive and working.

    But most of all, he was extremely cheered and encouraged. The demise of the one-off television play had been much lamented over the years. Its time-slots had been taken over by endlessly recycling soaps and indistinguishable series set in hospitals, police stations or forensic pathology labs. Or, even worse, reality shows. Like most actors, Charles Paris had a deep-seated resentment for that form of entertainment. Pointing a camera at members of the public and waiting for them to make fools of themselves was not the highest form of art. But it was cheap, and television executives didn’t care that such programmes put out of work a lot of actors and writers who might actually have produced well-crafted drama.

    So the fact that a director of the stature of Tibor Pincus was back in business might herald the return of the single television play. That would be really good news.

    ‘What is it?’ asked Charles.

    ‘What’s what?’ asked Maurice.

    ‘The play, the part Tibor Pincus is offering me?’

    ‘Ah, well there isn’t actually a script.’

    This was even better news for Charles. One of Tibor Pincus’s great triumphs of the late 1960s, long before Mike Leigh hijacked the form, had been a play called Nexus, built up by the actors through improvisation. It was still hailed as one of the landmarks of television drama.

    If he was going to feature in a new improvised play by Tibor Pincus, then Charles Paris’s acting career was about to take a very definite turn for the better.

    Disillusionment had started to set in when Maurice Skellern told him that he was only required for one day’s filming near Newlands Corner in Surrey. And that he was required to be there the next day, which was Friday. Dreams of Charles Paris being part of a long-planned masterwork by the great Tibor Pincus began to melt away.

    It was a six a.m. call for costume and make-up. The car arrived in Hereford Road at four in the morning to pick up a somewhat frail Charles Paris. The excitement of having some work, combined with nervous uncertainty about what the work was, had led him to hit the Bell’s whisky rather hard the night before.

    He’d ended up slumped in front of the television, watching what was apparently some programme about the Wars of the Roses. It was the style of historical documentary which had become popular over recent years, in which modern-day footage was intercut by ancient documents and images, together with a minimal amount of costumed reconstruction, to produce a half-hour programme padded out to an hour which would have worked better on the radio.

    The show was presented by a quite dishy woman with large breasts. Charles had read somewhere that she was a Professor of something at some university – and a feminist historian. She had written a book on changing attitudes to menstruation through the centuries, called The Bleeding Obvious, and appeared on Newsnight whenever a feminist guru was needed to pontificate on anything.

    Knowing that she was a feminist made Charles feel guilty about being so aware of her breasts. For someone of his generation gender politics were a minefield. He had discovered the hard way that it was now all right to fancy women, but not to ‘objectify’ them. And being overly aware of the large breasts of a television presenter he’d never met was dangerously close to objectification. He wasn’t quite sure of the politically correct approach for a man to a feminist with big breasts. Probably to pretend not to notice them, that’d be safest. Certainly not to look at them. God, it was sometimes difficult being a man.

    Anyway, he didn’t like the documentary much. To Charles’s mind there was something ridiculous about the 1455 First Battle of St Albans being discussed by a woman walking through a shopping mall in modern St Albans. In what way could the Tesco’s, PC World and W.H. Smith she passed be helping to give a historical context to her commentary? Also, the cargo pants and tight cotton shirt she wore gave the mall an impression more of a catwalk than a lecture room. Which was probably the programme-maker’s intention.

    Charles did keep coming back to the fact that they were very striking breasts, though. And he couldn’t help feeling that they must have had something to do with her success on the box. He was sure that British universities boasted plenty of equally knowledgeable academics whose less generous contours kept them out of the nation’s sitting rooms.

    As he sipped at his glass of Bell’s, Charles Paris, not for the first time, pondered mournfully the impossibility of balanced relationships with the opposite sex (though that, he reflected, was probably too adversarial an expression to use – nowadays no doubt you couldn’t call women the ‘opposite’ sex, you had to call them the ‘complementary’ sex).

    He must have dozed off. The television was still on when he woke, showing an early hours repeat of some talent show. Called StarHunt, the series was apparently searching for an unknown actress (or ‘female actor’, as Charles kept reminding himself he had to say nowadays) to play the part of Ophelia in a forthcoming West End production of Hamlet. The aspirants were amateurs – that was one of the show’s selling points. It was based on the – to Charles’s mind completely fallacious – view that anyone can become a star. All of the contestants – girls in their late teens identically over-made-up with heavily mascaraed false eyelashes and unnaturally white teeth – said how big a part of their life StarHunt had become, how they were ‘really going to go for it’, how much support they were getting from their families (cut to simpering parents in the studio audience), how nervous they were, and how much they respected their fellow contestants and the judges.

    Charles was surprised to discover that this panel of D-list celebrities included someone he knew. Ned English, who would be directing the Hamlet when it finally got to the stage, was someone he had worked with. A very long time ago – about twenty-seven years – in Hornchurch, Charles had been in Ned’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost playing Costard (‘Charles Paris’s Mummerset accent was well-nigh incomprehensible’ – Romford Recorder.) The director had then been an enfant terrible of the English theatre, notorious for stirring controversy by his ‘reimaginings’ of classic plays. While still at Cambridge, his King Lear, whose action had been transplanted into an aquarium, caused a minor sensation. And his Doll’s House, in which all the characters were dressed like dolls and moved as if they were string puppets, was still talked about.

    The Love’s Labour’s Lost in which Charles Paris had given his Costard had been set (for no very good reason) in the trenches during the First World War. When interviewed about his work, Ned English always said he ‘listened to what the play was telling him’. If that was the case, Charles Paris reckoned that in Love’s Labour’s Lost the director must have been working from a different text of Shakespeare’s play than the one he had.

    As with most enfants terribles, Ned English’s star had waned and he settled later in his career into comfortable predictability. A new generation of thrusting young directors hogged the limelight by doing things like setting J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls in a collapsing doll’s house. (Damn, Ned had never thought of that.) Like Ned’s, the approach of these new Young Turks demonstrated complete contempt for the text. This play, they seemed to be saying, is so bad that it can only be salvaged by my genius, my own particular brand of visual pyrotechnics.

    So, having ceased to be flavour of the month, to get the job directing Hamlet must have been a considerable boost for Ned English. Particularly as it involved appearing on television. Charles Paris was constantly surprised by the compulsive attraction of television to people in the theatre. Not the attraction of acting on the box – that was fine, and the money was much better than in the theatre. But so many actors and directors wanted to appear as ‘themselves’ (or rather a contrived version of themselves). They wanted to be on chat shows and panel games, showing how nice they were, how jolly they were. And very few of them were any good at it.

    The idea of exposing himself in that way was total anathema to Charles. One of the reasons he had gone into the theatre was because the profession offered him opportunities to disguise his own personality under layers of others. He loved acting, but he shrank from revealing the real Charles Paris (or even a sanitized television-friendly version of his persona).

    And yet Ned English was clearly glorying in his new-found fame on the box. In all such talent shows the mix of judges is the same. There’s an acerbic pragmatist who is very rude to all the contestants. (In StarHunt this part was taken by Tony Copeland, a producer famous for his very lucrative touring productions and other wide media interests, who would be guiding the Hamlet on its trajectory into the West End.) There’s a dishy young woman vaguely attached to show business who is sympathetic to ‘how hard’ the contestants have worked to get to this point in the show. And there’s a lovable professional who is very encouraging, particularly when a contestant is patently rubbish.

    It was this last role that Ned English had been granted. And he wasn’t very good at it.

    But he clearly thought he was. He played shamelessly to the camera, milked audience reactions and went through a laboured routine of defending the contestants from the cruellest (scripted) barbs of Tony Copeland.

    This played perfectly into the producer’s hands. So much so that Charles Paris began to wonder whether Ned had been given the job solely to point up the wit of Tony Copeland. The latter treated his fellow judge as an innocent child, who naively could see the good in everyone. A typical exchange between the two of them after an unfortunate aspirant had recited a Shakespeare speech would go:

    presenter:

    Well, Ned, what did you think of Kelly-Marie’s performance of Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice?

    ned english:

    I think the girl has a lot of talent. Clearly a bit of a problem pronouncing her Rs, but with elocution—

    tony copeland:

    I’d say a bigger risk for her was falling on her Rs.

    [Audience laughter. Camera cuts to unfortunate aspirant, fighting back tears.]

    ned english:

    Now you’re being cruel, Tony. As a director, I know that every actor can improve enormously with a little encouragement.

    tony copeland:

    I personally think it’s cruel to encourage someone who has no talent.

    ned english:

    Are you saying Kelly-Marie has no talent?

    tony copeland:

    I’ve seen more talent in a plank of wood.

    [Shocked audience laughter. Camera cuts to unfortunate aspirant, having even more difficulty in fighting back the tears.]

    ned english:

    Oh, that’s just unfair, Tony.

    tony copeland:

    I agree. Yes, I apologize for what I said.

    ned english:

    I’m glad to hear it.

    tony copeland:

    Comparing Kelly-Marie to a plank of wood is definitely unfair … to planks of wood!

    [Riotous audience laughter and applause. Camera cuts to unfortunate aspirant, now in floods of tears, being led away by a hostess in a sparkly dress.]

    And so StarHunt went on, like all so-called ‘reality shows’, humiliating members of the public, an activity rather easier than shooting fish in a barrel.

    Charles Paris noted that Ned English also looked different. Even back in Hornchurch days he had been completely grey, and yet for television he sported a glossy mane of chestnut hair. And his dark brown eyes now peered through round comedy tortoiseshell glasses.

    Watching the repeat of StarHunt made Charles extremely cross. Is this what the theatre’s come to? he fulminated into his whisky glass. Can’t a production of one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays get into the West End without this ridiculous publicity circus? And, even more pertinent, can’t Ophelia be cast by the normal auditioning process, to reward some genuinely talented young person who has worked her way through drama school and the early dispiriting uncertainties of a professional career in the theatre? Rather than some jumped-up teenager from Essex whose Mum produced fond footage of her singing and dancing to the video camera at the age of two?

    The thought brought Charles back to one of the enduring qualities of his profession – its unfairness. Like most actors, he reckoned that if talent were all, the hierarchy at the top of the theatrical tree would take a very different form. But it wasn’t the most skilled actors who tended to get the breaks. It was often the ones who came with some publicity story attached, some special detail that brought them to the notice of the public. It didn’t have to be much. Good looks were sometimes enough. Being in a relationship with someone more famous never hurt. And, of course, being born into a theatrical dynasty made you a shoo-in.

    Charles Paris had lost count of the number of actors he had encountered who were more talented than the ones he’d seen become stars. And though he’d never admit it to anyone for fear of sounding as if he’d overdosed on sour grapes, he did actually include himself in that number. If only he’d had the breaks, Charles Paris’s career could have been … But no, he must stop thinking like that. It wasn’t helpful and was unlikely to improve his mood.

    He thought back to a production of Hamlet he’d seen with his wife Frances not that long before. He couldn’t remember exactly how long, and he wondered whether it was actually the last time they’d met. Must ring Frances, he reminded himself. Though they didn’t cohabit, Charles liked to feel that there was a lot of warmth still between them.

    The reason they had seen the production was that the actor playing Hamlet was the boyfriend of one of his wife’s former pupils. (Frances was headmistress of a girls’ school.) The girl – whatever her name was, he’d forgotten – was playing Ophelia. But what Charles remembered was being blown away by the young man’s raw talent and the intelligence of his interpretation of one of the best parts in world theatre. What was his name? Something hyphenated … Oh yes, Sam Newton-Reid.

    Charles remembered talking to the boy with his girlfriend in the bar afterwards. The venue wasn’t a particularly prestigious one, just an upstairs room in a pub in Battersea. And despite the enthusiasm of the tiny audience, no newspaper reviewers had seen the show. Sam and his girlfriend had tried to get various influential people along … Charles seemed to remember Tony Copeland’s name being mentioned … but he got the impression none of them had turned

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