Customer Reviews

Carnage on the Committee (Robert Amiss Mysteries)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Irish author and scholar Ruth Dudley Edwards does not write fiction for the faint-hearted reader. Her mysteries all feature English civil-servant Robert Amiss, as well as a cast of supporting characters. Her best known supporting character is Lady Ida "Jack" Troutbeck, a booze guzzling, cigar-smoking, bi-sexual, un-"PC", head of a woman's college at Cambridge. Jack Troutbeck says what she thinks, and what she thinks is often at odds with Britain's "New Labour", which was in power when Dudley Edwards wrote and published "Carnage on the Committee".

The "committee" is the "Knapper-Warburton Committee", a Booker-like committee, whose nine members - including Robert Amiss - are charged with getting together to select one novel as that year's honoree of the prize. And the clever Dudley Edwards has made the eight members caricatures of the prevailing literary elite who people the real prize selection committees. Several murders occur and Robert Amiss enlists Jack Troutbeck's help by taking over the committee's chairmanship, left vacant by one of the murder victims. Dudley Edwards does not stint in poking fun at the pompousness of the literary insiders nor at the worthlessness of the books under consideration for the Knapper-Warburton. There are several laugh-out-loud scenes, for those who enjoy the un-PCness with which Dudley Edwards writes. Dudley Edwards has long satirized the British Establishment - brilliantly in "Publish and be Murdered", another Amiss/Troutbeck mystery, set a the "Wrangler", a suspiciously "Economist"-like magazine.

But if Dudley Edwards satirizes, she also points out truths. Her two page piece in her latest book, "Murdering Americans", gives the most beautiful explanation of America and her place in history and in the world I've ever read. Please seek out Dudley Edwards' fiction. She writes wonderfully, and often has some wonderful "truths" in her work.