Customer Reviews

Not Dead, Only Resting (Charles Paris, Book 10)

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Simon Brett's "Not Dead, Only Resting" has his actor amateur-sleuth, Charles Paris, without an acting job for the whole story and doing only his detecting work. When an actor is out of work, they say the actor is "resting." Charles has a part-time job as a house painter, and when he shows up for his first assignment, he and his work partner discover a murder victim, Yves Lafeu, who with his lover Tristram Gowers runs a restaurant named Tryst. Charles had previously met Yves and Tristram at the restaurant where the two had a row over a young man that Tristram believed Yves was having an affair with.
Brett has assembled an interesting cast of characters (suspects) and hasn't neglected his comic impulses. Charles, with the backing of Tristram's cousin Kevin O'Rourke, puts his investigative talents to work to find Yve's murderer and solve the disappearance of Tristram. O'Rourke and his lover Bartlemas are theater groupies who show up for every West End opening.
Charles and the pair go to the Yve and Kevin's French cottage in search of the missing man. The plot is ingenious, complex, and cleverly worked out. Of course there's a lot of acting lore involved in the plot so Paris fans will not be disappointed. Charles has to delve into gay society as part of his detecting. He even uncovers some blackmailing.
As he continues his investigation, Charles interviews a number of suspects and gathers clues, always stopping off to fortify himself with Bell's whiskey. To say that Charles likes to imbibe would be an understatement. Charles is getting known among theater people as a good detective, and it keeps him busy. A good thing because his acting career has had a lot of slow patches. Paris is a great character creation and this is a wonderfully entertaining crime series.

Simon Brett's Charles Paris series is a winner. The reader gets a "bird's eye view" of life in the theatrical world in London, and a good little puzzle too. Charles Paris is a hard-drinking, 50-something, mostly out-of-work actor that does a little amateur detective work on the side. And he is probably one of the most realistic characters that you will come across in fiction. Simon Brett paints him masterfully without omitting any of the "warts". In this book we have Charles in the middle of a domestic homosexual dispute, and one of the partners turns up dead, he takes it upon himself to find the killer. Wonderful little book.

Charles Paris is an indigent actor. Tryst is an expensive restaurant. Charles is losing his wife, Frances, he is our of work, but he is enjoying his meal at Tristram Gower's establishment. During the following month, September, Tris and the chef of the restaurant intend to vacation at Cahors.

After visiting the unemployment office, Charles likes to go out for a drink and lunch. At a drinks club, the Montrose, (the lease is to be up at the end of the year, seemingly tracing another point in the downward spiral of Charles's existence), Charles runs into Zoe Fratton, Tristram's former wife. Working with another out-of-work actor, (the state is known as resting, not unemployment), on a job of redecoration, Charles bumps into a dead body, that of the chef of Tryst, Yves. The police commence looking for Tris in France, suicide is feared.

A friend, Kevin O'Rourke, seeks to hire Charles to discover who killed his cousin, Yves. Yves's sister, hostess of Tryst, presents a mystifying attitude to his death. The solution to the mystery has to do with an actor's take on his unemployment problem.

This is rich. The characterizations are good and the talk is witty. The plotting is intricate in the manner of Agatha Christie.