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No Laughing Matter by Peter Guttridge
Headline, May 1997, £16.99
Freelance journalist Nick Madrid is in Montreal for the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival. Locked in an advanced yoga position on his hotel's fourteenth floor, he notices a naked blonde plummeting past his window the way to her death in the hotel swimming pool.  This is the first of a number of murders.  Assisted by his friend, Bridget the Bitch of the Broadsheets, Nick pursues a sporadically dogged  investigation in Montreal, Edinburgh and Hollywood. The body count mounts, and so does the number of slapstick set pieces. Media folk parade their follies and eccentricities. Old sins cast long shadows, and Nick discovers some unexpected consequences of the 1970 Isle of Wight Rock Festival.
NO LAUGHING MATTER is - paradoxically - at its best when it's not trying to make us laugh. Madrid is a pleasantly self-deprecatory hero who, like several other characters, makes a gallant effort to emerge from his comic mould.  Guttridge clearly knows the highways and byways of freelance journalism, and he has the ability to act as an entertaining guide.  He is good, too, at pathos - a couple of ageing hacks stay in the mind as does an unfortunate photographer.  The book is billed as the first of a series, and it will be interesting to see how Nick Madrid develops.

 Death At Sandringham House by C C Benison
Macmillan, £16.99
In his sequel to DEATH AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE, C C Benison whisks us away from the regal splendours of the metropolis to the relative domesticities of the Queen's private country house deep in the wintry Norfolk countryside.  This year, the staff - including the young Canadian housemaid Jane Bee - have a more interesting Christmas than usual.  The corpse of the Queen is discovered at a nearby village hall. On the Queen's head is a tiara stolen from the Duchess of Windsor half a century earlier.
Fortunately it proves not to be Her Majesty lying dead, but the actress sister of the Sandringham housekeeper - dressed in royal disguise for some sinister purpose of her own.  Soon Jane is in the throes of another murder investigation.  Once again she acts as the eyes and ears of a very important person indeed.
The plot soon mixes in other elements: among them, Jane's father, a sergeant in the Canadian mounties; animal rights activists; policemen who are no better than they should be; a rich brew of scandal and gossip among the servants; and the particularly loathsome son of a marchioness.
There is much to enjoy here - the unusual perspective on the royal family; the gentle humour, the mingling of real and fictional characters, and the impressive research.  But plausibility and tension are not among the book's narrative virtues.  And at 407 pages it is also far too long.  Still, this is not to be missed by criminally-minded monarchists.

The Tenth Justice by Brad Meltzer
Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99
The story of this legal thriller cranks into action when a youthful lawyer, Ben Addison, starts a new job as clerk to a Justice of the Supreme Court. There are nine Justices in the Supreme Court, the ultimate legal authority of the United States. The young clerks who help analyse the cases before the Justices and draft the decisions that decide the law are sometimes referred to as the Tenth Justice, because of the unseen power they wield.
Ben and his colleague Lisa ('sexy' and 'brash') have gone straight from law school to the fast track of the American legal profession. They are not the only ones who seem to be on the golden road to success. Ben shares a house with three friends he has known since high school, all of whom seem tipped for the glittering professional prizes that Washington offers its most successful yuppies. Ober works for a senator on Capitol Hill; Eric is a journalist with the Washington Herald; and Nathan has a job with the State Department. To Ben's horror, the golden future is threatened when he accidentally leaks advance information about a Court judgement. An unknown enemy knows he is to blame for the leak. Ben and his friends are drawn into a dangerous miasma of intrigue. All their careers are at risk - and so are their lives.
Not to worry - Ben and Lisa sort it out. The plot bounces along with a certain cocksure energy. The Supreme Court background is fascinating. So, too, for a very different reason, are the mores of professional life for ambitious twenty-somethings convinced of their own brilliance. Do people really live this way? This is one of those American legal thrillers which remind us that the Britains and the Americans are divided by more than a common language. The real problem is the central character: it is difficult to feel much sympathy for the jejune Ben Addison with his lucky boxer shorts and his unspoken conviction that happiness is primarily a matter of job status and salary. On balance THE TENTH JUSTICE is a promising debut, but it has to be said that there is room for improvement.

Death At Buckingham Palace by C. C. Benison
Pan Books £5.99
Here is a refreshingly different format for a series: Jane Bee, a young Canadian, works as a royal housemaid. In this novel, the first of the series, she finds herself moonlighting as an amateur sleuth at the behest of HM the Queen.
The criminal diversion begins when the Queen stumbles - literally - over the corpse of a Palace footman. The diversion rapidly diversifies in all directions. Someone is leaving wads of chewing gum stuck to Palace carpets. The English Revolutionary Army is on the prowl. Sir Julian, the Queen's private secretary, is a sinister Thatcherite, clearly a bad egg. A footman from the colonies turns out to be the heir to an ancient and wealthy earldom. By a remarkable coincidence, the next heir to the title is the despotic television director who is making a documentary about life belowstairs at the Palace - about the servants who endearingly refer to themselves as footpigs and housesluts. Someone steals the private diary of Edward VII. Is there a connection with Jack the Ripper? And who is really responsible for the pregnant housemaid?
The book gives a servants'-eye view of Buckingham Palace - 'like a big hotel with one very exacting guest and her husband'. Almost all the footmen are gay and at least one of them is passionately in love with his employer, whom he refers to as Mother. The dialogue is full of unexpected slants on Palace life. ('Balmoral can be such fun is you put your mind to it.')
It is true that the book has too many characters for comfort and that there is enough plot for half a dozen novels. Still, solid research, decent writing and an engaging sense of humour more than make up for this. Intelligent entertainment deserves to be cherished. And keen royalists will also discover exactly what the Queen carries in that handbag. (A clue: it has something to do with leaking Corgis.)

Count Me Out by Russell James
Serpent's Tail, £8.99
Russell James is emerging as one of Britain's best Noir writers, producing dark, powerful novels with a distinctive South London setting. In his novels, humour and humanity flourish in strange places, accentuating - and occasionally redeeming - the bleakness of the setting.
Once again, family business is at the heart of the novel. Scott drives a security van for a living; he's tired of his wife and son and wants a new life. A man called Gottfleisch is only too glad to make a creative suggestion involving half a million pounds. Scott's brother, Jet, on the other hand, a failed boxer, is actively trying to avoid the lure of crime. The best thing in Jet's life is his young daughter, Stella. Then Scott vanishes with the money and Gottfleisch thinks Jet knows where his brother is. Soon Jet and Stella are on the run, to the fairgrounds and the boxing booths, to a rough culture on the fringes of society. The result is a tough and fascinating novel distinguished by two magnificent villains, the twenty-stone Gottfleisch and Ticky, his foul-breathed paedophile sidekick.
In a curious way, the book is about honour. Jet is a man of principle, almost despite himself. As he struggles to build a life for himself and his daughter in a largely hostile world, his idiosyncratic moral code emerges - and is tested almost, but not quite, to breaking point. The combination of an honourable loner, a powerful narrative and an interesting specialist background suggests an unexpected parallel: the novels of Dick Francis.

Act Of Darkness by Simon Shaw
HarperCollins £14.99
In the seventh novel of the series, Philip Fletcher, Simon Shaw's actor hero, is looking forward to a gentle summer season at Chichester. The only blot on the horizon is the presence in the same theatre of his rival, Richard Jones, a man whom Philip considers to be utterly untalented as an actor and unspeakably foul as a human being. To make matters worse, their rivalry sharpens when both these middle-aged men find that they are salivating after the same youthful actress, the 'drop-dead gorgeous' Sally Blair.
But even worse is waiting in the wings - in the shape of obsessive fans. Philip is embarrassed by the shameless adoration of a large lady who sends him fruitcakes and crotchless knickers. Another fan, however, pursues Sally far more ruthlessly, and his desire for her is easily converted into hatred for her aspiring boyfriends.
The result is a novel which offers many interesting sidelights on the acting profession; young piranhas could read it with profit. The writing is assured and witty. There are some splendid set-pieces - in particular a cricket match. As Philip Fletcher slides deeper and deeper into middle age, he continues to exert a powerful charm as one of the most engaging cads in fiction, a martyr to his restless pursuit of priapic pleasure. It seems almost churlish to mention that the plot itself is a slight affair, whose denouement depends on one of those gob-smacking coincidences which are better suited to life than to fiction. I look forward to number eight.

The Girl In The Case by Lesley Grant-Adamson
 Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99
Maddy Knewton has the sort of existence that many people would consider idyllic. She holds down a demanding job as an estate agent. Home for herself and her dog is an old stone cottage in a Cotswold village on the edge of Wychwood. True, the man in her life falls a long way short of
perfection, but he is on the way out. Then the body of a neighbour is found in the forest. Beth Welford has been strangled.
As the police investigate the murder, the little community seethes with rumours. Old antagonisms surface. Fear and suspicion permeate the village. Why had Beth been trying to sell her house without telling her husband? Where does Maddy's partner go when he is supposed to be watching? What drives the bizarre actions of the woman who squats like a mystic cuckoo in the house of Maddy's closest friends? And underlying all these questions is a deeper one: is Maddy herself under threat, or is she merely the victim of her own paranoia?
The result is a distinctively creepy thriller, an elegant variation on the woman-in-peril theme which Lesley Grant-Adamson handles so well. The atmosphere is tight, stifling and intense. The glimpses of Maddy crumbling under stress are all too plausible. Another strong point is the sharp, perceptive writing: Grant-Adamson is excellent on the telling details of other people's lives (and homes). The book is well worth reading for the description of a memorably awful dinner party alone.
The resolution of such novels is always hard to handle. The last few chapters of The Girl in the Case are the least satisfactory: the working out of the plot is sketchy; many questions are left unanswered. This is realistic, of course, but it also leaves the reader hungry for more. Still, this dark psychological thriller works so well in other respects that the problem is a minor one.

In Kensington Gardens... Once by HRF Keating
Flambard, Paperback Original, £6.99
This is only the third crime title of Flambard Press, a small company run by Margaret and Peter Lewis. It contains ten short stories by H.R.F.Keating, collected together, I think, for the first time. All of them are set, wholly or partly, in Kensington Gardens, which the author has known since he moved to London nearly forty years ago. The collection is illustrated with twelve crisply elegant line drawings by Gwen Mandley.
One of the beauties of the short story as a form is that its very length encourages experiment. Keating has a knack for showing us the familiar from an unfamiliar perspective. Several of these stories smudge still further the contantly disputed borderline between crime fiction and mainstream fiction. Wry and sometimes surreal, they are shot through with delicate humour. Their characters range from the very old to the very young, and the monuments of Kensington Gardens themselves play a part.
In one story Queen Victoria herself, frozen in stone, keeps herself amused by watching the pickpockets. In another, a political assassination evokes an unexpected response from one of the witnesses. 'Speke', which centres on the burial of an inarticulate parakeet, has shades of Saki. 'Runners' revolves around a spinster's precise observation of joggers in Kensington Gardens. 'Mr Idd' will have a particular satisfaction for all of us who feel that the Arts are shabbily served by this country's government. The finest story in the collection, however, is one which puts a wholly unexpected spin on a character forever associated with Kensington Gardens: Peter Pan. Its ending elicits that authentic frisson which is the hallmark of a first-rate short story.
By turns poignant and playful, these short stories show HRF Keating in relaxed and versatile form. Highly recommended.

Upon A Dark Night by Peter Lovesey
(Little Brown, £16.99 out 6 March 1997) 
This is the fifth novel in Peter Lovesey's Superintendent Diamond series. Set against the gorgeous background of Georgian Bath, the series to date has been marked by skilful plotting and sharp, economic characterisation. The fourth title, BLOODHOUNDS, won the 1996 Silver Dagger of the Crime Writers' Association.
The novel opens with a young woman returning to consciousness in a hospital bed. She has no memory of who she is. She was found dumped in the hospital car park. She has been injured, perhaps by a car, which doctors at first believe accounts for her amnesia. As the days pass, however, her memory does not return. The cause of such long-term memory loss is usually profound emotional shock. Meanwhile, the woman - named Rose by Social Services - is left to kick her heels in a hostel. Here she finds an unlikely ally in the shape of Ada, an elephantine shoplifter with Rabelaisian appetites, a powerful personality and a talent for loyalty. It is Ada who traces the drunken driver who found 'Rose' on a nearby A road and brought her to the hospital. It is Ada who rescues Rose when a man makes a determined attempt to kidnap her in broad daylight. But Ada can do nothing when Rose's well-heeled sister turns up at the hostel and, with the connivance of Social Services, whisks her off to an unknown destination. Locked in a rented flat, Rose soon discovers that someone is out to kill her.
Superintendent Diamond, meanwhile, has other problems to deal with. He is in charge of the Murder Squad, but as there has not been a murder for months, his superiors are wondering if the position is surplus to requirements. It is this that leads Diamond to take an unusual interest in two apparent suicides. Near the motorway, an old farmer has put a shotgun under his chin and blown out his brains in his cottage kitchen. In an affluent quarter of Bath, a young German woman has jumped to her death during a party.
Diamond bullies and teases and blunders his way towards the truth. Each case only makes sense in the context of the others. The narrative builds up to a bravura climax, a race against time. In the background, other ingredients thicken the mixture of the plot - another despatch from the front line of the Diamonds' beautifully realised marriage; the politics of modern policing, and the relationship between Diamond and a woman colleague.
The result is vintage Lovesey, which means that the reader is guaranteed intelligent writing, memorable characters and sheer entertainment. The plot is a little too predictable to be one of Lovesey's best, but the pace of the narrative more than makes up for this. It will be a criminal waste if Ada does not reappear in further books in the series.
With her talent for constructive criticism under difficult circumstances, Ada might well have something interesting to say to the copy-editor of UPON A DARK NIGHT. One character's name changes from Treadwell to Turnbull and back again not merely once but twice. Dyrham Park, that splendid National Trust property near the A46, is temporarily renamed Dereham Park.

Killing The Lawyers by Reginald Hill
(HarperCollins, published 20.2.97, £15.99)
As many of his readers may have noticed, Reginald Hill has a sense of humour. It runs like an underground stream through the Dalziel-and- Pascoe series, sometimes bubbling up to the surface and sometimes threatening to drown the more serious elements in the books. This may be one reason why he has come up with a second-string series - one which allows him to be seriously frivolous.
Killing The Lawyers is the third novel featuring Joe Sixsmith, the black, balding private investigator who inhabits an almost entirely fictitious version of Luton. Joe is an innocent abroad, one of nature's amateurs. Accompanied by his feline sidekick Whitey, he prowls the mean streets of Luton and tries, usually unsuccessfully, to make ends meet. The story opens when a little problem with his motor insurance leads him to the town's most prestigious law firm. In their gracious eighteenth- century office he is physically assaulted by a female partner and verbally abused by a male one. When both lawyers are later murdered in swift succession, Joe is naturally a prime suspect.
He has other things on his mind as well. Like Kubla Khan, the civic authorities of Luton have decreed that there should be a stately pleasure dome. Theirs is to be opened on New Year's Day with a celebratory race featuring the beautiful top athlete Zak Oto, one of Luton's most famous citizens. Someone has been threatening her, trying persuade her that it would be wiser not to win. Joe soon discovers that both her entourage and her family are packed with suspects.
Eventually Hill brings together the two halves of his story in the best British basket-weave style. Every element of the plot fits neatly into the pattern - even Whitey's spectacularly soiled litter tray has an unexpected cameo role at the grand opening of the pleasure dome.
It is part of the fun that sometimes the parody teeters close to the edge: 'This was his town. And he was going to leave it better than he found it.' In the end, however, Hill's evident enjoyment and his narrative skill sweep the reader away from the precipice.
Sixsmith's third trip to Hill Country is excellent entertainment. It leaves you hoping that there really is an alternative Luton somewhere out there. We need a world where Joe Sixsmith waits for business either in his office in Robespierre Place or over a pint of Guinness at the Glit (a pub named after Gary Glitter). God knows there are enough real- life cases which would benefit from his honesty and integrity.

Goodfellowe MP by Michael Dobbs
(HarperCollins, published 23.1.97, £16.99)
Dobbs is best known for his HOUSE OF CARDS trilogy - not so much for the novels, perhaps, as for the BBC TV series which was based on them. The scripts were by Andrew Davies and the part of Francis Urquhart, Dobbs's Machiavellian politician, was played by Ian Richardson. What gave both the novels and the TV series their edge was Dobbs's timing and his inside knowledge of the workings of British government. In real life, his jobs have ranged from personal aide to Mrs Thatcher to Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party.
In GOODFELLOWE MP, he returns to the political arena but with a very different protagonist from the theatrically evil FU. Thomas Goodfellowe is a backbencher with a troubled personal life. Rightly or wrongly, few politicians are nowadays considered to be people of integrity and independence: Goodfellowe is both.
At the start of the novel, he is up a certain creek and on the verge of losing his paddle. A drink-drive conviction has ruined his hopes of high office. Even his reselection as a parliamentary candidate is in doubt. He has a mushrooming overdraft. His wife is in a nursing home. His son is dead. His daughter is a rebellious schoolgirl. Everything he does seems doomed - even an altruistic attempt to help a young Chinese neighbour rebounds on his head.
Far worse is on the way when Goodfellowe joins a parliamentary committee considering the new Press Bill. There is a whiff of corruption in the air, and Goodfellowe doesn't like the stink. Soon he is on a collision course, not only with his own party but also the Prime Minister and, worst of all, with a newspaper proprietor named Freddy Corsa. Corsa and the shadowy multi-national interests which are backing him will brook no interference: they have reasons of their own for wanting the Press Bill to become law.
The result of all this is a novel which is rarely less than entertaining. Unpleasant people (like FU) are generally easier to make interesting than nice ones. But Goodfellowe is an endearing character, a man with nothing to lose but his integrity. The plot is simple and predictable, but as usual Dobbs is excellent on what he calls 'the great editing process of power'. There is a particularly fine climax on the floor of the House of Commons.
It is a pity that the narrative is so slow-moving in the first part of the book and that the story is not stronger. The names have a curiously old-fashioned emblematic quality. (A weak and venal whip is called Lionel Lillicrap.) Dobbs's writing, too, when he strays away from the politics, may not be to everybody's taste. The villain, Corsa, for example, has 'storm-whipped eyes'. The eyes of the villainess, on the other hand, are 'like diamond-drilling bits'. The voice of this remarkable lady 'smouldered like sulphur'. All these achievements pale into insignificance beside those of the Prime Minister - 'a man whose eyebrows resembled two ferrets locked in coitus'. Phew.
It's easy to nitpick. It would be even easier to ignore the very real virtues of GOODFELLOWE MP - the strong (if uncomplicated) characterisation, a topical subject, a fine sense of background and a straightforward narrative. It's more than likely that Goodfellowe, like FU, will end up on television for these reasons. I look forward to further novels in what will no doubt be a series.

Perfectly Criminal edited by Martin Edwards 
An Anthology of Short Stories by Members of the Crime Writers' Association 
(Severn House, 1996; £16.99)
When the first CWA Anthology appeared forty years ago, its editor commented that the outlook for the crime short story was bleak. The outlook may still be bleak, but this anthology shows that the crime short story has not only survived but in some cases flourished.
There are nineteen contributors and, as I am one of them, this must be a partial review in both senses of the word. The collection includes highly skilled examples of this satisfying sub-genre from such veterans as Catherine Aird, Reginald Hill, H.R.F. Keating and Peter Lovesey. Susan Moody's "Moving On" is creepily enigmatic, while Val McDermid's Kate Brannigan exercises the perennial right of private investigators to have a flexible moral code. Lindsey Davis - or rather Croton the wrestler - solves the apparent murder of Pythagoras in "Abstain from Beans".
Both Kate Charles and Martin Edwards reflect ironically and skilfully on the lot of the crime writer. There are strong stories from such reliable writers as Eileen Dewhurst, John Malcolm and Tony Wilmot. Keith Wright, the one serving police officer among the authors, contributes a deceptively simple story which packs perhaps more emotional punch than any of the others. Two particularly interesting stories are by authors who are new to me - Matt Coward's "Bits", a plausible tale of suburban crime and unexpected punishment; and Gosta Gillberg's "The Perfect Imperfect", which is dark, Scandinavian and wholly effective.
It is both invidious and - in such a strong anthology - difficult to pick favourites. However, if you are unfortunate enough to have time to read only a few of the stories in this collection, I would advise you to choose the following three. Lesley Grant-Adamson's "This Way Nobody Gets the Blame" is one of the shortest and also one of the most successful - particularly noteworthy for its elegant plotting. By contrast, Peter Lewis's "Scots Bluid" is the longest in the book: a dose of Post-Modernism from north of the border, infused with a sly wit reminiscent of Robert Player's. Finally, no browser should miss Ian Rankin's "Herbert in Motion", which won the 1996 CWA Short Story Dagger. Rankin takes the reader behind the scenes at the Tate Gallery and 10 Downing Street; and the reader may be surprised by what is lurking there.
Martin Edwards is to be congratulated on assembling such a satisfying and varied anthology. All the stories share the theme of the perfect crime. But they share nothing else - demonstrating yet again that what is important is not what you do but the way that you do it.