Freeze My Margarita by
Lauren Henderson
pbk out August 98
(Hutchinson)
at £10
Lauren Henderson's fourth comic crime novel begins with a terrific joke, set in a nightclub for fetishists, as trendy sculptor and accidental detective Sam Jones meets an old friend from art school who persuades her to create some mobiles for a London production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Sam is not pleased to discover that her best friend's awful girlfriend,
Helen, is in the play, but soon finds some soul-mates amongst the cast and crew - notably Hugo, an actor with a Lord Peter Wimsey drawl, a sub-Wildean line in quips, well-made buttocks and impeccable taste in nail varnish. If Hugo turns out to be heterosexual, he has no chance of avoiding Sam's voracious embrace.
She's enjoying her first experience of set-design, but - being one of
those amateur sleuths who can hardly leave home without stumbling over corpses - she begins to get an oh-no-not-again feeling when a long-dead body is discovered in the sump under the theatre.
The first death is not the last, nor is it the only disturbing event to
disrupt the production. Accidents and acts of sabotage pile up as opening night approaches, and Sam realises that in the intense, jealous world of the thesps, everyone has secret shames and secret agendas.
For all the drugs, sex, designer labels and hip palare, this is a
thoroughly old-fashioned, closed-circle whodunit, complete with clues (both physical and verbal), red herrings and double bluffs. It's light stuff, with nothing in particular to say about its characters, or about life in general. That's not a criticism: there's plenty of room in modern crime fiction for a bit of light relief, particularly when it is provided by a protagonist like Sam Jones. Selfish and immature, she's not necessarily someone you'd want to know in real life, but confined to print she is lively company.
Although Henderson's writing is occasionally a bit lazy, a bit automatic, much of the time she produces sharp, sparkly dialogue and appositely acid asides. Of a director manqué, Sam notes that "He had as much sense of humour as Strindberg after a particularly nasty fight with the wife".
The central mystery here is not as strong as it was in Henderson's
previous book (The Black Rubber Dress). Sam doesn't actually do an awful lot of detecting, and the motives, when eventually revealed, are a little too soft - not for real life, but for the requirements of puzzle fiction. Throughout, the plot is largely overwhelmed by the background.
Indeed, how much you enjoy this novel (rather than the series as a whole)probably depends on how interesting you find the theatrical setting, which is the dominant feature of the book. Theatre fans, I'm sure, will love it all. If, on the other hand, you are of the opinion that the theatre is a tedious anachronism which should have been put to sleep on the day they invented the wireless, you're going to find yourself skipping some of the lengthier passages of showbiz fizz.
Freeze My Margarita by
Lauren Henderson