So there we have the police playing a comedic role while two organizations of bad guys set about trying to destroy one another. Not surprisingly the lesser of the evil bad guys prevails. This is the first of a proposed crime series, set in Brighton. We begin in 1951, with the ‘Middle Street Massacre,’ where Inspector Steine (pronounced ‘Steen’) believes he has wiped out crime in the town, when two major gangs manage to wipe each other out. He has rather lived off this event, which was made into a film and we meet up with him, six years later, enjoying a pleasant and delusional existence as a minor celebrity. There is a murder, a con man, and a criminal mastermind in Brighton, a beach town on the English coast in1957. Only young Constable Twitten has a chance to solve the crime if his bungling co-workers don’t stop him. Set in Britain, it could almost be a noir mystery given some of the dialogue, although there were plenty of corny characters that would have no place with the jaded cast of a true old time detective novel. There’s also the minor fact that the book is clearly meant to be laugh-out-loud funny, which it is. It’s a comedic mystery.

This book is utterly hilarious and made me laugh out loud quite a bit. The characters are endearing though rather bumbling - as the reader is told more or less from the beginning who the villains are, I did spend a lot of time wondering how the twain would meet! There were some really hilarious sequences and asides that I enjoyed, such as the relationship between the governor of Broadmoor and his 'Carlotta'. This is the third Constable Twitten book. These are funny cop stories set in Brighton, England in the 1950s. Twitten is a very clever upper class twit who is obscessed with being a police detective. His fellow policemen resent his smarty pants stuff. I have to admit, with the Keystone Cops scenarios, the vaudeville theater show and general language, the period described felt more like the 1920s/1930s than 1957. Regardless, if a cozy mystery with a grand swath of farce is your cup of tea, then this book is definitely for you. Constable Twitten is the kind of young recruit no-one welcomes into their police station. We will know a few like him our job histories. Too clever by far; far too clever for his own good.I am grateful to author Lynne Truss, Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc and Netgalley for having provided a free advanced reader e-copy of this book. Their generosity, however, has not influenced this review - the words of which are mine alone. For this Waiting on Wednesday I will be looking at a book that I have no doubt will be one of the funniest novels of this year, The Man That Got Away, by Lynne Truss. The Man That Got Away is the second book in the Constable Twitten series, which follows on from last year’s comedic tour-de-force, A Shot in the Dark. The story doesn’t start as well as it might. It begins with a note from the author explaining that she has written this book exclusively for the purpose of joining a particular writer’s club. It’s likely intended to be a tongue-in-cheek reference, but it comes across as an in-joke between people other than me. I almost feel as though I have walked into a party to which I am not invited.

Which such a fun striking cover of cows grazing in front of the Royal Pavilion, it was impossible to miss this quirky period mystery on prominent display in my local library.When I saw this title, I immediately thought of the old copyeditor’s joke about the Judy Garland song of the same name: He must have been an English teacher. Since the author of this second Constable Twitten mystery is none other than the perpetrator of that definitive usage guide, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I eagerly awaited mention of the who/that conundrum. Truss enjoys telling these stories. She drops in asides to the reader; "As the reader will have gathered, the opening of the zebra crossing at noon on Friday is destined to bring many strands of our narrative together." We are all in this together enjoying the fun.