A Shot in the Dark: A Twitten Mystery (A Constable Twitten Mystery)

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There is no doubt that A Shot in the Dark is a clever novel with a great sense of the absurd so I have awarded it 3* for these merits as I personally didn't enjoy it. I found the arch tone grating and slightly condescending and the humour was wasted on me as I didn't find it funny. The whole idea of an extremely stupid policeman, Inspector Steyne, landing on his feet at every turn is, as I said, clever but distinctly unappealing to me. 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. I also thought that the book was trying to be a little too "P G Woodhouse", and felt that this also didn't help the overall experience. The story takes place only months after Twitten’s previous adventure uncovering the murder of a famed theater critic in A Shot in the Dark, but he’s been given no credit for that one, and indeed his revelations tend to be dismissed as irrelevant or just impossible, making life much more difficult for an ambitious young copper. This book definitely has one of the more unusual titles of any book reviewed in recent memory. It definitely gives a lot of information right off the bat and lets you know precisely the common thread of the book.

My favorite moment is when Twitten is being held at gunpoint, and he is so pedantic and obnoxious that he bores his assailant out of shooting him. There are a huge number of characters in the book, which is fairly typical in mysteries where you need plenty of possible suspects. The law enforcement in this book are skewered for being easily distracted by tea and sweet treats. One man is killed and police can’t determine who the body belongs to despite finding the man’s initials on his belongings. I loved the narrative style and listened to it another time, almost completely once I finished it. In this audio mode, the author's subtle humour really shines through and makes the whole thing hilarious. It is almost as if the characters were written to be listened to, some of the jokes being too subtle for me until I heard the tone in which it was delivered. I was attracted to this book because it was described as the beginning of a new mystery series featuring a brilliant and driven police detective, Constable Twitten, and written by a New York Times best-selling author, Lynne Truss. That this first book featured a theatre critic who holds the keys to an unsolved murder made this doubly appealing to me.As an often clueless and sometimes provincial American, I feel I may have missed some of the British humor and allusions in this novel by Truss. But no matter. I caught enough to have had a good deal of fun reading this mystery. the characters—there's the suggestion of something likeable in Twitten, but she insists on making him so bally annoying as well. It's hard to commit to a series when you're low key annoyed by everyone.

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.

The Constable Twitten Series in Order (4 Books)

The mystery was a good one with multiple facets, all leading to the climax. Twitten kept his nose to the grindstone while the others simply went about their business. It was extremely well-plotted, depending on perfect timing. The characters are to die for m each having thoroughly fleshed out personalities and behaving as the reader would expect in all situations. In many ways it was a comedy of errors, but also well a well-executed plan, which everyone took in stride. In many ways it is outrageously funny, in other ways to close to real life. It is perfect. There is nothing more to say. I did not read the debut in this series, A Shot in the Dark; however, I don’t think that would have made a difference. Stop reading now if you plan to read the series from the beginning, and you don’t want spoilers. Ahh, where to begin?...This is definitely not your usual cozy mystery - mystery for sure, but way more farcical with a grand touch of Keystone Cops. In the wake of two extremely high-profile murder cases, and with the summer of 1957 finally winding down, Constable Twitten is eagerly anticipating a quiet spell at work. But his hoped-for rest is interrupted when he and his colleagues find a trio of bodies, all murdered with the same unusual weapon: a milk bottle. Lynne Truss has such a fun way with the English language which adds so much to these fun cosy crimes books. Sadly I believe this might be the last in the series. It did look like it was coming to a definitive end but then didn't so I'm still holding out hope that Truss will revive the series at a later date.