A literary agency receives a manuscript from a novelist determined to remain anonymous and persuade one of their unpublishable authors to pretend they wrote it for the US book tour. With arson, serpentine Southern services and sex and skulduggery in Oxford, this is a classic farce.
There are some brilliant lines: the fat agent Frensic stuffs himself with food because his "appearance tended to limit his sensual pleasures to putting things into himself rather than into other people." (p3) And near the end, when someone suggests that the epithet 'late' shouldn't be applied to a man who is still alive the riposte is that it scarcely seems suitable for one who is dead. But it was originally published in 1977 and some if the stereotypes, such as the gay publisher with a boyfriend called Sven, seem predictable and laboured.
November 2015; 380 pages
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