Mystery Man
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Review
Bateman is no slacker when it comes to producing comic crime masterpieces. --The Mirror
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
Product Description
A superbly gripping and blackly funny mystery by the king of the comic crime caper.
He's the Man With No Name and the owner of No Alibis, a mystery bookshop in Belfast. But when a detective agency next door goes bust, the agency's clients start calling into his shop asking him to solve their cases. It's not as if there's any danger involved. It's an easy way to sell books to his gullible customers and Alison, the beautiful girl in the jewellery shop across the road, will surely be impressed. Except she's not - because she can see the bigger picture. And when they break into the shuttered shop next door on a dare, they have their answer. Suddenly they're catapulted along a murder trail which leads them from small-time publishing to Nazi concentration camps and serial killers...
He's the Man With No Name and the owner of No Alibis, a mystery bookshop in Belfast. But when a detective agency next door goes bust, the agency's clients start calling into his shop asking him to solve their cases. It's not as if there's any danger involved. It's an easy way to sell books to his gullible customers and Alison, the beautiful girl in the jewellery shop across the road, will surely be impressed. Except she's not - because she can see the bigger picture. And when they break into the shuttered shop next door on a dare, they have their answer. Suddenly they're catapulted along a murder trail which leads them from small-time publishing to Nazi concentration camps and serial killers...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Confederacy of Eejits,
By
This review is from: Mystery Man (Hardcover)
There's plenty of humour to be found and a great deal of potential for further development (and even a rumoured TV series) in Bateman's creation of the Mystery Man. A small independent bookseller, the "hero" is the owner of Belfast's premiere crime specialist bookstore No Alibis ('Murder is our Business'), who gets mixed up in a series of misadventures when customers start turning up to the shop looking for him to solve small cases now that the Private Detective next door seems to have closed-up business. Stolen leather trousers and a missing person he can deal with - just about - but when he gets involved in the Case of the Dancing Jew, not to mention mixed up with the girl from the jewellery shop across the road, it takes more than a few Twix and Starbucks coffees to shake him out of his closeted existence.A genuine bookshop in Belfast on Botanic Avenue, No Alibis, its owner and its customers don't get perhaps receive the most flattering of depictions, but this is Bateman's particularly self-deprecatory Belfast type of humour and it's very funny, so it is. A few old jokes/stories/urban legends that have done the rounds for years are dug up and dusted down, the neurotic lead character perhaps owes something to Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (or they've at least shared a ward together at some point), but it's all just a means for Bateman to poke fun at local types - booksellers, publishers, ex-paramilitary taxi drivers, street thugs (Botanic Avenue Irregulars indeed) and local small businessmen - not in a mean spirited way, but in a lightly humorous and sometimes just downright hilarious manner.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A step up for Colin Bateman,
By pikeman "last_man_standing" (an island in the eastern Atlantic) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mystery Man (Paperback)
I have enjoyed Colin Bateman all the way from "Divorcing Jack" - I have even forgiven him the rubbish that was "Maid of the Mist" - but to an extent in the last 5/6 years he's got a bit formulaic.This is a real break from that though - the hero is a brilliant character - weirdo verging(?) on autistic - but genuinly interesting and clever. Like all Colin Bateman books the plot is secondary to the one-liners and the jokes - but that was also true for PG Woodhouse and so it ain't a criticism!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Starts well before falling,
By
This review is from: Mystery Man (Paperback)
Mystery man is an interesting book. It starts promisingly with a good set up but then falls into a bit of a pit as more detail about the main character (whose name we never learn) and his neurotic nature are revealed.The character is the owner of a specialist crime bookshop in Belfast who takes on an investigative role when the private detective next door vanishes. But then the character gradually reveals himself to be a repressed, almost autistic, child of neglecting parents with an absurd number of foibles that start off mild and believable but become more and more extreme as we go. Ultimately it is over the top and detracts from the focus of the novel as a crime story. It's first person and it is well written. Some of the characters do come across as a bit stereotypical but that might just be because we are seeing through the eyes of the nameless lead. I just found that the pace of character building was slow and over-dominant.
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