A Light-Hearted Look At Murder
Mark Watson Chatto & Windus, 313pp, £11.99
It’s difficult to know what Mark Watson was trying to do here. From a publisher’s point of view, it’s an easy sell: the former Cambridge Footlighter has already made a name for himself as a stand-up comedian. But for Watson, presumably an intelligent man, the rewards of being associated with this book are less clear.
Despite its title and the neon pink and blue decoration on the cover, it’s not funny. It seems to be trying to make a point about the shallowness of British humour, yet one of the main characters, Andreas, is a painfully two-dimensional German stereotype. The prose is so workmanlike that it seems impossible that a successful comic could have written it.
As a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Andreas takes a shine to Rose, the fifth tallest woman in Britain. In order to get to know her better, he ends up impersonating Hitler at a corporate entertainment night. His act turns out to be a big hit, and before he knows it he’s won the girl and they’re living in London running a professional lookalike agency. Needless to say, things eventually go wrong, and all is revealed through a series of letters from prison 20 years later. But trust me, it’s not worth the tedious journey to find out how.
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