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Ethelred Tressider is an author. In fact he's got three different identities – a crime fiction novelist featuring the morose Sgt Fairfax, a romance writer going by the name of Amanda Collins who has a fixation about oral and maxillofacial surgeons, and finally the author of a historical series set in the time of Richard II. Sadly (perhaps) none of them are any good at writing sex scenes! Ethelred's not famous, though. And he has an agent in the shape of the formidable Elsie Thirkettle, who has no intention of allowing any of his rather minor fame to go to his head. In fact, Elsie never hides her contempt for her writing charges, but she's forever snapping at their heels to stop them slacking. The fact that her percentage keeps her in chocolate and eccentric clothes might just have something to do with this . . . And our poor beleaguered hero is also having a mid-life crisis. He's living in a rather poky flat in the back of beyond in Sussex where he retreated to from London after his marriage to Geraldine failed. But then she turns up dead nearby, and his dull life is turned upside down. Ethelred sets out to discover who bumped off Geraldine. He's accompanied and hindered by Elsie, who is always more worried about where her next chocolate fix is coming from THE HERRING SELLER'S APPRENTICE is an absolute delight from start to finish. First-time novelist LC Tyler skewers so politely but ever-so-forcibly all the genre clichés you can shake a stick at (oops, sorry, cliché alert there as well!) I was particularly fond of the point at which Elsie elbows in to give us her point of view: "If there's one thing that gets up my sodding nose, it's starting a new chapter and finding that the poxy narrator has changed. Changing the typeface just adds insult to injury, as if the author (silly tosser) reckons the reader won't recognize it's somebody else without double underlining everything and putting it in twenty-four-point sodding Haettenschweiler. Or whatever." I read THE HERRING SELLER'S APPRENTICE on a train journey and had great difficulty restraining myself from nudging fellow passengers in the ribs and reading out the choicest bits (of which there are many). Open the book at random and Tyler's elegant wit will have you smiling. The book, part of Macmillan's New Writing series, is one of the cleverest parodies I've ever read. I don't know where Tyler goes next, but if you can write prose and dialogue like he does, it's bound to be worth reading.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, October 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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