The Coming Day

Book excerpt: The new book in the Francis and Gordon Jones mysteries set in 1950’s NorfolkA witty spoof of the classic boy’s detective stories. Following on from The Voice of Doom (ISBN: 97817893285) There is something freshly appealing and charming about the Francis and Gordon Jones mysteries, compared by some to the works of E F Benson, with inevitable nods to Dorothy Sayers and Conan Doyle. The second in the series of their detective adventures, The Coming Day, has five new intriguing cases for the intrepid investigators to solve. A missing girl in a Cornish seaside town … the mysterious death of a man dressed as a woman in a fleapit cinema … the unravelling of an old murder trial… the arrival of a foreign doctor coinciding with communal disaster … the search for a missing photograph. With its host of regular characters in the little Norfolk village of Branlingham, including the Revd. Challis, Mrs Jones of Bramley apple pie and curious corset-making fame, the terrifyingly autocratic Lady Darting, the snooping postmistress Miss Simms and ravishingly handsome actor Rufus Wolfe, Wright has created what the Bookhound calls ‘a literary delight … Brilliantly funny, deliciously wicked and thoroughly enjoyable’. Inspired by Anthony Wilson’s famous 1950s radio characters Norman and Henry Bones, these are sunny stories with an irresistible mingling of comedy and, sometimes unexpectedly, deeper themes. In the current glut of crime writing, they are unlike anything else.