Mystery Man - Colin Bateman

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 jewelry shop across the road - it takes more than a few Twix and Starbucks' coffees to get 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-deprecating 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 (making this more like A Confederacy of Eejits), 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.

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