Murder is causing a headache in Migraine-sur-Mer
My recommendation for summer reading this year is Death by Page-Turner, a whodunnit by Janice Wilberforce. It tells the story of Lulu Sarson, the glamorous literary critic, who is found dead in suspicious circumstances beside the pool at her holiday villa, just outside the town of Migraine-sur-Mer in the south of France.
The chief suspect is the author JP Colman, whose novel The Remorseful Sea was included in Lulu’s list of recommended holiday reading.
Colman was enraged that she described his deadly serious work as “a delicious bit of escapism, which will help to while away the hours in the departure lounge”.
As Death by Page-Turner proceeds, the suspects mount up. Inspector Frank Gruff, a tetchy Scotland Yard detective renting a nearby villa, is called in to help the local police. He is tetchy because he has an irritating insect bite on his knuckle. “There’s something odd here,” he muses, surveying the crime scene. “Why is the body not lying face down in the pool, as in all decent crime novels?”
New twists keep emerging. It turns out that Lulu’s anti-diarrhoea pills have been tampered with and one of the sun-lounger’s legs has been sawn through. Wilberforce deploys the clues with skill. What is the significance of the stain of sun-block on page 37 of the William Boyd paperback? And what of the bloodstains on the Kindle? Was it Lulu’s blood or had she used it to swat mosquitoes? Is the murderous-looking waiter at the beach-side bar actually a murderer?
The victim was last seen alive standing outside the ice cream shop in Migraine, dithering over which of the 48 flavours to choose. How did the killer know that the combination of pistachio and mango would prove fatal? All is neatly wrapped up in the last few pages and the moral seems to be: never recommend holiday reading.
I am sorry to report yet another schism in the Church of England. Last week the General Synod voted to allow members of the clergy to wear jeans and trainers when conducting services, to make the church more accessible and relevant, but now war has broken out between the Levi fundamentalists and the more progressive “pre-shrunk” tendency.
The fundamentalists base their claim on a passage in the Old Testament which says: “Let thy raiment be of the cloth of Levi.” So far, nobody has been able to track down this passage. Levi-ites say pre-shrunk jeans are an abomination and those who resort to distressing them artificially are doing the devil’s work. The garment should be allowed to fade naturally, even if being out of fashion makes the wearer suffer agonies.
At the other extreme, you have the torn-again Christians who insist on having their trousers ripped, so that when then they pray, their knees are “in touch” with the earth.
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is inviting both sides to come together in a spirit of conciliation and to “reach out to denim.” I understand that if parishes are so badly divided that they become unmanageable, the Churchhurch of England will send in flying corduroy bishops to take control.rol.
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion Some of our cavemen ancestors must surely have been insomniacs. There’s a new theory going round that we sleep less well when we are older because our hunter-gatherer forefathers slept in shifts as a survival technique.
On t the contrary, I believe that what we hav have inherited from prehistoric man is a tendency to be a bore about sleep. I bet, in any group, there was one pe person who said he (or she) could manag manage on only four hours a night and th then go out and do a full day’s gather gathering.
I be believe that as soon as man created fire h he sat round it and told the others abou about this weird dream he had in wh which he came face to face with a wo woolly mammoth and suddenly rea realised he was totally naked and ha had forgotten to bring his spear.
I am convinced that early woman accused early man of snoring. And I am also convinced that she would have a brilliant thought in the middle of the night, get up and paint on the wall of the cave and then find in the morning that it was complete rubbish.