J is for Joe Murray

 

Running the Lazy Luncheonette is Joe's life. Running the Sanford Third Age Club is his community calling. But his passion is solving mysteries and crimes.

The central character of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, Joe is a post-war baby boomer, born sometime in the mid 1950s. Although many improvements had been made to living standards, it was still a time of great austerity. In the mining towns of Northern England the men worked long hours for low pay, still waiting for the promised land the government had guaranteed them for their war effort. As boy, Joe knew he would never have to go down the mines; he was guaranteed employment in his father's café. But that did not mean he would have an easy or cushy life. He would be out of bed by five thirty every morning, and he would work until well into the afternoon.

Always intelligent and sharp witted, Joe found escape from the drudgery of real life in the novels of Agatha Christie, Margaret Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers and, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He became a great fan of Poirot, Wimsey, Campion, and he marvelled at Holmes' powers of observation and deduction.

Until he finally left school, Joe borrowed his books from the library. As a teenager, with wages in his pocket, he would cut along to Sanford Market and buy books from the Exchange Stall. Paying two shillings for a secondhand paperback, he would get a shilling back when he returned the book. Joe never pocketed the shilling. Instead he invested in fresh reading matter.

Determined to emulate his great fictional heroes, Joe trained himself to observe others, and he had to ideal environment to develop his skills: the Lazy Luncheonette. A working man's café in the midst of a busy retail area, it fed a wide variety of folk, many of them regulars, just as many passing-by.

He realised that people were creatures of habit and at first his observations and deductions were the easy kind. The miner turning out in his second-best suit, hands clean, face scrubbed, had some kind of appointment; maybe a court appearance, or hospital check-up. The woman who usually turned out in a wraparound overall, but instead showed up wearing a frock and cardigan, was likewise not going to or coming from work.

As his powers developed, Joe made deeper deductions. The scrubbed fingernails of the mechanic, and the straight seams of the shop assistant's stockings told him this was someone with a date. The middle-aged chap suddenly carrying a stick and switching from pork chops to a chicken salad, was probably suffering from gout.

He was delighted to learn than more often than not, his deductions were spot on, and from there, it was only one short step to solving the minor and later, major crimes that would gain him the reputation as Sanford's finest sleuth.

He married fairly late in life, at the age of 37, and it was partnership doomed from the word go. Alison, his wife, made efforts to change him, without success, and they gradually drifted into that vacuum which precedes an amicable separation. They finally divorced some time after the Millennium. Alison moved to the Canary Islands and Joe returned to his singular life, with the three Cs support: The cafe, the club and the crimes.

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The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords