The Body on the Beach ~ Fethering #1 by Simon Brett

When a British writer creates a murder mystery series with alliterative titles, it is clearly meant to be funny. And so, when I picked up THE BODY ON THE BEACH I believed it would be an entertaining…beach read.

However, that is not quite true, for it turned out to be much more than that.

It begins in a comic vein. Carole Seddon, a retired lady in her fifties, is not exactly enjoying her over-quiet life in Fethering, a charming resort town on the south coast of England, which (if you happen to be British) you will realize is the sort of place that people  will flock to after their retirement, But she nevertheless is well contented with her lot. For Carole’s life is one of sensible containment. In her view, one must never ask for too much, or one will be disappointed. One should invest one’s money sensibly. One should never be extravagant, so one buys  clothes that while not exactly in style will last for years. The only extravagant thing her parents bequeathed to her is her name, with the extra “e” on the end. And so you can see that Carole would not enjoy her retirement as that would be too strong an adjective for her extremely well-regulated emotional life.

Enter Jude, the new next-door neighbor. We don’t know what Jude’s age is, but somehow I have the impression she is younger than fifty-plus Carole. We also don’t know what Jude’s surname (last name) is, as she unaccountably fails to reveal it. The conservative ladies of the prosperous village of Fethering find her first name, Jude, so disconcerting that when they pronounce it they furl it in quotation marks. (It turns out that Jude is short for Judith.) As the reader will discover, Jude is an expert at keeping her secrets, which is quite an achievement in a gossipy little village.

The book opens with a body found on the beach by Carole Seddon, while out walking with her dog Gulliver. It will surprise no-one that Carole lives a life of fixed routines, and so when she returns home, the first thing she does is to give Gulliver a good bath, and then, noticing that the naughty dog has left muddy footprints all over her kitchen floor, she proceeds to give it a good clean. And so it has to be a good hour before she contacts the police. Carole, always conscientious, provide the authorities with a detailed account of the body, including his missing tooth and two strange holes found in his neck. Unfortunately, by the time the police arrive, this corpse has vanished. And so they insult Carole (in a very British way) for wasting police time and never return. But Carole did see the body on the beach. Fortunately, her new neighbor Jude believes her, and so the two ladies put their heads together to solve the crime, as obviously the police are not going to do it for them.

What makes this volume great is Simon Brett’s sensitive portrayal of heartbreak and the ruination of life via substance abuse. Of course, the body that Carole found that fateful morning was a person, with a hero-worshipping son and a long-suffering wife who are waiting for him to return. Of course, the wife is fobbed off by the police when she reports him missing, and so she has no idea that her husband is now dead. When the son realizes that this body is his father, he nearly has a nervous breakdown. And it is that way of drawing out the complex emotions of grief, especially for a young man on the cusp of adulthood, that makes this volume so compelling.

Sooo, if you like British humor, and you are looking for a bit of whimsy to your crime dramas as well as unexpected depths, this is the book for you.

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