Simon Brett

• Born: October 28, 1945
• Place of Birth: Worcester Park, Surrey, England

Simon Brett is a versatile writer, equally at home with mystery, children’s literature, radio, television, and theatrical drama.

TYPES OF PLOT: Amateur sleuth; cozy

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Charles Paris, 1975-; Mrs. Pargeter, 1986-; Fethering, 2000-

Contribution

For Simon Brett's first mystery series character, Charles Paris, Brett looked to the middle-aged actors with whom he worked. They fascinated him, in part because he found them to be so obsessed with themselves. “Somebody defined an actor as someone whose eyes glaze over when the conversation moves away from him,” he said. He created Charles as an amalgam of many of the actors he has known. Brett described Charles to an interviewer: “If anyone starts attacking the theater, he will leap to the defense, but he does have this kind of detachment so that he can sit on the sidelines and . . . see the share of idiocy and greed and all the worst human values.”

Brett is a past chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association (1986-1987). In 2000, he became president of the prestigious Detection Club. He received nominations for Edgar Awards in 1984 for his “Big Boy, Little Boy,” A Shock to the System (1984) in 1986, and “Ways to Kill a Cat” in 1998. In 2016, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his contribution to English literature.

Biography

Born in a southern suburb of London shortly after the end of World War II, Simon Anthony Lee Brett is the son of John Brett, a surveyor, and Margaret Lee, a schoolteacher. His secondary education was at Dulwich College, where he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to study history. He graduated with first-class honors, but only after serving as president of the University Dramatic Society and director of the Oxford Late-Night Revue on the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival. He married Lucy Victoria McLaren in 1971, and they subsequently raised two sons and a daughter.

In 1968, Brett became a radio producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He also began writing plays. His first production, Mrs. Gladys Moxon, debuted in London in 1970. His next play, Did You Sleep Well? was staged the following year, and another, Third Person, in 1972. His interest in plays gave way to radio and television scripts, earning him the 1973 Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for the best radio feature script, and then he decided to branch out into novels. While with the BBC, he produced the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), a radio series.

The BBC assigned Brett to produce a series of adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Brett says he worked closely with the writer adapting the books into scripts, and his experience “sort of demystified the genre.” This association with the Wimsey project showed him that a good mystery is a series of dialogues, with the sleuth interviewing various characters: “If you can make the dialogue interesting, there is usually one fact that has to emerge from these encounters; . . . the top wasn’t on the bottle of whiskey . . . and you can make an interesting scene around that.” Although he was unsure of his ability to create the puzzle plots typical of mysteries, he knew he could write dialogue and decided to write a mystery.

Brett published his first mystery, Cast, in Order of Disappearance, the start of the Charles Paris series, in 1975. In 1986, after eleven years of producing a Charles Paris novel annually, Brett created a new series featuring Mrs. Pargeter. In 2000, he started a third, featuring two women in the coastal town of Fethering. However, Brett continued adding to the Charles Paris series with novels like The Cinderella Killer (2014) and A Deadly Habit (2018).

The Mrs. Pargeter series began with A Nice Class of Corpse (1986) and continued for decades with Mrs Pargeter's Plot (1996), Mrs Pargeter's Principle (2015), and Mrs Pargeter's Patio (2023).

Analysis

Simon Brett likes to weave irony and humor into his stories, commenting obliquely on the aspects of British society in which each series is set. In the Charles Paris novels, he looks at the egomaniacs of the theater, the young performers clawing their way up and the older performers easing their way down. With Mrs. Pargeter, the aging but sexually attractive widow gives readers a look at various underworld characters, whom she calls on to help her with certain investigative tasks, both savory and unsavory. In the Fethering series, he puts together a middle-aged, conservative, and quiet divorced woman forced into retiring from the Home Office and a jarring neighbor with a wild, loose, outgoing personality. Here, there is less commentary on a facet of society than more of a contrast between two opposites.

In stories outside of these series, Brett features weaker characters who react to life’s problems by turning to crime. The most popular of these was A Shock to the System, in which oil company executive Graham Marshall’s career is threatened, and he resorts to murder. This 1984 novel was made into a 1990 film starring Michael Caine.

Brett’s mysteries have been categorized as “British cozies,” which leaves the author “amazed and amused,” although he acknowledges that he and other British writers have not produced much fiction in the hard-boiled genre, although British readers do enjoy this genre. Brett has said that he writes about amateur sleuths rather than police detectives because the novels about the latter are essentially just puzzles, where all that matters is identifying the murderer. He thinks that the detectives in these works have become interchangeable characters and that nearly no good puzzles are left. With an amateur sleuth, he finds more leeway to describe some part of the world in the background, such as the milieu of theater productions, horse racing, or the wine trade.

Dead Giveaway

In the eleventh Charles Paris novel, Dead Giveaway (1985), Charles is invited to be a contestant on the pilot of a television game show similar to What’s My Line? (1950-1967), where panelists guess who he is and what he does. The faded actor is resigned to realizing this is a challenge because few people would recognize him. As the big wheel is spun at the climax of the show, the sleazy, skirt-chasing host falls dead, poisoned by cyanide in his gin. The host had upset many people, providing many suspects for his murder. One of them, who had worked on a show about poisons and had handled the host’s glass, enlists Charles’s aid. Charles knows something about the timing of the poisoning because he was secretly sipping the gin earlier. As usual, the novel features a healthy dollop of irony and wit.

A Nice Class of Corpse

Mrs. Pargeter has been compared to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, but Brett described her as “not quite so accepting as Miss Marple. She has her standards, and she does not like pretension. She’s very happy to put people down.” Her elegance is tempered with flashiness.

In A Nice Class of Corpse (1986), the first work in the series, Brett mixes Mrs. Pargeter’s systematic detection method with entries in a criminal’s diary. Several deaths have been attributed to accidents that happen only to older adults, but Mrs. Pargeter suspects murder, and the diary confirms her belief for the reader. She finds fake jewels in a safe, catches a thieving employee of the Devereux seaside hotel, and uncovers the diary’s writer.

The Body on the Beach

The Fethering series begins in The Body on the Beach (2000) with the growing friendship of two opposites, forcibly retired civil servant Carole Seddon and flamboyant flower child Jude. Carole finds a body on the beach, his throat slashed, but when she returns with the police, the body is gone, and they write her off as hysterical. It does not help that she washed her dog and kitchen floor before calling them. The next day, a dead teenager washes up on the beach, and the grieving mother wants it kept quiet. Jude and Carole question residents and discover tensions among regular patrons of the local pub.

Brett’s strength is the depth of his characterizations, although it seems a bit over the top to withhold any details of Jude’s prior life or even her last name. The matching of opposite personalities works well, however, and both make a good contrast to Mrs. Pargeter.

Principal Series Characters:

• Charles Paris is a broken-down, alcoholic actor with a libertine nature. Forty-seven years old, he has been divorced for fifteen years in the first novel. He gets along well with his former wife, who runs a school for girls. He sometimes takes temporary jobs such as painting houses or helping out his friends. Trying to liven up his routine life, he pursues meaningless sexual encounters and amateur detective work.
• Mrs. Melita Pargeter is the attractive widow of a master criminal who had serious links to the underworld but never got her involved in any nefarious activities. When he died, he left her wealthy and also left her his address book. Her husband’s associates have all gone straight, but they provide a wealth of resources that enable the widow to make copies of jewelry and find vehicles. Mrs. Pargeter lives in an upscale subdivision. The novels’ action tends to happen during the daytime, while the neighborhood husbands are off to work, so it is their wives who experience the uncertainties of living near a sleuth.
• Carole Seddon is a prim and proper resident of Fethering, a self-contained retirement community on the southern coast of England. Divorced shortly after retiring from her career in government service, she is trying to live a quiet life when she is forced to investigate a death on the beach.
• Jude is the bohemian neighbor of Carole Seddon, in Fethering, who becomes involved in her neighbor’s investigation. She uses only one name, has a colorful past, and earns her living from aromatherapy and alternative medicine. Jude is the liberal, emotional side of this pair.

Bibliography

Cannon, Peter. Review of A Hanging in the Hotel, by Simon Brett. Publishers Weekly 251, no. 29 (July 19, 2004): 198.

Fletcher, Connie. Review of Murder in the Museum, by Simon Brett. Booklist 99, no. 17 (May 1, 2003): 1536.

Priestman, Martin. The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

"Simon Brett." British Council Literarure, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/simon-brett. Accessed 20 July 2024.

"Simon Brett - Biography." Simon Brett, www.simonbrett.com/about. Accessed 20 July 2024.