If you’re a fan of any cult media shows – especially British ones of a certain vintage – and also possess even a rudimentary sense of humour, then author Nev Fountain’s “Mervyn Stone Mysteries’ trilogy of books should be right up your street.
Certainly it helps if the reader is familiar with the types of cult show that this book wonderfully evokes: Blakes Seven leaps to mind with its bizarre fashions and memorable characters like Servalan, but Doctor Who is very present as well and there are doses of The Tomorrow People, Star Cops and several others in the make-up of the fictional Vixens in the Void composite. If you know the behind-the-scenes references to those shows then you’ll enjoy matching character trait to real life actor counterpart, and each convention anecdote to its equivalent real life tale; but if you don’t (and I’ve never been to a scifi convention myself) there’s still plenty to enjoy
The book is lightly written with both style and humour present in almost every line, and you’ll find that you’ve devoured half the book in no time at all and without any effort, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The writer obviously knows his subject inside out (he’s been involved in Doctor Who fandom for a long time and even does regular stints hosting sessions at Who fan conventions) and skewers it with a wonderfully accurate aim, but at the same time with clear love and affection for the subject that should protect him against receiving fan fatwas from all but the most humourless obsessives. Basically, if the description of the lead character as looking “like a hedge which has been dragged through a man backwards” and the withering verdict on another as being “Scrappy Doo made flesh” bring smiles and nods of recognition to your face, then you should love the other 286 pages. Given the mix of weirdness and reality, crime and science fiction and ultimately farce there’s a slightly irresistible tendency to compare this with Douglas Adams’ writing, which is intended as a high compliment.
The only trouble with this book and its two sequels in the “Mervyn Stone Mysteries” – DVD Extras Include: Murder and Cursed Among Sequels – is that they are bizarrely hard to get hold off. For one thing, they’re the sort of genre-busting book (crime? mystery? fiction? humour? science fiction? television?) that means they could be located in half a dozen different places in a modern book store. But the chances are that they won’t be in any of them: despite having only been released in May it seems that retailers are down to their last two or three copies, even the obvious online sellers. And when they do have them, that doesn’t mean they’ll have them out on display: the sole London outlet I could find that had them listed as being in stock (a branch of Waterstones in Chiswick, West London) did its level best to keep them safe from prying buyers’ eyes by having them crated up in a storeroom that no one seemed to know about. Actually that error was in my favour, since it had kept them safe and sound for months so that they were still there when I enquired and found the one member of staff who remembered them and could unearth copies for me. If those copies hadn’t been ‘misfiled’ then they’d probably have sold out long ago; and there’s a happy ending in that the newly uncovered stock is now back out on the main store shelves for others to stumble across. (Shelved under science fiction, as it happens – despite the books having no actual SF aspects. The bookselling trade moves in mysterious ways.)
On the basis of the first of the three books, I’d thoroughly recommend them for both geeks and non-geeks alike. I’m certainly looking forward to moving on to the others.
[UPDATE: All three Mervyn Stone books are now available from Amazon.co.uk as Kindle e-books, which means I can warmly recommend them knowing that they're now much easier to pick up. And you should.]
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