It's the first novel in a series of Dad's Army murder mysteries. Its two main characters, Edward Lowe and John Le Breton, are respectively Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier. They're not even given the thinnest of disguises. The book couldn't have been more explicit in its homage without sending out a marching band with flags and banners. Our heroes aren't actually filming Dad's Army itself, because the original TV show is never explicitly named, but the characterisation of the main duo is the novel's most distinctive feature and you'll be missing a lot if you don't know what I'm talking about because you've never watched any 1960s-70s UK sitcoms. (There are also other reminders of Captain George Mainwaring, Sergeant Arthur Wilson at al, though, e.g. someone with the same surname as Clive Dunn's first wife.)

The front cover calls it "the best cosy crime novel since The Appeal", but I found this quote misleading. The whodunnits I'm used to (Agatha Christie, etc.) do indeed tend to be cosy, but this book's murders hurt. It opens with the lead-up to someone's death and I cared. It makes a difference that this book takes seriously the victims' deaths, the impact on their loved ones and the nasty wartime backstory that underlies everything. The Japanese prisoner of war gang, for instance. Ouch.

This isn't a dense book. It feels simple, it flows well and it's easy to read. At the same time, though, it's not portraying 1972 Britain as particularly nice. World War Two is a recent-ish memory, the police are mindlessly sexist and even our heroes aren't exactly lovable (unless of course you love them already thanks to Dad's Army). Lowe is pompous, prickly and sees most of the world somewhere between "negative" and "hostile". He's bad at handling people. Le Breton is charming, but we only see this indirectly because the book's two main viewpoint characters are Lowe (who's immune) and Le Breton himself. (Mind you, the book only portrays a simplified version of John Le Mesurier's famously complicated love life. Digging into that in depth would have made this a very different novel.)

Incidentally, the Columbo reference on page 176 isn't anachronistic. I looked up the dates and was surprised.

This could be an interesting series. Lowe and Le Breton are cuddly old buffers who'll be instantly familiar to a generation of UK TV viewers... yet, underneath that, they're not cuddly at all. (They're spikier in the early chapters than towards the end, mind you. They grow. Lowe softens.) Similarly, there's quite dark material about British society, history and social attitudes of the period, underpinning the well-constructed mystery. The clues fit together nicely. Before this, Stuart Douglas had already written four Sherlock Holmes novels. He predicted my guess for the murderer, for instance, and played with that assumption at the end.

Besides, our heroes must be about sixty years old, so they're putting themselves at significant risk. They don't have back-up and they're not pugilists. If the killer(s?) realised what was happening, this might mean serious trouble.

I enjoyed the book. I should probably rewatch my Dad's Army DVDs before reading the next one, though! Titan have already announced it, with an expected publication date of March 2025...