Jackie’s Reading Corner

SYNOPSIS

The Red Lion production of Love and Miss Harris is booked to tour America, opening in Manhattan.

On arrival the group finds that it’s not the Manhattan with the Great White Way of Broadway at its glittering heart, but the part between the Bowery and the East River, on the Lower East Side, in a vaudeville venue owned by a local mobster. And when members of a rival gang decide to disrupt the play, the action shifts from the theatre’s state to its auditorium…

Determined to fulfil the rest of their tour dates, the company heads west from New York. Try as they might to shake it off, trouble seems to follow them wherever they go.

MY THOUGHTS

This book was slightly different from other books I have read recently. The Red Lion Theatre Company are heading to America to put on their play. Set in post world war 2. The tour is being funded by Robin Maidstone and his Marjorie although everyone calls her George. Robin is the 15th Earl of Maidstone and George is the Countess. They had known each other when they were young, but had gone separate ways and met up and married later in life. They are tagging along with the troupe with their Rolls Royce which is being driven by actor Jack Savage. The rest of the troupe will be travelling in a pre war number 9 double decker bus. Titus Llewellyn-Gwynn is the actor/manager of the Company. Wellington Cheslyn or Wells as he is called it the oldest member, he has been treading the boards from a very young age and had hoped for fame and fortune but it had never happened. The rest of the actors are Nancy, Dolly, Fitz and Stella.

They are travelling to New York on a cargo vessel, which hits some turbulent weather on the way. But the gang are excited to be putting their play on in Manhattan, NYC. However, when they arrive it is not on Broadway it is the Lower Bowery a rougher end of NY. Wells is initially angry when he finds out the name of the theatre his cousin has booked them in,as he had played the Lillie Langtry theatre when it was Vaudeville with his father. The theatre is owned by Benny La Motte or he was better known as Benny The Bat. But he wants his theatre to be run as a legitimate business. Having met and fallen in love with a school teacher he is cleaning up his act. Whilst in New York Robin and George are offered a part in an advert for an Aunt Bessie Cereal, as they are not part of the play and with the chance of earning money they go for it. After one job they are offered a few more so whilst the actors are travelling across America they stay behind in NY.

The story follows the group as they hit new places some of the turnouts are good, some they have competition. But the story tells of some of the escapades that happen as they are working in each theatre. Then the story darkens as a murderer who has escaped a mental hospital in the UK, is out to kill Jack Savage and Nancy. Will he get to them?

This was a pretty quick read at 204 pages, the characters, are good each with their own quirks especially Wells and Titus. Following them across the United States to several places like Connecticut, Ohio, just to name a couple. The ups and downs of a touring company. This was a fun interesting read. There are a few little scrapes that they get into that adds to the story.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Maughan is an ex-actor, fringe theatre director and script writer, married and living in the Welsh Marches, the borderland between England and Wales, and the backdrop to the Batch Magna series. 

‘The Cuckoos of Batch Magna’ is the first novel – on Kindle and in print – in the Batch Magna Chronicles. It is followed by ‘Sir Humphrey of Batch Hall’, ‘The Batch Magna Caper’, ‘Clouds in a Summer Sky’, and ‘The Ghost of Artemus Strange.’ All published by Farrago Books. 

“‘The Cuckoos of Batch Magna’, and its sequels, was born,” Peter Maughan has said, “out of nostalgia, the memory of an idyllic time in the mid 1970s spent gloriously free living in a small colony of houseboats, a bohemian outpost in a village on the River Medway in deepest rural Kent. The summers of that time when life was moved outside – particularly in the long, torrid one of ’76, when it seemed that there was only summer,summer and youth and the river. Boating or swimming in it, or coming together for another jolly, for the weekend lunches that ended up somehow in the evenings, and the parties that saw in another summer dawn. And the winters when the lamps were lit and the smell of log fires scented the air, snug around the stove below when there was rain on the deck, or the owls in the wood across the river called in the frosty dark.

“I carried those memories of place and people around with me for years, until we moved to the Welsh Marches and I found a home for them in a river valley there, in a place I called Batch Magna. 

“The houseboats from those days on the Medway were converted Thames sailing barges; for my houseboats, on Batch Magna’s river the Cluny, I used converted paddle steamers (once part of an equally fictional Victorian trading company, the Cluny Steamboat Company) because they too speak of fun and another time. And it seemed entirely right somehow that they should have ended up in quite dotty, amiable decline in Batch Magna.

“For the fourth novel (a work in progress) in the series, ‘Man Overboard'(which opens with one of the houseboats turned back into a working paddler), I am indebted to a real-life paddle steamer skipper, Captain John Megoran, master of the PS Kingswear, the last coal-fired paddle steamer in Britain, for unstinting help with technical details. John’s vessel, after her years plying the Medway, is now back in the home waters of the River Dart in Devon. 

“‘In Man Overboard’, my paddle steamer, the PS Batch Castle, chugging up to Shrewsbury and back, plies the home waters of the River Cluny carrying passengers and goods, and deck cargoes of livestock from the fields on market days, and crates of chickens, geese and Christmas turkeys, and fun – and most of all, fun.

“The Batch Magna novels are feel-good books (The Wind in the Willows for grown-ups, as a couple of Amazon reviewers have described Cuckoos), pure escapism – for me now, looking back, and I hope for my readers.”