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Author and playwright, Ian Ferguson won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for Village of the Small Houses (D&M, 2004), about growing up in Fort Vermillion, Alberta. He had previously co-authored with his brother, Will Ferguson How to Be a Canadian (Even If You Already Are One) (D&M, 2001/2007), which was also shortlisted for the Leacock prize and won the CBA Libris Award for non-fiction. He is a contributor to the Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour and has been published in the Globe and Mail, National Post, Reader's Digest, Maclean's, and EnRoute, among other publications. He also works as a writer and creative director in the film and television industry. He lives in Victoria.
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I Only Read Murder
by Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson
(HarperCollins $24.99)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2024)
Detectives are like eggs; not every one needs to be hard-boiled. With four Stephen Leacock Medals for Humour between them, brothers Ian and Will Ferguson could be expected to whip up something as homey and comforting as scrambled eggs on toast without anyone mistaking the ketchup for the signature red sauce of murder. As one of the main characters in I Only Read Murder observes, such mysteries are known in the trade as “cozies”...“You know, an amateur sleuth, female, usually plucky, with a small-town murder solved in the penultimate chapter and equilibrium restored. That sort of thing. They’re surprisingly popular.”
They have been since Agatha Christie’s wise spinster, Miss Marple, busied her old body by exposing the bucolic English village of St. Mary Mead as the unlikely but leading candidate for Most Homicidal Hamlet per capita on the planet, soon to be followed by Midsomer (a fictional English county) in Caroline Graham’s Chief Inspector Barnaby novels. Even our own quiet Sunshine Coast town of Sechelt (a real place) is depicted in the mysteries of L.R. Wright. The Fergusons cheerfully invite comparisons to Angela Lansbury’s long-running TV turn as Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, based in the equally murderous municipality of Cabot Cove, Maine.
“Cozies,” notes producer Alan Zabic in the Ferguson brothers’ tale, are the bread-and-butter format of MOWs (Movies of the Week) produced for network and cable TV and now streaming services. Zabic has come to the bucolic Pacific Northwest town of Happy Rock on Tillamook Bay to shoot one starring Miranda Abbott, who had starred in a weekly TV mystery series called Pastor Fran Investigates a decade previous, only to be dropped like a cold yam fry when the industry deemed her “typecast” and was looking for “fresh talent” (i.e., “younger”) heroines to solve crimes while dressed in wet or improbably skimpy costumes.
Miranda has been marooned in Happy Rock at Bea’s B & B, separated but not divorced from former Pastor Fran screenwriter, Edgar Abbott, who now runs the town’s specialty mystery bookstore, I Only Read Murder. She is as thrilled by the handsome Alan Zabic’s attentions as by the overly-generous contract he offers her. The icing on the cake is that her co-star is to be none other than Harry Tomlin, the A-list leading man universally acclaimed as “the Nicest Actor in America.” Even the director and cinematographer are trending “artistes” fresh from winning awards at European film festivals.
The town of Happy Rock is totally starstruck, especially since many locals are hired by the production. Only Miranda’s devoted personal assistant, Andrew Nguyen, finds it suspicious that so much talent and money is being lavished on a small-screen Movie of the Week. Like ancient Roman lawyers and all good detectives, Andrew wonders, cui bono? Who benefits? A simple question on the face of it, but Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate that the answer is often an almost-invisible web of hidden human emotions.
When Harry Tomlin dies immediately upon making an unconventional entrance at the big press conference (convened in the lobby of the suitably haunted old Duchess Hotel), the mystery train picks up speed. Sensing his star was fading, plagued by crippling alimony payments and a looming scandal in his signature salad dressing company, did Tomlin choose to make a sensational exit, a Grand Guignol finale?
Was he hooked offstage like a washed-up vaudevillian or knocked off by a mystery man who looks like a mobster from central casting? Was it suicide or murder?
In a display of “the show must go on” determination (Hollywood-speak for “our paycheques are at stake”), hapless Harry is instantly replaced by Poe Regal. Pronounced “ReGAL,” Poe is a bloated former action star and ex-Miranda Abbott love interest who, even she admits, would have to be two hundred years old if he had spent as much time as he claims in secret Asian ashrams and dojos mastering obscure martial arts.
Between cataloguing the quirky residents of a tiny town composed almost entirely of eccentrics and sending up the pretentious duplicities of the entertainment industry, the Fergusons have themselves a field day in what the military call a “target-rich environment.”
What saves I Only Read Murder from being just a satirical comic romp is that it’s genuinely a good mystery. Many of the characters are revealed to have motives not apparent at first and the plot has more twists than a granny knot. That said, place some pillows on the floor around your favourite reading chair or couch for when you fall out of it laughing.
ian and Will ferguson also co-wrote How to Be a Canadian: Even If You Already Are One (D&M, 2001/2007). Individually, Ian Ferguson wrote The Survival Guide to British Columbia (Heritage, 2019). He is a creative director in the film and television industry and lives in Victoria. 9781443470766
John Moore reads and reviews books in Garibaldi Highlands.
***
BOOKS:
How to Be a Canadian (Even If You Already Are One) (D&M, 2001/2007) $19.95 978-155365-311-0. Co-authored with Will Ferguson.
Village of the Small Houses (D&M, 2004) $19.95 978-155365-069-0
The Survival Guide to British Columbia (Heritage House, 2019) $19.95 978-1-77203-284-0
I Only Read Murder (HarperCollins, 2023) $24.99 9781443470766. Co-authored with Will Ferguson.
[BCBW 2024]
***
I Only Read Murder
by Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson
(HarperCollins $24.99)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2024)
Detectives are like eggs; not every one needs to be hard-boiled. With four Stephen Leacock Medals for Humour between them, brothers Ian and Will Ferguson could be expected to whip up something as homey and comforting as scrambled eggs on toast without anyone mistaking the ketchup for the signature red sauce of murder. As one of the main characters in I Only Read Murder observes, such mysteries are known in the trade as “cozies”...“You know, an amateur sleuth, female, usually plucky, with a small-town murder solved in the penultimate chapter and equilibrium restored. That sort of thing. They’re surprisingly popular.”
They have been since Agatha Christie’s wise spinster, Miss Marple, busied her old body by exposing the bucolic English village of St. Mary Mead as the unlikely but leading candidate for Most Homicidal Hamlet per capita on the planet, soon to be followed by Midsomer (a fictional English county) in Caroline Graham’s Chief Inspector Barnaby novels. Even our own quiet Sunshine Coast town of Sechelt (a real place) is depicted in the mysteries of L.R. Wright. The Fergusons cheerfully invite comparisons to Angela Lansbury’s long-running TV turn as Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, based in the equally murderous municipality of Cabot Cove, Maine.
“Cozies,” notes producer Alan Zabic in the Ferguson brothers’ tale, are the bread-and-butter format of MOWs (Movies of the Week) produced for network and cable TV and now streaming services. Zabic has come to the bucolic Pacific Northwest town of Happy Rock on Tillamook Bay to shoot one starring Miranda Abbott, who had starred in a weekly TV mystery series called Pastor Fran Investigates a decade previous, only to be dropped like a cold yam fry when the industry deemed her “typecast” and was looking for “fresh talent” (i.e., “younger”) heroines to solve crimes while dressed in wet or improbably skimpy costumes.
Miranda has been marooned in Happy Rock at Bea’s B & B, separated but not divorced from former Pastor Fran screenwriter, Edgar Abbott, who now runs the town’s specialty mystery bookstore, I Only Read Murder. She is as thrilled by the handsome Alan Zabic’s attentions as by the overly-generous contract he offers her. The icing on the cake is that her co-star is to be none other than Harry Tomlin, the A-list leading man universally acclaimed as “the Nicest Actor in America.” Even the director and cinematographer are trending “artistes” fresh from winning awards at European film festivals.
The town of Happy Rock is totally starstruck, especially since many locals are hired by the production. Only Miranda’s devoted personal assistant, Andrew Nguyen, finds it suspicious that so much talent and money is being lavished on a small-screen Movie of the Week. Like ancient Roman lawyers and all good detectives, Andrew wonders, cui bono? Who benefits? A simple question on the face of it, but Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate that the answer is often an almost-invisible web of hidden human emotions.
When Harry Tomlin dies immediately upon making an unconventional entrance at the big press conference (convened in the lobby of the suitably haunted old Duchess Hotel), the mystery train picks up speed. Sensing his star was fading, plagued by crippling alimony payments and a looming scandal in his signature salad dressing company, did Tomlin choose to make a sensational exit, a Grand Guignol finale?
Was he hooked offstage like a washed-up vaudevillian or knocked off by a mystery man who looks like a mobster from central casting? Was it suicide or murder?
In a display of “the show must go on” determination (Hollywood-speak for “our paycheques are at stake”), hapless Harry is instantly replaced by Poe Regal. Pronounced “ReGAL,” Poe is a bloated former action star and ex-Miranda Abbott love interest who, even she admits, would have to be two hundred years old if he had spent as much time as he claims in secret Asian ashrams and dojos mastering obscure martial arts.
Between cataloguing the quirky residents of a tiny town composed almost entirely of eccentrics and sending up the pretentious duplicities of the entertainment industry, the Fergusons have themselves a field day in what the military call a “target-rich environment.”
What saves I Only Read Murder from being just a satirical comic romp is that it’s genuinely a good mystery. Many of the characters are revealed to have motives not apparent at first and the plot has more twists than a granny knot. That said, place some pillows on the floor around your favourite reading chair or couch for when you fall out of it laughing.
ian and Will ferguson also co-wrote How to Be a Canadian: Even If You Already Are One (D&M, 2001/2007). Individually, Ian Ferguson wrote The Survival Guide to British Columbia (Heritage, 2019). He is a creative director in the film and television industry and lives in Victoria. 9781443470766
John Moore reads and reviews books in Garibaldi Highlands.
***
BOOKS:
How to Be a Canadian (Even If You Already Are One) (D&M, 2001/2007) $19.95 978-155365-311-0. Co-authored with Will Ferguson.
Village of the Small Houses (D&M, 2004) $19.95 978-155365-069-0
The Survival Guide to British Columbia (Heritage House, 2019) $19.95 978-1-77203-284-0
I Only Read Murder (HarperCollins, 2023) $24.99 9781443470766. Co-authored with Will Ferguson.
[BCBW 2024]
