| The Simon Bognor series of 'whodunnits':
Unbecoming Habits
The first Simon Bognor "mystery" set
in an Anglican Friary where everybody is behaving badly and some criminally.
Based on Heald's real-life research for a "Trevelyan Scholarship"
while still at school. The Sunday Times said it was
"A witty and most attractive debut" and the Daily Telegraph
"A constant pleasure".
1973 Hutchinson, Stein and Day, Arrow,
Ballantine
Blue Blood will out
Simon Bognor in the world of Stately Homes.
Heald had earlier assisted Lord Montagu of Beaulieu write "The Gilt and
the Gingerbread" a factual account of how to make money out of living in
an ancestral pile. This is a homicidal frolic through that world,
fictionalised and satirised. "Deft and insouciant" said the Financial
Times while H.R.F. Keating in the Times called it "A steel
clawed butterfly".
1974 Hutchinson, Stein and Day etc
Deadline
Simon Bognor joins a Fleet Street gossip column
after the editor is found dead at his desk. The "diary" is not
totally unlike the Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column where Heald worked in
real life during the 1970s. The New York Times said it was "almost
as good as the all-time classic along those lines, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
Let Sleeping Dogs Die
Heald's first non-fiction book ("It's a
dog's Life" - see non-fiction) was a study of the bizarre relationship
between the British and their dogs. This is the fictional spin-off in which
Simon Bognor finds himself investigating the death
of a champion poodle and much else besides.
Just Desserts
Heald has always done occasional reviews of
hotels and restaurants as well as travel articles in which food and drink loom
quite large. This time Simon Bognor is drafted in after the suspicious death
of the chef proprietor of a London
restaurant called the Dour Dragoon (a fictional antidote to the real-life Gay
Hussar). His friend Maurice
Buckmaster, head of the French section of SOE during World War II and sometime
Honorary PRO for the champagne industry, always believed that the character,
Colonel Erskine Blight-Purley was modelled on him. This was only partly true!
Murder at Moose Jaw
In the 1970s
Heald spent a year as an Associate Editor on Weekend Magazine in
Toronto, Canada. Ever keen to recycle such experiences Heald sent Simon Bognor
to Canada on a mission to solve the murder of a tycoon who bore at least a
marginal resemblance to Canada's own Lord Beaverbrook with just a whiff of
Conrad Black. The Canadian jokes amused his Canadian audience but eluded most
British and Americans!
Masterstroke
Every novelist who went to Oxford University
has to write an Oxford novel and this is Heald's. His Oxford College is called
Apocrypha and there is a Regius Professor of Sociology invented to entertain
his favourite history tutor, Richard Cobb, who hated Sociology with a passion.
The role of the leggy motor-cycling Dr. Hermione Frinton was intended for
Maria Aitken but never made it to the screen.
"The Chase is masterly, the denouement as
vintage as High Table port and there's blood on the C.P. Snow-covered
landscape." Sheridan Morley
Red Herrings
A character
in this novel is Sir Nimrod Herring, a name Heald found on a headstone in the
Civil War cemetery in Richmond Virginia but which many critics thought
impossibly far-fetched. This is a sort of pastiche of the traditional
Golden Age whodunnit except that the traditional English village has been
updated to the second half of the
twentieth century - with disastrous results.
"Tom Sharpe couldn't have done it
better" - The New Statesman
Brought to Book
Bognor encounters the world of books after the ghastly
Vernon Hemlock, boss of Big Books plc is found squashed to death between the moveable shelves
of his pornographic library. This is a waspish murder story involving some
exaggerated but easily recognisable caricatures from the publishing and writing
industries.
"A dazzling whodunnit", Jilly Cooper.
Business Unusual The most hard-edged of the Bognors as Simon finds himself
in the town of Scarpington, the acme of Mrs. Thatcher's provincial England. The
usual suspects are all members of the local equivalent of the Rotary Club. There is
another club with a
disturbingly sexual theme and Simon's wife, Monica, becomes distinctly
unamused.
"Crime with a P.G.Wodheouse flair - light-hearted but lethal". The
Chicago Tribune
Other fiction:
Caroline R
As a journalist reporting on the young Prince Charles,
Heald inevitably found himself caught up in speculation about who the heir to the
British throne would eventually
marry. Most people supposed that the Prince would marry a true love and
live happily
ever after. Heald, perhaps cynically, wondered what would happen if he
married "the
wrong girl". This novel is based on that premise and though written
before
the world at
large knew about Lady Diana it turned out to be horribly prescient.
"Caroline R has everything needed in a bestseller: a double surprise
ending, led up to by a plot of steadily increasing tension; an abundance of human interest; a
familiar but disconcerting setting; and a subject in which only the inhabitants of Outer
Mongolia are not interested." Class
Distinctions Originally supposed to be the first in a series of
roman-a-clef , this story of boarding school life in 1956 turned out to be the last as well as
the first. It's essential Englishness, and lack of a criminal plot, meant that
it failed to
paperback or find an
American publisher. It also became involved in a financially disastrous
dispute with
Thames TV when they produced a series with an identical theme and setting.
However the book found favour with an audience which didn't usually read Heald novels.
Great reviews from poets such as Robert Nye in the Guardian and Anthony Thwaite
in the Observer who said it made him laugh out loud.
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