Small-town sleuth

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This article was published 22/07/2023 (1153 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Who better to be the amateur sleuth solving the murder of an actor in a play about an amateur sleuth solving a murder than an actor who portrayed an amateur sleuth solving murders on a TV show?

(Pause to catch breath.)

This is what a character in Will and Ian Ferguson’s I Only Read Murder alludes to, within the musty stacks at the I Only Read Murder mystery bookstore, as one heck of a Cozy.

The humorous Canadian brothers Ferguson, with their four Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour awards, have given us a delightfully amusing whodunit — not always laugh-out-loud, but exceptionally amusing.

A Cozy, we’re told, is a gentle sub-genre of murder mysteries for those who want to sleuth a murder in which someone had it coming but doesn’t suffer — not a police procedural, not a hard-boiled detective, no violence as such.

A Cozy could be the almost-infinite variations on Miss Marple, or mysteries built around cats, or dogs, or vicars, or the attractive combination of chocolate and murder.

So we have our hero, aging actor Miranda Abbott, arriving in the odd little Oregon town of Happy Rock to try to reunite with the husband she abandoned in an attempt to resurrect her moribund career in Hollywood, while he walked away from a screenwriting career to run a small-town mystery bookstore.

The only one obliviously unaware that she’s a has-been long over the hill, Miranda is a diva who’s clueless that her humble bed-and-breakfast isn’t a five-star luxury resort catering to her every whim, and that the devoted-fan police chief isn’t a studio-supplied chauffeur.

Miranda’s claim to fame is a long-cancelled show in which she starred for six seasons, Pastor Fran Investigates.

As an itinerant pastor of no particular denomination, Pastor Fran showed up in a different town each week to solve a murder, wearing her clerical collar even when undercover, though often losing some bits of crucial clothing during chase scenes leading to her weekly use of karate on the villains.

At the end of each show, Pastor Fran is sadly hitchhiking out of town, an unsettled soul untethered from any permamence, to the closing theme song that is presumably deliberately reminiscent of The Littlest Hobo.

As luck would have it, Happy Rock is about to stage its annual little theatre production of a hokey Victorian melodrama based on a historical local murder. Practically everyone in town plays a role in cast or crew, and every one of them has secrets and eccentric character traits.

The Fergusons soon tell us how many days it will be until there’s a murder during the play, and eventually they even tell us who the victim will be — should we keep our eye on the hissable villain?

Miranda is likable through all the arrogance. She’s really a nice person at heart, and eagerly accepts it as the due of a major star to sleuth on behalf of her fans. (Though, much of the time, she jumps to the wrong conclusions.)

The Fergusons have a terrific time sending up the banality and absurdity and duplication of so many TV shows, poke loving fun at small towns and their characters, and stick pins in the balloons of celebrity.

Still, there’s a genuine whodunit here, and quite the good one. There is a murder, into which Miranda sleuths — or, if one prefers, Pastor Fran investigates.

Like too many Canadian murder mysteries lately, I Only Read Murder is short, but gosh darn, it’s a lot of fun.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin fondly remembers Then Came Bronson with an amateur sleuth drifting into a different town every week to solve — wait a sec, how did a drop-out reporter afford a motorcycle in 1969?