Under the Influence

Description

For Will Benson, life cannot get much worse. Cuckolded, overweight, and in career meltdown he is at his lowest ebb. Attempting to concentrate on his column in the shambolic trade rag, Theatre World, through a fog of lunchtime drinking he recalls wistfully his halcyon days as a cub reporter when life was all so different. Baccanalian romps in the countryside, illicit trysts, shared secrets; the world was his for the taking. But when then past comes knocking at Will's door, the reality is suddenly far removed from his memories. His old friend Nicholas is dying, and Henry - Will's youthful hero - has stolen a valuable Vermeer painting and is on the run. Impelled to track Henry down, Will reluctantly takes up the trail. But Henry has always been a slippery customer and along the way Will must endure an Oxford Gaudy, a bizarre heavy metal gig and the worst dentist in the world before the full extent of Henry's Machiavellian plans are revealed . . .

Charles Spencer was on the staff of the Daily Telegraph for 25 years, for most of that time serving as its theatre critic. He was named Critic of the Year in the British Press Awards in 1999 and 2008. For ten years he also wrote a column about pop music for the Spectator and remains an unrepentant fan of the Grateful Dead to this day. After graduating with a degree in English from Oxford he began his career as a journalist on the Surrey Advertiserin 1976 and subsequently worked for the Evening Standard as a notably inefficient arts reporter, the theatrical trade paper The Stage, as a sub-editor and reviewer, and the late Robert Maxwell's London Daily News which went down with the loss of all hands in less than a year. After that debacle the Telegraph provided him with a welcome berth from which he retired in October 2014. During his 38 years as a journalist he reckons he wrote some 6000 reviews, ranging from Shakespeare to strip shows and everything in between. His three comic crime novels, I Nearly Died, Full Personal Service, and Under the Influence were partly inspired by his happy and often inebriated days on The Stage newspaper and first published between 1994 and 2000.

Spencer pulls off the most shocking and unexpected denouement of any crime novel that I have read in years. Daily Telegraph Funny, cunning, nostalgic ... don't miss Literary Review A light comedy thriller, with plenty of good one-liners and some ingenious set-pieces, it is also a lament for lost innocence; and it is the undercurrent of melancholy which gives the novel its distinctive timbre. There is real human sadness here, but also the possibility of healing and redemption ... the tenderness which exists between people who become friends at a tender age, beautifully captured by Spencer, is the abiding memory of the book. Sunday Telegraph