Forgotten Book - The Death of Amy Parris

T.R. Bowen, also known as Trevor Bowen, has had a successful career as both an actor and a screenwriter. He has written scripts for the Miss Marple, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and Lovejoy series among others. And in 1998 he became a novelist with The Death of Amy Parris. This book was published was Penguin, who described it as 'a tense, atmospheric mystery in the tradition of Ruth Rendell'. Penguin also published Black Camel, its successor, which I haven't read but which also featured the main detective characters John Bewick and Gio Jones.

After that, there were no more Bewick books and as far as I'm aware Bowen never wrote another novel. My guess (and it's no more than that) is that he's an example of an author who obtained a good publishing deal and a two-book contract from an excellent publisher, but found that sales and reviews were not what had been hoped. Perhaps he wasn't offered another deal; perhaps he became disillusioned, perhaps both. 

What is clear to me is that Bowen had the literary skills to have become a reasonably successful novelist. The Death of Amy Parris is capably written and his experience as a scriptwriter helped him to create some vivid set-piece scenes. However, even though the setting of this book is Rendell territory, East Anglia, he wasn't in quite the same league as a writer. Then again, few people are.

Unfortunately I think he needed a much more ruthless editor. This story struck me as too long. It could easily have been pruned and it would have held my interest better than it did (after a reasonably good start). I also found Bewick less entrancing than did his creator, who gives us not one but two gorgeous women who swoon over the man, while his old pal Gio is full of admiration for him. All this is overdone. As for the plot, it's serviceable, but I'm afraid I spotted the culprit right away; three hundred plus pages it turned out that my assumption was correct. It's almost as if Bowen had a checklist of ingredients that he thought would work, perhaps hoping for TV adaptation, and threw all of them into the book, when a more selective approach might have worked better. A pity, but on this evidence - and despite the merits of the book - I won't be in a hurry to read Black Camel.