Played to Death by Mike Ripley – Review

For years Mike Ripley delighted readers with his Angel series and more recently his Albert Campion novels, a continuation series of the classic character created by Margery Allingham. With the publication of Buried Above Ground last year, Ripley introduced a new character in Roland ‘Roly’ Wilkes and a new string to his authorial blow, via a metafictional parody of the publishing business. Roly is an editor who lost his job in a publishing merger and ended up working in a small library. In Buried Above Ground Roly is jolted out of his peaceful existence as a librarian when he becomes embroiled into an elaborate copyright mystery regarding a forgotten author. That novel combined humour and mystery in a delightful literary cocktail. Ripley achieves that delicious blend again in the second book of the series – Played to Death.

This time the focus is on actors, who after editors are often the bane of most authors existence! Adam Cunningham is a solicitor and enthusiastic practitioner of amateur dramatics. Cunningham is involved with the Hopewell Players, who are staging a play by the late dramatist Othniel Soulby. However, Cunningham suspects the shoddily written play is a forgery and the aspiring thesps at the Hopewell Players are not all that they seem to be. He enlists Roly Wilkes, now an established detective of all things literary, to investigate. What follows is an entertaining and often very funny romp in which Ripley lands potshots at the theatre, local politics, archaic class structures, small-town grudges and other indispensable aspects of English life.

Roly Wilkes is a beguiling character who seems equally at home in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction as he does in a modern novel.