The Wooden Overcoat, Pamela Branch

Who says girls aren't funny?

When I unwrapped Pamela Branch's The Wooden Overcoat on my birthday last year, I was more than a little confused; the format was odd, the blurb sounded naff, I'd never heard of it and there was a quote from the queen on the back - as if I have the same sense of humour as that old trout! Nevertheless, a few months later, curiosity got the better of me and I plunged into Chapter One. Imagine my surprise when the very first line made me laugh out loud. And I don't mean I gave a wry smile, I guffawed so loudly the wine I'd been about to swallow shot out of my nose.

It's obvious from the off that Branch's style is far from austere. She has an easy, P. G. Wodehouse-esque way of turning the serious into the comical; except that Wodehouse only ever went as far as the stealing of pearl necklaces and getting engaged to the wrong girl. The Wooden Overcoat, however, takes on a far more macabre tack; the body count could rival that of a horror film, and that's not including the "rets". Perhaps it's the unlikely contrast between the grim and the farcical, but for some reason the two work together with hilarious consequences.

The Asterisk Club is an exclusive and clandestine boarding house for wrongly aquitted murderers, as Benji Cann has just discovered. A dangerous combination of people under usual circumstances, but the club has very strict rules that prohibit the bumbing off of fellow guests. So when the seemingly unsuspecting neighbours in the adjacent house begin carting around dead bodies in an amateurish fashion, the members of the Asterisk club are most confused; except of course the most recent addition, Benji, who is the first to fall victim. They vow to keep a close eye on these clumsy part-timers who are wavering dangerously close to their turf. Meanwhile, the inhabitants next door, each in a bid to protect their respective other halves (while secretly suspecting them) are finding their first shot at disposing of dead bodies less successful than they might have hoped. This combined with the fact that a large family of rats has taken the opportunity to infest the skirting boards is stretching tempers somewhat and the rat-man will insist on going into minute detail about his very own hush-hush methods for disposing of "rets".

The improbability of this premise does absolutely nothing to deter; once I started reading, I just couldn't stop. I found myself absolutely crying with laughter while in the most inopportune of places: on the bus, at work, at the train station, in the waiting room at the doctors' surgery, anywhere other people are generally found, actually. And it carried on long after I'd put the book down. On more than one occasion I caught myself chortling as a few lines popped into my head whilst walking down the road or waiting in the queue for a cashpoint. And I think my work colleagues will clearly remember the day I shook and snorted with repressed laughter for, at the very least, an hour after my lunch break, muttering "...tide's out". I shall leave that one with you to find out for yourself.

The one thing that displeases me is that every single one of P. G. Wodehouse's books has been reprinted over and over, and rightly so, but when it comes to something as good as Pamela Branch's masterpiece, why so long? True, it was written in the early fifties and clearly relates to that era; but as such I find the almost naïve narrative rather refreshing. With believable characters, each sporting their own eccentricities, and an effortlessly deft writing style, Pamela Branch has written the unforgettable and I firmly believe that this book should never have gone out of print.

The Wooden Overcoat was reprinted by the Rue Morgue Press in 2006, on luxuriously thick, shiny paper, and since then the other three Pamela Branch novels have followed suit. They sit on my shelves, patiently waiting to brighten a gloomy Sunday.