Bobbing and weaving in Peckham

ANYBODY who has watched comedian Bob Mortimer weave good-natured surreal fictions on the TV panel show Would I Lie to You? might have guessed that he had a novel or two in him. But this, his first, is so surprisingly good that I literally read it in one sitting.

Before we get into this oddball story, I have a confession. Robert Renwick Mortimer and I have a shared history. We are both from Middlesbrough in the North-east of England and we both went about the tricky business of setting our family homes on fire with fireworks when we were kids. Bob succeeded: I didn’t (although I did fill my bedroom with smoke and sparks). We are also - and this is clear - devotees of a particularly surreal humour that is deeply ingrained in Northern culture, and was often evident in Bob’s double act with Vic Reeves (the artist Jim Moir), who was from Darlington a few miles from Middlesbrough. .

Even so, I was a little thrown by the conversation thirty-year old Peckham-based legal assistant Gary Thorn - the ‘hero’ of the book - appears to have with a squirrel on his way to the pie shop. I had to read it twice before I realised that Gary was putting words into the squirrel’s mouth. And therapists might like dwell for a while on what the squirrel said: “You’re looking a right mess, if you don’t mind me talking around that fact.”

It isn’t difficult to visualise Gary Thorn as Bob Mortimer, especially since Bob once worked as a solicitor in a private practice in Peckham, and that gives a sort of cinematic quality to the story from the outset: it would, in fact, make quite a good film. (You can have fun working out who would play the lead role, since Bob - now in his 60s - is a little too old for the part.)

It would be wicked to give away the plot except to say it involves a mystery disappearance, a femme fatale and an extraordinarily nasty bad guy - all the elements of the hardboiled detective fiction pioneered by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The difference is in the delivery, Gary - the narrator - has Bob Mortimer’s ear for the ridiculous. He drinks Bovril in the early hours ‘for its meaty punch’, and asks characters ‘is that a remark?’

Even so, and despite Bob’s surreal humour sparkling through, the plot is cracking. Give yourself a few hours though, because if you already like Bob Mortimer you’ll get sucked in just as surely as the panelists on Would I Lie to You?

The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer. Simon & Schuster UK. £8.99.