A Decent Interval – Simon Brett (1)

Charles was wary about how he should reply to that, so he resorted to the old trick of answering a question with a question. ‘Why, are you suggesting she was murdered?’ ‘I’m not suggesting anything, Mr Paris. Merely trying to ascertain some facts, which will provide a background to the circumstances of her death.’ Detective Inspector Shelley’s manner was as formal as his language. It was impossible to know what he was thinking.

He would have made a good poker player. Nor did the face of his sidekick, the female Detective Constable whose name Charles hadn’t caught, give much away either. It was the same evening, the Thursday. They were in Charles’s communal dressing room, but the other actors had been sent home. The second half of Hamlet had been abandoned ‘due to an accident to one of the cast’, as the House Manager had told the audience with intriguing imprecision.

The theatregoers had all gone home in a state of high curiosity. But the news of Katrina Selsey’s death couldn’t remain a secret for long. Actors thrive on gossip and have a very efficient grapevine for distributing it. In spite of Tony Copeland’s strictures, Charles felt certain that some of the younger actors wouldn’t have been able to restrain themselves from tweeting the news. It was only a matter of time before the Grand Theatre was once again besieged by journalists and television crews.

‘So I revert to my question, Mr Paris. Was Katrina Selsey popular with the other actors?’ Charles was still determined to be cagey with his reply. He didn’t know how much the detectives had heard from other company members. To give full details of Katrina’s misdemeanours during rehearsal might at this stage be unwise. So all he said was, ‘Everyone gets very tense running up to a First Night.

Nerves are frayed. People tend to snap at each other.’

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First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of 9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF. eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited. Copyright © 2013 by Simon Brett. The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brett, Simon. A decent interval. – (A Charles Paris mystery ; 18) 1. Paris, Charles (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Actors–Fiction. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet–Fiction. 4. Theater–Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories. I. Title II. Series 823.9’2-dc23 ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-044-7 (cased) ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-539-8 (trade paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-412-6 (epub) Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland. 1kitap1.com/en To Ali and Tim, who know about the theatre 1kitap1.com/en ONE It’s been a while, thought Charles Paris. A while since I’ve been dressed as a Roundhead for a part. A while since I’ve had a part – any part, come to that. Later in the day he would be dressed as a Cavalier. Because Charles Paris was fighting the Battle of Naseby.

Alone. Still, it was work. It had indeed been some time since he’d had any of that precious commodity, work, but then that wasn’t unusual in what he laughingly called his ‘career’. Like most actors, when unemployed, Charles Paris went into a kind of half-life. Yes, he met up with friends in the business, he continued to drink Bell’s whisky either with them or more often alone, but the animating spark that made him fully alive was missing.

And he kept wondering, as members of his profession in their late fifties tend to, whether he had already received his last ever job offer. An actor’s career does not have a retirement cut-off point like more regulated types of employment. No farewell parties, gifts of carriage clocks and private pensions kicking in (few actors even know what the word ‘pension’ means).

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 7c7e992f787e45c9
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,585,322 bytes (1.512 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781780290447, 9781780295398, 9781780104126
• Pages: 196
• Language: English (en)

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• Total Words: 62,476
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• Average Words per Page: 318.76
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