FRONT COVER

Hey Jerry, how’s the wife?

Ah – I’m afraid she passed away last year.

I’m so sorry to hear it.

Yes, it was very sudden.

How did it happen, if you don’t mind me asking?

She was – she was cruise shipped to death. 

Actual blurb below picture. It makes a real meal of the plot – a barbie(barby?)cued meal. Zing!

Barby is a temporary office worker.

Her friend, fast-living model Ruthie Simson, invites Barbie [sic] on a business-pleasure cruise aboard Any Bromwell’s deluxe yacht. They sail for Bimini and not long into the voyage Barby finds romance with a West German industrialist, Werner von Winderwald. Then she discovers he is mixed up in an industrial espionage caper with two others of the ship’s guests.

Two murders climax the cruise and bring Bahamian police on to the scene not only to solve the killings but to put a huge dent into the activities of an international drug smuggling ring.

The author is very anecdotal in her style. She describes how she found herself unmarried and middle aged in 1970′s Sydney, so took a course in massage and decided to set up a business. In the introduction to Vol I, she describes how she’d fervently and innocently looked forward to helping people – sore sportsmen and women, those with back problems, old persons with aching joints.

She put a small ad in a newspaper, ‘Mature lady, private massage’, and sat excitedly by the phone… and then got a million calls from men presuming she was a prostitute.

And then she spends most of the books getting gradually more outraged at the depravity of society.

What I imagine the lady looked like- with her cat Bobkins. See how the cat enjoys his mistress’s expert touch.

Most of Book II is taken up with details of the weirder fetishes and instances of breath-taking chauvenism that she encountered during her rocky start - stories which are troubling, but also quite funny – pages and pages about the phone calls, walk-ins, advances made to her during her early years in the biz.

Youc an feel her getting more furious about the liberties that had been taken: men presuming she’d be topless, asking her to do mother/baby roleplay, wheedling presents of chocolate and one man who tried to pay with a crate of beer - men who marched in  naked in a complete state of arousal, men who didn’t want a massage but a spanking. This is as well as several pimps, who called to see if she wanted a place in the city, a small flat of her own and ‘protection’.

As far as I can garner, a lot of her business calls ran thus:

She: Hello.

Man: [no hello] I want a localised massage on Tuesday lunch, if you’ve got space.

She: Ah yes, I do -  can I ask, localised where?

Man: Genitals.

In one particularly fantastic paragraph she recalls how annoyed she’d get when men would craftily ask for a straight massage, then get a vicarious kick out of it - she says they’d groan, and ’buck and heave’, to the extent that sometimes ‘their buttocks would be up to my eyeline. It made it very difficult’.

And what really ticks her off? Their ‘rudeness’. The only man she remembers with fondness from these early days is the upright old gent who came once a week with a cassette tape of hymns to listen to as she rubbed away at him. He, for her, was a true, noble ideal of massage subject.

Whether she perceives them positively or negatively, it comes across like most people who got massage in the 1970′s were a bit bats.

I was doing 1940′s murder mysteries, which have the best titles ever (though none have yet pipped the seminally titled thriller ’The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough’). A selection:

The Odd Flamingo

Murder for Tea

Death By Two Hands

And the ‘Ronsil’ of the detective genre…          There Has Been a Murder

Also my boss’s cat was in an excellent mood. It was as playful as all of the Aristocats – for one memorable and unproductive five minutes, it lay right across the keyboard with its head pushing the spacebar. Amazon went nuts. Later that afternoon, I was also to go nuts –

(+ dishy headshots below)

- I’ve been putting a series of ‘Talking Classics’ audio cassette tapes up for sale – audiobooks, from Jerome K. Jerome to War and Peace - which meant a parade of dishy headshots/beautiful childhood memories. And I was going nuts for these artistes. Top men who combine sultry purrs with bombastically sexy black and white mugging for the camera:

Martin Jarvis. Reader of ‘Just William’ and quite a few talking books in the series. The human equiv. of buttered toast: golden, moist, versatile, a little bit naughty and yet still sublimely wholesome. Very good at accents and children’s voices, of course.

Adrian Lukis – hear his ‘authoritative, natural, dry, warm, rich’ tones with their distinctive ‘twinkle’ here. You may recognise him from Pride and Prej – the charming and insinuating Wickham appropriately lends his pipes to ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’.

…It was a lovely day.