Tag Archives: Bob Mortimer

Book review

I have a theory: I suspect that early drafts of The Long Shoe were planned as a sequel to The Satsuma Complex (2022) and The Hotel Avocado (2024) – in all probability with a fruit-based title. But this plan had to be abandoned, because The Long Shoe‘s plot needed the central female character, Harriet (Emily in the first two novels) to have a job that runs the risk of her being kidnapped, and Mortimer just couldn’t make the plot work within the constraints of her ‘legacy’ occupation.

So a new context and setting was required. Apart from the change of occupation the novels are strikingly similar, with the protagonist Matt (Gary) a rather feckless character drifting through life (he is a recently unemployed bathroom salesman) living in a London suburb, taking walks in the park, drinking coffee, talking to his pet cat/pigeon/quirky animal of choice, and enjoying a casual relationship with his girlfriend while taking her commitment for granted. The novels’ themes are also similar – mysteries involving organised crime, a violent villain who is physically menacing and a bit disturbed, and a climax in which Gary confronts the bad guys in a clumsy, endearing manner.

This theory would also explain the irrelevance of the novel’s title. The long shoe referred to here is a comically long wooden model of a shoe, purchased from a market stall specialising in quirky conversation pieces. It could have easily been swapped into the novel on a find and replace basis for a whimsical fruit-based object of a similar scale.

Having said all that, it really doesn’t matter if this theory is right or not. The Long Shoe works well enough as a standalone novel, just one that will feel very familiar if you have read the author’s previous two. The premise is simple, if familiar: Matt’s relationship with Harriet is in trouble, as she questions whether they have a long-term future together. She leaves him for a short break to consider her feelings. While she is away Matt is offered out of the blue a caretaking job. which comes with the benefit of a heavily discounted flat in Satsuma Heights, (a little nod to novel one, of course). The new job and flat are all the more welcome as they were having to leave their existing flat in a few weeks. Harriet’s farewell note is ambiguous and Matt is not sure if she has left him for good, or is just taking some time out. Improbably she has also neglected to tell her employer, the Crown Prosecution Service, that she is taking leave, and she stops answering her phone. Instead of reporting her absence to the police, Matt tries to track her down.

The novel’s minor characters include Carol, a deeply unpleasant neighbour who has designs on Matt, Hot Dog, one of Matt’s new neighbours in Satsuma Heights, and a very underwritten waitress who never really emerges as a distinctive character at all (in my alternative version of this novel this character has a more fleshed out role but with all the old plot elements stripped from her she is left hollowed out(.

Around halfway through the novel we discover that Harriet has been kidnapped and over the course of the rest of the novel her predicament is revealed and her rescue effected. The mystery – who has kidnapped her, and why – is well-managed, and the novel’s rather violent climax is genuinely exciting. The novel’s humour is more whimsical than laugh out loud – with Bob I think much of the charm of his humour is in the performance, so on the page the jokes are wryly amusing rather than belly laughs. So overall this novel is amusing and a pleasant enough read, but will not linger long in the mind.

The Long Shoe, by Bob Mortimer, 2025

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Book review

The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer, 2024

My track record for predicting how celebrity novelists are going to pursue their novel series is poor. I predicted Richard Osman would kill off one of his main characters in the second instalment of the Thursday Murder Club, but after four novels in the series they are still all going strong. Then n my review of The Satsuma Complex I forecast that it would be a one-off and we would hear no more of Gary, Emily and Grace – which was equally off-target!

The Hotel Avocado is the sequel to The Satsuma Complex (are we going to see a series of fruit based novel titles from television’s latest national treasure?) Set almost immediately after the events of Satsuma, Emily has inherited her father’s hotel in Brighton and started to renovate it. Gary remains working in his law firm in London, travelling down to see Emily at the weekends. He has to decide whether to commit to his relationship with Emily and move down to live with her in Brighton, leaving his neighbour Grace to a rather lonely life, or whether he tries to make a long(ish) distance relationship work. Emily seems content with the relationship as it is – she is working flat out on preparing the hotel for opening and has no time in the week for romance or relationships. Her plans for the hotel are greatly helped by Mark her very hard working but socially awkward facilities manager and Pete, her super-efficient painter and decorator. Things are complicated by the fact that Emily and Pete once dated and clearly retain a residual attraction for one another.

Both Gary and Emily flirt with breaking relationship boundaries. Gary invites a work friend, Roma, to sleep over at his flat, and Emily gets uncomfortably close to Pete. While neither are unfaithful the implication is that their relationship is vulnerable. All that becomes rather redundant when the main plot line of The Satsuma Complex resurfaces. The end of that novel left Gary waiting to be a key witness in the trial of several corrupt Metropolitan police officers. He is visited by the menacing Mr Sequence and his equally violent sidekick Brian, and offered money not to testify at the forthcoming trial. It is made very clear what will happen to him if he refuses. He can’t go to the police over these threats and attempts to pervert the course of justice, because the corrupt officers have friends still on the Force. Gary flees to Brighton, but Sequence and Brian track him down – they always seem able to predict his movements – and Emily and her hotel are dragged into the affair.

For a comic novel, the scenes in which Gary and Emily are menaced with increasing ferocity by Sequence and Brian are quite dark and slowly come to dominate the novel. People get hurt with the promise of a lot more to come. The bad guys are convincingly violent and uncompromising and there’s little Gary can do to protect himself and his loved ones other than comply with their threats. The whimsy that dominated the first novel fades into the background as Emily and Gary are bullied, menaced and beaten. In a sub-plot Emily applies for planning permission to hang a massive avocado sign outside her hotel as an advertising feature and bribes the chair of the planning committee to ensure permission is granted. When it is refused she installs it anyway and the sign quickly goes viral.

Surprisingly I actually preferred the crime elements of this novel compared to the quirky comedy. They don’t always sit together comfortably and while we know that Gary and his friends will be OK in the end, there aren’t many laughs in these scenes. But I thought they showed signs of more care and attention from the author – once freed from the burden of trying to make the reader laugh he can get on with telling what became a quite gripping story. The element of peril was real – or as real as it can get in a comic novel. We also see fewer autobiographical elements in the novel (unless the author once ran a hotel in Brighton) as the author moves away from his source material, which helps give the narrative more freedom. Slowly the potential of the author as a serious novelist, rather than (god-forbid) someone cashing in on his celebrity, is emerging.

The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer, 2024

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Book review

The Satsuma Complex, by Bob Mortimer, 2022

If someone told you the engagingly daft comedian Bob Mortimer had written a novel, what would you expect? Wonder no more, because the answer is The Satsuma Complex. It is impossible to find a review of this novel which doesn’t use the word quirky, so let’s get that out the way up front – this is a quirky, funny crime novel full of the surreal humour which is Bob’s trademark. The challenge the author must have faced when sitting down to write this was whether this humour could be sustained over the length of a novel, or whether the more serious elements would be seen as ‘padding’.

The Satsuma Complex (possibly a reference to A Clockwork Orange?) is narrated by Gary Thorn, a lonely, 30-something solicitor’s assistant drifting through life. His only friends are his irascible next-door neighbour, Grace, and a squirrel he talks to in the park. Work is boring and unengaging, and he has only been on two dates since he moved to London. Anyone who has read Mortimer’s autobiography, And Away will recognise this description of a less than happy period of Bob’s life, pre-comedy, down to the cheap shiny suit and the spartan flat. Write what you know is the template being used here.

The novel opens with Gary getting out of his depth when an innocuous drink with a work acquaintance gets him entangled in an investigation into police corruption and organised crime. The acquaintance goes missing, presumed dead, but not before he has told Gary that he is investigating police corruption in their patch of South London. Shortly thereafter Gary meets and is smitten by Emily, who, it turns out, is also involved in the crime operation and is also out of her depth, being coerced into following him to find out what he knows about the investigation. Details of the police corruption are recorded in a memory stick which comes into Gary’s possession, making him a target of both the criminals and the corrupt police. (I think Mortimer drew inspiration from the Daniel Morgan murder case for this element of the narrative – some details have been changed but there are plenty of similarities as well).

This is not a particularly promising or original set up for a crime novel, even a comedy crime novel – the ‘someone goes missing and a memory stick with key details of the case needs to be kept safe by our unwitting hero’ scenario has been done before. When the police call round to tell Gary his friend is dead, he is ill-equipped for his part in what follows. Mortimer stresses the fact that Gary has no heroic elements to his character – and this isn’t going to be a situation where any hidden heroism emerges either. When threatened by the criminals who want the memory stick he is quite ready to hand it back, even though he knows it means his friend’s murderers will escape unpunished. His focus is really on pursuing a developing relationship with the fragrant Emily, undeterred by revelations about her involvement with the aforementioned gang,

The plot may be deeply unoriginal, but Gary is an engaging anti-hero. His comedic asides and internal monologues (especially the conversations with the friendly local squirrel) are pure Mortimer. You would have thought that absurd comedy and hard-boiled crime novels are an uncomfortable combination unlikely to work, but Mortimer just about pulls it off. If you aren’t a fan of Mortimer’s carefully judged silliness then you won’t find much to entertain you here. The crime novel element of the book is quite heavily cliched, from the femme fatale to the hyper-violent but well-spoken villain. The charms of the book are elsewhere – in the banter between Gary and his irascible neighbour, the surreal descriptions such as the cologne ‘Electricity’ by Seb Longcoq being ‘on the banana-y side of road-works’ or dogs named Zak Briefcase and Lengthy Parsnips.

Would this have been published if the author was not a celebrity? Honestly, I doubt it. The characters aren’t strong enough and the plot is predictable. Is the humour strong enough to compensate for these weaknesses? Yes – but only because we know and love Bob and appreciate his sense of humour. Without that context it would have struggled.

I think the good news is that there’s unlikely to be a series here. I am sure Mortimer’s publishers will be pushing his for more of the same to capitalise on his current high profile and the considerable success of this novel. But a career investigating crime doesn’t seem in store for Gary Thorn – perhaps he will discover the world of stand-up comedy, which I think will be much more his kind of thing.

The Satsuma Complex, by Bob Mortimer, 2022

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Book review

Anyone who has seen him wildly ad-libbing on Would I Lie to You will know that as well as being a wonderful comic Bob Mortimer is also a brilliant story-teller. It’s a pity therefore that his childhood provides such depressing material for the opening half of this his autobiography. His dad died unexpectedly when he was young, and his mum struggled to support the family of four sons in working class Middlesbrough. The sad clown trope in which the comedian’s childhood insecurities are compensated for by comedy voices and routines (impersonations of teachers being a favourite) is very often a feature of similar accounts. But Bob was too shy even for that role. He’s very frank about how difficult these years were for him, but what is surprising is how long he struggled with this aspect of his personality. I found it genuinely sad that his footballing abilities didn’t provide an outlet for him – although he played for the Middlesbrough boys team for several years he tells us he hardly shared more than a dozen words with his teammates off the pitch. He later describes his time at Sussex university as the most difficult years of his life and that “throughout my entire three years at Sussex I never spoke to another law student. I talked in tutorials but as soon as they finished I was away back to my room to listen to my records.”

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The opening chapters of this absorbing autobiography are interspersed with an up-to-date chronicle of Bob’s heart problems, which brought a very sudden taste of his mortality. In childhood we have to come to terms with the inevitability of our own deaths, but we are able to treat it as sufficiently distant as to be an abstract concept, something that will happen one day but is not too frightening. But in later mid-life, with an unambiguous and critical diagnosis, it becomes a much more immediate reality. Bob response to the dawning realisation that he was not going to be around in ten or twenty years was to try to make the most of what time he had left. And to go fishing with his friend Paul Whitehouse. If you haven’t seen it Gone Fishing is wonderfully relaxing and contemplative comedy.

And Away… is admittedly fragmented. I got the impression that however hard Bob tried to be honest, he edits the story of his younger years to sanitise them. I can’t blame him for not wanting to dwell overly long on moments of his life best left behind, (not least because he would in doing so give away the ‘true or false’ answers to some of the more ridiculous anecdotes on Would I Lie to You) and he hurries on to the transformative moment when he meets his comedy partner, Vic Reeves. These are obviously the days Bob remembers with particular fondness, allowing him to leave behind a legal career he clearly wasn’t that interested in and to develop a stage persona in which he felt more comfortable than in his own skin. Imposter syndrome is possibly an exaggerated way of describing the common feeling that we don’t quite deserve the success we achieve and Bob certainly shares this feeling – it is almost as if he can’t quite believe his luck in getting to share the stage and screen with Vic, and would never want to emerge from his role as sidekick where he feels he belongs. He tells the story of their amazing success on television almost as a fan would describe it, a series of lucky breaks and undeserved second series, rather than the reward for hard work and comedic talent.

Bob comes across on television as a decent, genuinely likeable and yet humble man, someone who it would be wonderful to go for a beer with. This memoir confirms that impression without really giving the reader any new insights. Perhaps autobiographies are always going to hide as much as they reveal, which is why we wait for biographies for the real warts-and-all revelations.

And Away…, by Bob Mortimer, 2021

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