Mystery Man
by Colin Bateman
Headline
HK$234
The acid test of whether a funny novel works is whether it makes you laugh out loud. And in this case, Mystery Man: Murder, Mayhem and Damn Sexy Trousers by Belfast author Colin Bateman passed with flying colours, making this reviewer laugh not once, but twice in quick succession - the first occasion being a bit embarrassing.
Having time to kill recently I decided to read the book in a public loo in Central. When I entered the cubicle there was no one else around and, hunkering down for a chapter or two, I read how the protagonist - the Mystery Man of the title - was suffering from a 'quite distressing burning sensation in [the] armpit area'. As a crime fighter, Mystery Man suspects he is being poisoned. 'Any other crime fighter thus suffering would surely have alerted national security and insisted on a radiation sweep,' Bateman writes. But the truth turns out to be more mundane. 'I examined the situation, the circumstances and the timing, and after due rumination these led me to deduce that by not immediately donning my glasses when emerging from my shower each morning, I had not in fact been spraying deodorant on to my steaming body as I thought, but Windolene.'
That did it. I laughed out loud and left the cubicle to find six or seven people staring at me as if I were deranged.