Book review: Mrs Danby and Company

Like Paul Magrs' other novel series featuring Brenda and Effie or Iris Wildthyme, Mrs Danby and Company - which also has the feel of the first in a series - takes its characters or situations from classic stories by other writers then gives them a different twist. This time three characters who seem rather familiar from Victorian adventure stories are thrown together a few years after their biggest triumphs, on a journey to New York in the early years of the 20th century: It's not hard to see who Mrs Danby, former housekeeper to a great detective, or vampire killer Abraham van Halfling could be based on, while Professor Zarathustra is every Jules Verne character in one. After an adventure on a sinking ocean liner and a voyage to an underwater city (including battle with the inevitable giant squid) the trio arrive to both unexpected celebrity, and more vampires in New York. In the usual crossover with his other series we get a brief insight into what all the fuss about Sheila Manchu's husband Mumu was, as he sends the characters into even more peril through a series of magical doors. It doesn't quite have the campness of Magrs' other series but the fun touch in Mrs Danby and Company is that the narration switches between the three lead characters, giving us a view into how differently they all view their situations, and especially each other - the unstoppably arrogant Zarathustra unable to take a honking great hint about what the other two really think of his self-proclaimed greatness. It's a fun and funny bit of steampunk but it does seem as if Magrs keeps kicking similar off new series about adventurous old ladies rather than focusing on one.

Book review: Enter Wildthyme

I don't know if Paul Magrs plans to return to Brenda & Effie at any point but in the meantime he's starting a new series that crosses their own universe over with the Doctor Who one. Iris Wildthyme is a character Magrs created years ago for the Doctor Who novels and audio plays that came about when the series was off the air, another seemingly immortal time traveler who picks up companions to go around the universe having adventures with; except this one is female, much more fond of booze and fags than the protagonist of a family TV show, and travels in a double-decker bus instead of a police box. Evidently she's taken on a life of her own and has appeared in print and audio stories written by a number of writers, but now Magrs is giving her a new series of books, starting with Enter Wildthyme.

Iris' main sidekick Panda, a living stuffed toy, appeared in the last Brenda & Effie book, and there's a number of other sly little crossovers with his other series, including a cameo from Jessie the womanzee. The story itself is largely setup for a new series, with Iris acquiring a new crew for her double-decker (in addition to Panda she picks up a gay, Northern bookshop owner and a talking vending machine called Barbra) and then setting off in pursuit of a dangerous poet. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover but the tagline ("Time and Space. Good and Evil. Gin and Tonic.") should give you a good idea of the kind of sense of humour we're talking about.

Book review: Brenda & Effie Forever!

Another Brenda & Effie novel by Paul Magrs, there's a lot of hints being dropped that Brenda & Effie Forever! might be the final book in the series. Brenda, the Bride of Frankenstein and Whitby B&B owner, and her best friend Effie, the last in a line of powerful witches who now runs an antique shop, start off on holiday in Paris where they bump into their local equivalents M Ananas and M Banane (aka Mr Pineapple and Mr Banana, or the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.) They warn them about great danger if they return home, which is of course exactly what they get.

The story sees the two old ladies and their friends encounter the ghosts of the Brontë sisters, who now run an underground (literally) school of magic and jujitsu, and I thought it took a while to get as quirkily funny as some of the earlier books in the series, but by the second half of the book there's plenty of bizarre little observations that had me chuckling. As for whether this is the final Brenda & Effie volume, it seems to me as if Magrs left the ending open enough that he could call it a day if he wanted, or bring the pair back if he decided he had more stories to tell. For me there's a few too many loose ends left to call this a conclusive ending - I want to know about the dust, for one thing.

Book review: 666 Charing Cross Road

A standalone (although... not quite) novel from Paul Magrs of Brenda & Effie fame, 666 Charing Cross Road shares those novels' camp take on the supernatural, except this time in more of a cosmopolitan setting, with the first half of the novel set in New York and the second half in London. When ageing American ghost story fan Liza discovers a specialist Charing Cross bookshop that will deliver the most obscure old English ghost stories, she's an instant fan. But one of the shipments contains the real thing, a bloodsoaked grimoire that contains a trapped demon who possesses her niece's boyfriend and starts a vampire and zombie plague on New York.

This is another lot of good fun from Magrs (although he's perhaps overcompensating a bit with how many of the English characters are bad guys and the Americans good - I'm sure if he was trying for a more transatlantic audience they could have handled a bit more of an even spread of good and evil.) The evil-fighting team are a familiar combination, with a seemingly innocuous old lady with a badass past, a gay best friend and a terrifying monster who's actually one of the good guys. It certainly takes place in the same universe as the Brenda and Effie books and early on I was wondering if, like in To The Devil - A Diva! this book's characters might eventually end up crossing over into the other series; a reference near the end makes it look pretty much inevitable that they will.