The First Casualty - Ben Elton

The First Casualty – Ben Elton ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Firstly, a confession. I didn’t mean to buy this book; I wanted the Elton book about the reality TV show (Dead Famous) and picked this up by mistake and didn’t realise the error until I started reading the first pages. I mention this because one of the joys of reading is the anticipation you feel before starting a new book and realising this wasn’t the book I wanted set me back and may have influenced my thoughts of it, particularly in the first few days of reading. Ben Elton doesn’t really need much of an introduction as one of the things he is most famous for is how prolific ...

When I think of famous people that I dislike, Ben Elton is very high on my list. Once a bastion of anti-Thatcher working class humour he has sold out so badly that he now represents everything that is wrong with New Labour's horribly false façade. You get the feeling that if you shook his hand, you may just lose your watch. No matter how much I hate the man it seems that he finds success and money in everything he does from comedy, books, film and theatre – yuck! What makes me even sadder is I thought his earlier books such as ‘Gridlocked’ and ‘Stark’ were fantastic slices of funny fiction. Over the years as he grew increasingly unbearable; so did his books with the ...

For my money, Ben Elton has a bit of a mixed record when it comes to books. Some are excellent, others readable and some really quite poor. The First Casualty definitely belongs in the first category. It centres on Inspector Kingsley, a police officer and conscientious objector, who suddenly finds himself investigating a murder in the trenches of the Great War in 1917. Despite this fairly standard sounding plot summary, though, it's not a conventional murder-mystery book, offering far more than just a straight forward whodunit plotline. There's commentary on the First World War, an array of interesting and very human characters, humour, action, and, of course, ...