Carnage on the Committee: Birmingham Post review
‘Carnage on the Committee‘ by Ruth Dudley Edwards is a satirical farce which lifts the dustbin on all the rubbish spoken and written about literary prizes. When the chairwoman of the committee awarding the “Knapper-Warburton” prize is murdered, her replacement is Edwards’s awesome series heroine Baroness “Jack” Troutbeck, as outrageous and politically incorrect as ever.
There are, of course, more murders as the odious members of the juding panel (virtually all of them) are slaughtered by an unseen hand. Yet these members of the literati are so awful – jealous, back-biting bullies in the main – that, like Baroness Troutbeck, you want the murderer to get away with it.
Fortunately, there is no bigger bully than “Jack” Troutbeck, who sails through the storm as stately as a galleon, firing broadside after hilarious broadside into the pretensions of the literary establishment. And who dunnit in the end? That is the best (and oldest) joke of all, proving that the author can wield a stiletto as well as a blunderbuss.’
Mike Ripley
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Praise for Carnage on the Committee:
Marvellously entertaining and iconoclastic series of satires on the British establishment. Ruth Dudley Edwards is a crime writer whom we should treasure – sharp, intelligent and gloriously politically incorrect.
Like other venerable British institutions Ruth Dudley Edwards has gutted in previous mysteries, the literary cognoscenti (“the super-ciliati,” she calls them) hold no terror for this ribald satirist…
[Ruth Dudley Edwards] writes ebullient novels filled with entertaining eccentrics.
Carnage on the Committee is satire at its best… Witty, irrelevant, and down right funny… With her robust language, on the spot assessment of the current situation, this is one of the funniest books that I have read in a long time.
Sprightly, saucy and ingenious.
Dudley Edwards is an equal opportunities satirist. She’s rude to every persuasion.