The Bookseller With No Name is back. Since he put his own first name to rest, Bateman’s quirky, black comedy crime novels, featuring often unwilling protagonists who, much to their indignation, found themselves thrust into all manner of peculiar situations, enjoyed a strong cult following and earned him a great deal of critical praise (the Daily Telegraph voted him to be one of the 50 Crime Writers to Read Before You Die). And then Richard & Judy picked Bateman’s Mystery Man to be a part of their 2009 Summer Read and things went big-time and supermarket friendly fast. Mystery Man introduced the crotchety, severely hypochondriac, generally personality bypassed and still unnamed proprietor of the No Alibis bookshop on Botanic Avenue, Belfast to the crime loving public. The eponymous Mystery Man was struggling to keep Belfast’s best known but least visited mystery bookshop afloat in troubled financial times and so found himself, against his better judgement, taking on cases originally destined for the AWOL private detective with an office next-door in order to stave off financial ruin.

The Day of the Jack Russell finds our favourite consulting Bookseller firmly ensconced back behind his counter. No Alibis still seems to be about as favourable a prospect to Belfast’s reading public as asking to use the restroom at Black Books so the business is once again in the monetary doldrums. Even the local crimes, at least the ones he would be prepared to get involved with, seem to have dried up. Having to run an internationally renowned but criminally overlooked small business is difficult under the best of circumstances but when you factor in the challenges of employing moronic student and Amnesty International devotee Jeff as his (not so) able assistant, his stroke-afflicted harpy of a mother, his inconsiderately pregnant ex-girlfriend Alison and the complete lack of interest from loyal customers in his Christmas Club, it’s no wonder our man’s spastic colon is acting up. And then ‘The Case of the Cock-Headed Man’ walked through the door of No Alibis and into his life.

Billy Randall runs a low-cost, no frills airline and holiday company that specialises in flying “the great unwashed to cheap destinations, many of them in the Third World, most of them permanently braced for natural disaster or constantly teetering on the edge of civil war or desperately trying to recover from a crashed economy”. Proud of being a self-made man, Randall has no compunction in proclaiming his greatness to the world and this, despite his attempts at exuding a cheeky chappie ‘man of the people’ image, has not endeared him to the Northern Irish public at all. Randall also takes himself very seriously and it is his tarnished dignity that brought him to No Alibis. Our Man Behind the Counter is not one to keep abreast of popular trends and viral Internet phenomena so Randall is forced to show him the offending YouTube video following two hooded youths as they use a set of decorators ladders to climb up an advertising billboard featuring the image of Billy Randall. One of the youths then takes “a can of spray paint from his hoody and [begins] to spray what slowly became an enormous cock and balls right in the middle of Billy Randall’s gigantic forehead”. Hence ‘The Case of the Cock-Headed Man’.

Believing that it will prove to be a simple matter, our man agrees to leave No Alibis under the watchful eyes of Jeff (well, it’s not like they have many customers anyway) and track down the graffiti bandits for Randall. He’s not particularly bothered as to what Randall intends to do once the two have been identified. It certainly seems that the extreme confidence he has in the detective abilities that he has cultivated through reading thousands of good, bad and indifferent crime novels is justified as, with a bit of unwanted help from Alison, he soon manages to track down Jimbo and Ronnycrabs, the fugitive artists.

Then things take the inevitable turn for the worse as our man finds himself up to his ears in intrigue and battling to solve murders which (possibly) echo in the corridors of power. With MI5 hovering about, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland seeming to be suffering from explosive temper tantrums, a host of small-time villains and potential paramilitaries on his case and his mother and Alison at each other’s throats, the Bookseller must gird up his loins, battle through his allergies and solve the murders while at the same time trying to figure out just where the stolen Jack Russell fits into the whole mess.

The Day of the Jack Russell offers an intriguing mystery spread over a plethora of bumblings, fumblings and zany events that cause plenty of laughs. The two novels featuring The Man With No Name are probably Bateman’s most comedic works to date and have been aptly described as Dashiell Hammett meets Raymond Chandler meets Father Ted. Perhaps understandably given this emphasis on humour, the central plot is not the most complex of mysteries but there are still enough twists, turns and McGuffins to keep even hardened mystery fans satisfied. The Mystery Man himself is certainly not a sympathetic character but he does provide wonderful narration and is a truly unique detective. From reading The Day of the Jack Russell it’s easy to see that Bateman had great fun flexing the conventions of the mystery genre and writing about writing and those who love and live through books. This sense of fun is reflected in an intriguing mystery that draws the reader in, keeps them laughing and guessing, but never takes itself too seriously. The Day of the Jack Russell is hugely entertaining and the perfect murder mystery to hide away with on a bleak winter’s evening.

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