They are yin and yang: Richard Osman and Mick Herron, or Mick and Dick.
I like both but friends are clearly one or the other. Actually I hope I will be given books by both for Christmas for a guilty, pleasurable read. Meanwhile I am reading The Thirteen-Gun Salute, the thirteenth in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. A nice touch like Quentin Tarantino calling his eighth film The Hateful Eight.
Authors may be touchy about their work being edited and if they are as successful as Patrick O’Brian it’s best not to interfere. At least that’s what I reckon reading the Salute. In previous books in the series there are two clubs in St James’s, opposite one another: Button’s and Black’s. The former is Tory and among its members are Ledward and Wray, both senior in government but traitors spying for France. Black’s is Brooks’s, Whig, and where Aubrey, Maturin, Sir Joseph Blaine (chief of British Naval Intelligence) and the Duke of Clarence, George III’s brother and an actual member of Brooks’s belong. In the Salute P O’B more than once slips up and interchanges Black’s and Brooks’s.
This is a hazard producing unexpected consequences such as when Tony Scotland apparently wears the butler’s pyjamas, a good title for a film – much better than There’s a Girl in my Soup; cars by Rolls Royce and champagne (of course) by Bollinger.