Review by Frank Plowright

We’ve all had the nightmare day when everything that can go wrong does go wrong, leaving us somewhere on the scale from vexed to enraged. Andi Watson exploited that so well for The Book Tour, and we now have A Lack of Alibi, in which encyclopedia salesman Sebastian Mortimer arrives in the same town with appointments to keep.

From the people met, the assumption is of England being the setting, yet Watson depicts the town in which Mortimer arrives as if old European, with gas lights, tiled passages and cobbled streets. It’s designed in the way Fawlty Towers was designed, with multiple turns and steps to ensure the maximum chance for mishap, the first occurring shortly as Mortimer slips down some steps shortly after arrival. His intention is to be home to attend his daughter’s school sports day, having missed the previous two, yet circumstances delay him time and again.

Watson contrives these well, Mortimer being naturally polite and so unable to extricate himself from a succession of timewasting conversations in which he really should have no part. They’re skilfully scripted to induce frustration in readers of a similar temperament. At the same time the meetings he’s supposed to have don’t occur, the bang on the head he’s had may be affecting him, and the staff at his hotel are notably rude and aggressive.

As with all Watson’s previous work, the cartooning is absolutely delightful. Characters are simply drawn, yet each is significantly different from the remainder, their face shapes and accessories instantly identifying them. The town is almost a character itself, detailed, charming and eccentric.

The clever aspect is how intimately it’s entwined with The Book Tour, and it’s eventually clear that A Lack of an Alibi is constructed around the same crucial event. As joking asides Fretwell’s lost books turn up all over the place, but it highlights that although the circumstances and protagonist are different, Watson remains in the same territory. It means anyone picking up A Lack of an Alibi without knowledge of the first book, which isn’t necessary to enjoy this, will find a dazzling reworking of Kafkaesque themes rendered via exquisite cartooning. For anyone who did read the first book, the clever idea of the same circumstances experienced by a different person at the same time may not be enough to compensate for revisiting the same events in the same style.