The Mayor of Fordhamton is not happy that listeners to Nice Radio had voted the town the third most boring in England. The first Fordhamton Arts Festival is born and soon runs into trouble when the stand-in for the dead body in The Real Inspector Hound is found dead onstage during the dress rehearsal. It brings into town Detective Inspector Miles Davis who is soon digging into the public and private lives of the actors – the actors being staff at Geno Washing County High School. Davis has recently been promoted and working with an unnamed intelligence agency and discovers that the dead person Lynne Anderson was an American secret service agent . She had made contact with the director of the play Jeremy Hawkins who as a student was well known to hold extreme left wing and anti-American views. When the teacher playing Lady Muldoon's long lost husband has a an accident that rules him out of the play Davis is accepted by Hawkins as the last resort to join the cast. He falls in love with the teacher playing Lady Muldoon and in doing so solves the murder. John Barber was born in London at the height of the UK Post War baby boom. The Education Act of 1944 saw great changes in the way the nation was taught; the main one being that all children stayed at school until the age of 15 (later increased to 16). For the first time working class children were able to reach higher levels of academic study and the opportunity to gain further educational qualifications at University.This explosion in education brought forth a new aspirational middle class; others remained true to their working class roots. The author belongs somewhere between the two. Many of the author's main characters have their genesis in this educational revolution. Their dialogue though idiosyncratic can normally be understood but like all working class speech it is liberally sprinkled with strange boyhood phrases and a passing nod to cockney rhyming slang.John Barber's novels are set in fictional English towns where sexual intrigue and political in-fighting is rife beneath a pleasant, small town veneer of respectability.They fall within the cozy, traditional British detective sections of mystery fiction.He has been writing professionally since 1996 when he began to contribute articles to magazines on social and local history. His first published book in 2002 was a non-fiction work entitled The Camden Town Murder which investigated a famous murder mystery of 1907 and names the killer. This is still available in softback and as an ebook, although not available from SmashwordsJohn Barber had careers in Advertising, International Banking and the Wine Industry before becoming Town Centre Manager in his home town of Hertford. He is now retired and lives with his wife and two cats on an island in the middle of Hertford and spends his time between local community projects and writing further novels.
