The Cuckoos of Batch Magna
By (Author) Peter Maughan
Duckworth Books
Farrago
9th May 2019
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Humour
Boats
823.92
Paperback
320
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
When Sir Humphrey Strange, 8th Baronet and squire of Batch Magna, departs this world for the Upper House, what's left of his estate passes, through the ancient law of entailment, to distant relative Humph, an amiable, overweight short-order cook from the Bronx.
Sir Humphrey Franklin T. Strange, 9th Baronet and squire of Batch Magna, as Humph now most remarkably finds himself to be, is persuaded by his Uncle Frank, a small-time Wall Street broker, to make a killing by turning the sleepy backwater into a theme-park image of rural England, a playground for the world's rich.
But while the village pub and shop put out the Stars and Stripes in welcome, the tenants of the estate's dilapidated houseboats tear up their notices to quit, and led by pulp-crime writer Phineas Cook and the one-eyed Lt-Commander James Cunningham, they run up the Union Jack and prepare to engage.
Peter Maughanstudied at the Actor's Workshop in London, and worked as an actor in the UK and Ireland (in the heyday of Ardmore Studios). He founded and ran a fringe theatre in Barnes, London and, living on a converted Thames sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway, wrote pilot film scripts as a freelance deep in the green shades of rural Kent. He lives in a river valley in the Welsh Marches where he writes the Batch Magna novels. Visit Peter's website at http://www.batchmagna.com