In 2022, Bob Mortimer put out a crime novel that only Bob Mortimer could have written. Set in south London and starring a diffident solicitor named Gary Thorn, The Satsuma Complex had the usual parade of gangsters, bent coppers and femme fatales but also made room for talking squirrels and digressions about barn-owl crockery. As charmingly zany as you’d expect from the veteran comedian, it was niftily plotted too and went on to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.
It also sold by the truckload, which may be a factor in Mortimer’s speedy return to the same terrain. The Hotel Avocado picks up where the first book left off, with Gary resuming his low-key life in Peckham while his girlfriend Emily sets about renovating her late father’s hotel in Brighton. The main drama in the first 100 pages hinges on whether Gary will uproot himself to help Emily with the hotel or, more probably, continue to be a noncommittal “shithouse” and stay in London.
