CANR
WORK TITLE: THE MAN THAT GOT AWAY
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.lynnetruss.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 300
Lives in Sussex and Bloomsbury.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 31, 1955, in Kingston-upon-Thames, England.
EDUCATION:University College London, B.A. (with honors), 1977.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and writer. University of London Library, England, library assistant, 1973-74; Radio Times, subeditor, 1977-78; Times Higher Education, London, England, deputy literary editor, 1978-86; Times, London, England, art profile writer, 1982-86, television critic, 1991-97, sports columnist, 1996-2000; Listener magazine, literary editor, 1986-90; Independent, London, England, columnist, 1990-91; Woman’s Journal, columnist, 1994-97; Daily Mail, London, critic; Sunday Times, London, book reviewer. Host of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio-4 series Cutting a Dash. Member of judging panel, Asham Awards, 2005-06.
AWARDS:Named Columnist of the Year, 1996, for articles in Women’s Journal; University College London fellowship, 2004; Book of the Year designation, British Book Awards, 2004, for Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Honorary degrees from University of Brighton, 2005, New York School of Visual Arts, 2006, and Open University, 2006.
WRITINGS
Author of numerous comedies, dramas, and other features for BBC Radio, including Acropolis Now, Full Circle, and Inspector Steine. Contributor to Glued to the Gogglebox: Fifty Years of British Television with Freeze-Frames, Checkmate (Liverpool, England), 2003; Secrets of the Press, Penguin; Days of Wine and Roses, Transworld; Fabulous Brighton, Shrew Press; Don’t Know a Good Thing, Bloomsbury; The Sunday Night Book Club, Arrow; and Fur Babies, Quadrille. author of a column for Sunday Times of London.
SIDELIGHTS
Even when Lynne Truss was a little girl, she enjoyed writing. One of her first stories, a fairy tale written at age nine, began with the dialogue: “So your the wicked witch.” When a sister read the story, her first comment was that Truss should have written “you’re,” not “your.” The mistake, Truss told USA Today interviewer Bob Minzesheimer, left the future writer feeling “humiliated.” She declared: “I never finished that story, but I certainly learned the difference between your and you’re.” The lesson stayed with her; nearly thirty years later, Truss’s love of proper grammar led to her to publish the international best seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
A journalist, critic, and novelist, Truss has reviewed books and television programs, and she has written about sports for the London Times. She is also well known to thousands of listeners of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio-4 due to her dramas and comic monologues, and she has had modest success as a novelist. It was while writing a radio program about punctuation that Truss realized that she “did care, quite strongly, about these things,” as she later told Bryan Alexander for People. Her little book on grammar, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, has become an international hit, selling millions of copies in both Great Britain and the United States and inspiring a series of related books for children.
The title Eats, Shoots and Leaves refers to a joke: a panda walks into a café, eats a sandwich, then shoots an arrow into the air. When a man asks why, the panda throws him a badly punctuated nature guide and tells him to look it up. The entry for panda includes the line: “Eats, shoots and leaves.” The extra comma completely changes the meaning of the sentence from a description of the panda’s diet to one of a violent action. In Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Truss traces the history of punctuation marks like the comma, apostrophe, and semicolon. She argues that paying attention to punctuation is not being a stickler; in fact, doing so ensures correct communication. Her humor enlivens the book throughout, especially in her examples of how missing punctuation can completely change a sentence’s meaning.
In 2006, Truss produced a version of her best-selling book for children, titled Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Really DO Make a Difference! In addition to the title example, Truss gives several other amusing instances of how a comma can make a difference. Cartoons help illustrate the divergent meanings of “Slow, children crossing” and “Slow children crossing.” Although adapting her grammar guide for children may not seem like a natural fit, “it proves very effective, thanks to entertaining repackaging that narrows the original’s broad purview to the comma,” according to Jennifer Mattson in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic likewise found the book to be a “clever, creative commentary on commas,” adding that “the witty sentences increase in complexity (and hilarity).”
In The Girl’s Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can’t Manage without Apostrophes! Truss focuses on the power of the apostrophe, as in the difference between “those smelly things are my brother’s” and “those smelly things are my brothers.” “Many of the 13 scenarios successfully find the sweet spot between kid-pleasing goofiness and perfect clarity of purpose,” Jennifer Mattson remarked in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic commented that “some sentence pairs are whimsical while others are laugh-out-loud funny, but the entire text is easy to understand” when combined with Bonnie Timmon’s illustrations. The book gives kids “wordplay or ‘grammarplay’ at its finest,” according to Jennifer Cogan in School Library Journal.
A third child-friendly guide, Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts!, includes punctuation marks ranging from the hyphen to parentheses, quotation marks, and periods, again showing how one little change in notation can make a world of difference in meaning. Truss’s efforts to improve people’s grammar including writing books and creating podcasts for use in classrooms. As she told Alexander, “I feel responsible for making others notice” poor grammar, even if it means taking a marker to badly punctuated shop signs.”
In her novel Cat Out of Hell, Truss tells the story of a librarian and his dog, Alec and Watson. Alec’s wife has recently died, so he takes Watson to spend some quiet time at a cottage by the sea. A friend of Alec’s sends him a series of documents concerning the strange experiences of a man named Wiggy. Wiggy is an actor whose sister disappears. When he goes looking for her at her house, he encounters her cat, Roger, who begins talking to him in English. Roger tells Wiggy about his adventures with his mentor, a cat called Captain. He also comments on art and literature. Roger reveals that some of his previous owners have died, and Alec realizes that he, too, may be in danger. Alec brings Watson home to Cambridge, where he unites with Wiggy to summon Beelzebub, the Grand Cat Master, in order to save himself and Watson.
Tom Cox commented in a review for the London Guardian: “Truss brings an eerie, nineteenth-century kind of horror story into the present-day world.” Writing on the Washington Post Book World website, Ron Charles stated: “If jokes about acerbic pets, library carrels and funerary archaeology are catnip to you, then by all means curl up next to the fire with this diverting comedy.” Library Journal critic Jennifer Beach praised the structure of the book, calling it “a fun format for an equally entertaining quick read.” “Cat lovers (or cat haters) and fans of gothic fiction will devour this creepy, paranoia-inducing morsel,” remarked a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described the volume as “a Chinese box of anti-narrative that reads like M.R. James on bad acid with a laugh track, complete with demonic cats.”
In 2018 Truss initiated the “Constable Twitten Mystery” series set in 1950s Brighton with A Shot in the Dark. Critic A.S. Crystal is shot at the opening night of a play at the Theatre Royal before being able to tell Constable Twitten what he knows about the Aldersgate Stick-Up case from 1945. Unaided by an inept police chief, Twitten and Sgt. Jim Brunswick aim to get to the bottom of the old case by diving into the center of the city’s criminal underworld. They use Crystal’s death as a lead to reopen the decades-long conspiracy.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews observed that “Truss piles up ingenious plot twists, preposterous coincidences, snarky asides, and characters out of P.G. Wodehouse.” The same critic concluded that “readers who can suspend their disbelief are in for quite a workout.” A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that “Truss successfully combines wry humor with a fair-play mystery.” In a review in iNews, Barry Forshaw concluded that “skeptical readers will not only find their prejudices against comic and cosy crime being swept away, but will be eager for more outings with Twitten and co. And, needless to say, there is not a single misuse of the English language in the entire book.”
With The Man That Got Away, Twitten overhears two teens talking about people who had cut of their uncle’s head. He recalls the names they had dropped in conversation to follow leads, soon realizing that he has stumbled across something quite big. He soon uncovers ties to influential people in town as more bodies appear.
A Publishers Weekly contributor contended that “Truss perfectly blends humor and detection.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews mentioned that “Truss’ period burlesque extends from individual character types and obligatory scenes to the longer narrative arcs beloved of more recent franchises.” The same reviewer thought it was “too relentlessly facetious to take seriously but more frantic than funny.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2004, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, p. 1681; September 1, 2006, Jennifer Mattson, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Really DO Make a Difference, p. 132; July 1, 2007, Mattson, review of The Girl’s Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can’t Manage without Apostrophes!, p. 53.
Boston Globe, March 21, 2004, Jan Freeman, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. C3.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2006, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Really DO Make a Difference!, p. 639; June 15, 2007, review of The Girl’s Like Spaghetti; January 1, 2015, review of Cat Out of Hell; September 1, 2018, review of A Shot in the Dark; August 15, 2019, review of The Man That Got Away.
Library Journal, February 1, 2015, Jennifer Beach, review of Cat Out of Hell, p. 77.
Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2004, John Rechy, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. R5.
Newsweek, April 12, 2004, Elise Soukup, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. 12.
New Yorker, June 28, 2004, Louis Menand, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. 102.
New York Times Book Review, April 25, 2004, Edmund Morris, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. 7.
People, May 17, 2004, Bryan Alexander, interview with Truss, p. 53.
Publishers Weekly, January 5, 2015, review of Cat Out of Hell, p. 50; September 3, 2018, review of A Shot in the Dark, p. 73; August 19, 2019, review of The Man That Got Away, p. 78.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, November 1, 2004, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
School Library Journal, August 1, 2004, Susan H. Woodcock, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. 147; July 1, 2007, Jennifer Cogan, review of The Girl’s Like Spaghetti, p. 95.
Spectator, December 6, 2003, Philip Hensher, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. 44.
Time, May 24, 2004, Christopher Porterfield, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. 83.
USA Today, August 8, 2006, Bob Minzesheimer, “‘Eats, Shoots, Leaves’ Spelled out for Kids,” author interview, p. 5D.
Washington Monthly, December 1, 2005, Elizabeth Austin, “Missed Manners: Lynne Truss Thinks People Are Getting Ruder. She Can Shove It,” review of Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today; or, Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door, p. 42.
Washington Post, May 23, 2004, Michael Dirda, review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, p. T15.
ONLINE
British Council, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/ (September 17, 2019), author profile.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves, http://www.eatsshootsandleaves.com/ (October 28, 2008), author profile.
Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/ (March 6, 2014), Tom Cox, review of Cat Out of Hell.
Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (July 3, 2010), Charlotte Philby, author interview.
iNews, https://inews.co.uk/ (July 11, 2018), Barry Forshaw, review of A Shot in the Dark.
Lynne Truss, http://www.lynnetruss.com/ (September 17, 2019).
Washington Post Book World, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (March 3, 2015), Ron Charles, review of Cat Out of Hell.
’ve been a full-time working writer for over twenty-five years now, but I realise this is no excuse for the mountains of stuff I seem to have produced. I can only apologise, and say that, although you wouldn’t think so, I do sometimes stop writing, have a cup of tea, and re-organise the dog treats or something. There is a common misconception that I was only ever interested in punctuation. I try not to be hurt by this. But what really interests me in life is how other people think, which is why the dramatic monologue is probably my favourite form. On this website you will find a monologue written from the point of view of an Edible Dormouse, who has important Cold War espionage duties to carry out from his HQ the loft of a house in the Amersham area. Could a person only interested in punctuation have written this? I truly think not.
Doris Lessing once said at a public talk that she had made one big mistake as a writer – letting the cat out of the bag that she enjoyed writing. The people who get respect, she said, are those who struggle to write, for whom the whole business is torture. After she had said this, I realised I was doomed. It’s so obvious that I enjoy what I do. But then Doris Lessing went and won the Nobel Prize, didn’t she? So maybe she was wrong, after all.
Lynne Truss biography:
Born 1955, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England
Home until age 18: Petersham, Surrey
One sister, Kay (d 2000)
Father d 1991
Schools:
The Petersham Russell Infants’ School, Petersham 1960-63
The Orchard Junior School, Petersham 1963-66
Tiffin Girls’ Grammar School, Kingston upon Thames 1966-73
9 O levels (Biology, English Language, English Literature, French, Geography, History, Latin, Maths, Religious Knowledge)
3 A levels (English, History, Religious Knowledge)
Gamble Prize for Literature
University:
University College London 1974-77
BA Hons (First Class) English Language and Literature
Awarded Morley Medal, Rosa Morrison Scholarship and George Smith Prize
Courtauld Institute, Graduate Diploma course 2011-12
Work:
1973-74 University of London Library, Senate House, library assistant
1977-78 Radio Times, sub-editor, programme pages
1978-86 Times Higher Education Supplement, deputy literary editor
1986-90 The Listener, literary editor
Freelance writing:
1978-86 Times Educational Supplement, arts and books reviewing
1982-86 The Times, arts profiles
1988-91 The Listener, column called “Margins”
1990-91 The Independent on Sunday, arts and books coverage
1991-97 The Times, television critic, “Single Life” columnist, “Logged Off” columnist, and Op Ed columnist
1994-97 Woman’s Journal, columnist (Columnist of the Year, 1996)
1996-2000, The Times, sports columnist (shortlisted for Sports Writer of the Year, 1997)
Other regular writing:
Sunday Telegraph, “Seven”, weekly column
Saga, monthly column
Books:
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Published November 2003
Cutting a Dash (Eats, Shoots & Leaves)
Published April 2004
A Certain Age, Vol. 1: Female Monologues
Published January 2005
The Lynne Truss Treasury
Published June 2005
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!
Published August 2006
Talk to the Hand
Published October 2006
A Certain Age, Vol. 2: Male Monologues
Published February 2007
The Girls Like Spaghetti
Published October 2007
Inspector Steine (Dramatised)
Published March 2008
Twenty-Odd Ducks
Published August 2008
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Illustrated Edition
Published October 2008
The Casebook of Inspector Steine (Dramatised)
Published January 2009
A Certain Age
Published February 2010
Making The Cat Laugh
Published February 2010
The Adventures of Inspector Steine, Third Series
Published April 2010
Get Her off the Pitch!
Published May 2010
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed
Published May 2010
Going Loco
Published May 2010
Tennyson’s Gift
Published May 2010
The Return of Inspector Steine
Published July 2013
Tennyson and his Circle (National Portrait Gallery Companions)
Published March 2014
Cat Out of Hell
Published March 2015
The Lunar Cats
Published November 2017
A Shot In The Dark
Published June 2018
A Shot In The Dark
Published November 2018
A Shot In The Dark
Published July 2019
The Man That Got Away
Published July 2019
Stories/chapters in books:
Telling Stories (BBC)
Femmes de Siecle (Chatto)
Perfect Pitch (Headline)
Woman's Hour Book of Short Stories 3 (BBC)
Asham Short Stories (Serpents Tail)
Secrets of the Press (Penguin Press)
Days of Wine and Roses (Transworld)
Fabulous Brighton (Shrew Press)
Don’t Know a Good Thing (Bloomsbury)
The Sunday Night Book Club (Arrow)
Fur Babies (Quadrille)
Midsummer Nights (Quercus/Glyndebourne), Modern Delight (Faber)
Tales from a Master’s Notebook (Vintage Classics)
Stage:
Freshwater
Released June 2009
The Proceedings of that Night
Released February 2011
Hell’s Bells
Released August 2012
Other stage productions:
Ellen Terry’s Lectures on Shakespeare, performed by Eileen
A rehearsed reading of the comic play(s) by Virginia Woolf, in a new adaptation. (Charleston Festival, May 2009)
Atkins for the Charleston Festival, May 2011 (my idea)
Critical introductions:
Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics)
Published October 2006
BP Portrait Award 2007
Published June 2007
A Dictionary Of The Sussex Dialect
Published March 2008
The Exclamation Mark (Hesperus Classics)
Published August 2008
Envelopes by Harriet Russell
Published October 2008
Westwood (Vintage Classics)
Published August 2011
Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave? (Workbook)
Published October 2011
Jane Austen: Persuasion (Vintage)
Published November 2014
That’s Not English: Britishisms, Americanisms and What Our English Says About Us
Published September 2015
Broadcasting:
See Broadcast page
Appearances:
Pick of the Week
Fourth Column
Front Row
Saturday Review
Quote....Unquote
The Write Stuff
Wordly Wise
Front Row
Word of Mouth
The News Quiz
Cross Question
Woman's Hour
Late Tackle
Books and Co
Late Night Live
Who Goes There?
Excess Baggage
Whispers
Saturday Live
Loose Ends
Start the Week
Today
Great Lives
The Now Show
The Essay
A Good Read
The Verb
University Challenge
Only Connect
Honours:
Fellowship of University College London, 2004
Honorary degree, University of Brighton, 2005
Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 2005
Honorary degree, Open University, 2006
Honorary degree, New York School of Visual Arts, 2006
Directorships etc:
Patron of Julia Margaret Cameron Trust, Isle of Wight
Patron of Asham Trust, East Sussex
Patron of Women's Refuge Project, Brighton
Personal:
One home in Sussex (with dogs); one home in Bloomsbury
Cats Buster and Paddy, both born in 1986 died 2006-7 and are much missed
Member of Groucho Club
Friend for Life of Terrence Higgins Trust
Trusty assistant named Gavin
Journalism
Book reviewing was where I started out. I worked as a deputy literary editor, and then as a literary editor (at The Listener), and book reviews were my whole professional world. I am relieved not to have critical duties so much these days. I am a slow reader, and when I review a book, I read it twice and take a million notes – my review of the two books for the New York Times last autumn (attached here) took about a month to do. Elsewhere in journalism, I did spend four years as a very unlikely sportswriter for the Times, and wrote my book Get Her off the Pitch! about those experiences. Sportswriting was as close to “real” journalism as I have ever got, and four years of it was definitely enough for my lifetime…
Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss is an English writer, journalist, and professional pedant best known for her popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Genres: Cozy Mystery, Literary Fiction
New Books
July 2019
(hardback)
The Man That Got Away
(Constable Twitten Mystery, book 2)
Series
Constable Twitten Mystery
1. A Shot in the Dark (2018)
2. The Man That Got Away (2019)
Novels
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (1994)
Tennyson's Gift (1996)
Going Loco (1999)
Cat out of Hell (2014)
The Lunar Cats (2016)
Omnibus
Tennyson's Gift / Going Loco (2005)
The Lynne Truss Treasury (2005)
Collections
A Certain Age (2007)
The Casebook of Inspector Steine (2009)
Non fiction
Tennyson and His Circle (1999)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2002)
Glued to the Gogglebox: 50 Years of British Television (2003)
Making the Cat Laugh (2004)
Talk to the Hand (2005)
The Girl's Like Spaghetti (2007)
Twenty-Odd Ducks (2008)
Get Her Off the Pitch! (2009)
Eats Shoots & Leaves for Children III (2016)
Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times of London, followed by four (rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Women's Journal. Lynne Truss also hosted Cutting a Dash, a popular BBC Radio 4 series about punctuation. She now reviews books for the Sunday Times of London and is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Brighton, England.
Lynne Truss
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Lynne Truss
2015
Born
31 May 1955 (age 64)
Kingston upon Thames, England
Occupation
Author
Nationality
English
Website
www.lynnetruss.com
Lynne Truss (born 31 May 1955[1]) is an English author, journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster and dramatist. She is arguably best known for her championing of correctness and aesthetics in the English language, which is the subject of her popular and widely discussed 2003 book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.[2] The book was inspired by a BBC Radio 4 show about punctuation, Cutting a Dash, which she presented.
Besides her promotion of linguistic prescription and commentary on English grammar, Truss has written many radio plays, both comedic and dramatic. She has also written novels, and grammar guides for children.
Contents
1
Early life
2
Career
3
Politics
4
Bibliography
4.1
Novels
4.2
Non-fiction
4.3
Children's books
4.4
Collections and published scripts
4.5
Selected radio series
5
References
6
External links
Early life[edit]
Lynne Truss was born on 31 May 1955 in Kingston upon Thames. She was educated at the Tiffin Girls' School and University College London, where she was awarded a first class degree in English Language and Literature.[3]
Career[edit]
Truss began her media career as a literary editor. She then spent six years as a television critic for The Times, before moving into sports journalism for the same newspaper. She spent four years in the latter field, and in 2009 wrote a book about her experiences with it, Get Her Off the Pitch: How Sport Took Over My Life.
Politics[edit]
In August 2014, Truss was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.[4]
Bibliography[edit]
Novels[edit]
A Shot in the Dark - Raven Books (2018) ISBN 978-1-4088-9051-6
The Lunar Cats (2017) ISBN 978-1-7847-5688-8
Cat Out of Hell - Hammer (2014) ISBN 978-0-09-958534-3
Going Loco – Review (Hodder Headline) (1999) ISBN 0-7472-5965-8; Profile Books (2004) ISBN 1-86197-733-6
Tennyson's Gift – Hamish Hamilton (1996) ISBN 0-241-13521-4; Penguin (1997) ISBN 0-14-024671-1; Profile Books (2004) ISBN 1-86197-733-6
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed – Hamish Hamilton (1994) ISBN 978-0-241-13410-8; Penguin (1995) ISBN 0-14-017938-0; Profile Books (2004) ISBN 1-86197-749-2
Non-fiction[edit]
Get Her Off the Pitch: How Sport Took Over My Life (2009)
Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (2005)
Glued to the Goggle Box: 50 Years of British TV with Freeze-Frames (2003) - with John Minnion
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003)
Tennyson and his Circle (1999)
Making the Cat Laugh: One Woman's Journal of Single Life on the Margins (1995)
Children's books[edit]
Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts (2008)
The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage Without Apostrophes! (2007)
Collections and published scripts[edit]
Giving Up the Ghost – BBC Radio 4 (2008)
A Certain Age: Twelve Monologues From the Classic Radio Series – Profile Books (2007) ISBN 1-86197-879-0
Selected radio series[edit]
Acropolis Now - set in Ancient Greece
Inspector Steine - set in a 1950s English police station
Gossip from the Garden Pond
Rumblings from the Rafters
A Certain Age (BBC Audio Collection, two vols.) – BBC Audiobooks (2005, 2007) ISBN 0-563-51052-8, ISBN 1-4056-7687-6
This list excludes standalone plays.
Lynne Truss
FictionNon-FictionPoetry
Born:
Kingston, Surrey
Publishers:
Profile Books
Agents:
David Higham Associates Ltd
Biography
Lynne Truss is a writer and broadcaster.
She began work as a literary journalist, editing the Books section of The Listener, and as critic, columnist and sportswriter for The Times. She also wrote for Woman's Journal, and for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, for which she regularly reviews books. In 1996 she was named Columnist of the Year for her work on Woman's Journal, and the following year, was shortlisted for Sportswriter of the Year for her work on The Times. She has written extensively for radio, including dramas, adaptations and short stories.
She has written three novels: Going Loco (1999); Tennyson's Gift (1996); and With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (1994). She also writes scripts and comedy series for BBC Radio 4, the latter including Acropolis Now and A Certain Age. She often presents and contributes to radio discussions and hosted Cutting A Dash, a series about punctuation which led to the writing of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003). This book was a runaway success and surprise best-seller, and won the 2004 British Book Awards Book of the Year.
Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (2005), is an analysis of manners in modern society. A Certain Age (2007) is a book consisting of 12 radio monologue scripts.
Lynne Truss lives in Brighton. Her most recent non-fiction book is Get Her Off the Pitch: How Sport Took Over My Life (2009), an account of her four years as a sportswriter. She has since written a novel for cat lovers, Cat Out of Hell (2014).
Read less
Critical perspective Bibliography Awards
Critical perspective
The sales phenomenon of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003), her witty self-help guide to punctuation, has recently transformed Lynne Truss, somewhat to her own surprise, into a high-profile author.
The book not only spent weeks at the top of the best-seller list but found itself being put onto students’ reading lists, and stimulated a national debate about apparently declining standards of grammar. Her new book also appears to have addressed a similar public anxiety, about the state of manners in contemporary life. The Times newspaper serialized Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (2005), and Truss appeared at this autumn’s Cheltenham Literature Festival to talk about her subject. She had previously been noted mainly for her versatility and humour, working for magazines and for newspapers as a sports journalist, bringing a sardonic female viewpoint to bear, particularly on football and its characters. She was also literary editor at The Listener from 1986 to 1990, and has written comic novels and radio plays, while continuing to be a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4.
While at The Listener, she wrote humorous columns - ‘Margins’ - the best of which were collected in Making the Cat Laugh (1995). These are a mix of self-deprecation, literary asides, with a continual commentary on the satisfactions and frustrations of being single, and the freelance writing life itself. ‘The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day’ and ‘I always shout “Buns for tea!” when a cheque arrives in the post’. She portrays herself as ‘Teddywoman’ rather than ‘Catwoman’, delivering many slyly funny reflections on her reading habits and infatuations – with television programmes, Wimbledon tennis stars and films starring Jeff Bridges. We also learn about the perils of supermarket shopping, how to invite yourself to the Booker Prize dinner, and even ‘The Only Event of Any Importance That Ever Happened to Me’ (being stuck in a lift). Her beloved cats function as a perennial source of inspiration (‘I swore off caviare on Sunday night, the cats took it badly’), and the collection concludes with a cat’s eye view, ‘snoozing happily on my pet’.
In one of the columns, she remarks that ‘my favourite conversational topic is garden sheds’. Her first novel, With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (1994), actually features a (male) freelance journalist who writes a celebrity ‘Me and My Shed’ column for a somewhat chaotic gardening magazine. The plot is a well-choreographed farce, sparked off by the takeover of the magazine by a teenage entrepreneur. Through various misunderstandings, the now-redundant staff all converge on the house – and the garden shed - of this week’s celebrity subject, a libidinous American television actress. There are slapstick incidents aplenty, accompanied by a stream of jokes, puns - and asides on grammar and language, lamenting that ‘life is not susceptible to sub-editing, by and large’. Another column happens to mention ‘Despair’, a work by the Victorian pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. The latter’s despairing efforts to persuade her neighbour Tennyson to pose, and the strange goings-on during July 1864 on the Isle of Wight, form the essentials of Tennyson’s Gift (1996). This is Truss’s best, funniest and most imaginatively accomplished novel, and few characters escape her affectionate debunking. The anxious Poet Laureate is protected from bad reviews by his long-suffering invalid wife, while unwanted gifts (including Elgin Marbles wallpaper) get in the way, as does the holidaying Charles Dodgson. The Alice in Wonderland manuscript he has brought with him provides dream-like interplay with the characters, and we also encounter painter G.F. Watts and his wife, actress Ellen Terry, ‘the Phrenological Fowlers’, as well as a fast-moving cast of crazed servants and precocious children. There are again some funny misunderstandings, of romantic and poetic kinds, and the action moves dangerously towards the cliff’s edge at Freshwater Bay.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves was actually a publisher’s suggestion, following on from her Radio 4 series ‘Cutting a Dash’, but Truss claimed that ‘despair’ was the initial stimulus for the book: ‘I saw a sign for "Book’s" with an apostrophe on it, and something deep inside me snapped’. She set out to rid the world of ‘this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes’. The book’s success was surely due as much to it being chatty and informal, with a characteristic self-deprecating wit, as to its timely subject. Throughout, she mixes scholarly and historical background information with literary asides (‘Byron is a great master of the dramatic dash’). The introduction explains the vital role of punctuation in directing you how to read, ‘in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play’; there follow chapter titles such as ‘The Tractable Apostrophe’, ‘That’ll Do, Comma’, and ‘Airs and Graces’. There are again plenty of jokes and puns (‘I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation’) and well-chosen examples of idiosyncracies perpetrated by writers such as Gertrude Stein, G.B. Shaw, Beckett (‘he earned the right to be ungrammatical’), Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Along the way, we learn about the origins of italics, the correct uses of exclamation marks, inverted commas, the ellipsis, brackets, and the hyphen. She concludes by discussing the future of our language and its grammar, in the age of text messaging and the Internet. What the book essentially does is to make readers feel good about the subject, giving them a sense of empowerment and the permission ‘to love punctuation’. The important thing, she advises, is to ‘release your Inner Stickler’.
In Tennyson’s Gift, Fowler the American showman-phrenologist at one point tells his daughter: ‘we have a duty to behave with the very best of manners’. This nicely anticipates Truss’s concerns in Talk to the Hand (2005). It takes on the vexed subject of manners in modern society and suggests that rudeness is essentially a moral issue: ‘Rudeness is bad. Manners are good. It feels very daring to come out and say it, but I’ve done it and I feel better’. The book seems to have a more serious, even embattled air, as it discusses such everyday matters as intrusive mobile phone calls on trains, ‘aggressive hospitality’ in shops and from call centres, even ‘the universal eff-off reflex’. However, she claims optimistically, we can do something to help the situation. And ‘just as enough people going around correcting apostrophes may ultimately lead to some restoration of respect for the English language, so enough people demonstrating kindness and good manners may ultimately have an impact on social morality’. Lynne Truss, it appears, has turned out to be as much a moralist as she is a humourist.
Dr. Jules Smith, 2005
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Bibliography
2014
Cat Out of Hell
2009
Get Her Off the Pitch: How Sport Took Over My Life
2008
Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts
2007
The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage Without Apostophes!
2007
A Certain Age
2005
Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life
2003
Glued to the Goggle Box: 50 Years of British TV with Freeze-Frames by John Minnion and a Rewind by Lynne Truss
2003
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
1999
Going Loco
1999
Tennyson and his Circle
1996
Tennyson's Gift
1995
Making the Cat Laugh: One Woman's Journal of Single Life on the Margins
1994
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed
Awards
2004
Book of the Year, British Book Award
Truss, Lynne A SHOT IN THE DARK Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) $17.00 11, 6 ISBN: 978-1-63557-274-2
The shooting of an acerbic reviewer during the premiere of a play at the Theatre Royal opens endless avenues of investigation for the incompetents of the Brighton Constabulary in this effervescent farce.
Six years after the Middle Street Massacre wiped out all 45 members of the Giovedi crime family and its rival gang, Fat Victor's Casino Boys, DI Geoffrey Steine, who'd arrived from the City of London Police just in time to hear the news that most of the town's leading criminals had killed each other, is still convinced that there's no crime in Brighton and that he's the reason why. The situation changes with a bang when an unknown member of the audience interrupts the opening night of Jack Braithwaite's play A Shilling in the Meter to keep exacting critic A.S. Crystal, a "Robespierre with BO," from filing his scathing notice by shooting him where he sits as he's calling out, "Tell Inspector Steine from me he's even more of a fool--." The person to whom Crystal addresses this unfinished injunction is PC Peregrine Twitten, a dewy-eyed smarty-pants who's rounding out his very first day on the job at Brighton by attending the play in the seat next to Crystal after having been dismissed from several earlier positions by bosses who thought him too clever, too clueless, or both. So although the officers nominally in charge of the case are Steine and Sgt. Jim Brunswick, Twitten is convinced that only he can solve a case whose body count rapidly rises. He turns out to be right, though not at all with the results he expected.
As in Cat out of Hell (2015), Truss piles up ingenious plot twists, preposterous coincidences, snarky asides, and characters out of P.G. Wodehouse, this time replacing her murderous felines with a setup out of the genre's golden age. Readers who can suspend their disbelief are in for quite a workout.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Truss, Lynne: A SHOT IN THE DARK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A552175239/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c46dd36. Accessed 10 Sept. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A552175239
* A Shot in the Dark: A Constable Twitten Mystery
LynneTruss. Bloomsbury, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-63557-055-7
British authot Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) makes her crime fiction debut with this hilarious series launch. One morning in 1957, London theater critic A.S. Crystal takes the train to Brighton, where he's to attend the try-out of a new play, A Shilling in the Meter, at the Theater Royal. That same morning, Constable Peregrine Twitten, an eager beaver who won a prize "for forensic observation," reports for duty to Det. Insp. Geoffrey Steine, the less than clever head of the Brighton Constabulary, who in 1945 failed to break the Aldersgate stickup case, to which Crystal, then an assistant bank manager, was a witness. That evening at the Theater Royal, something in the play prompts Crystal to remember a piece of crucial information about the Aldersgate robbery, but he's shot dead before he can share it with the police. Twitten sets out to investigate Crystal's murder and his link to the unsolved case, aided by competent Sgt. James Brunswick and despite lack of support from the feckless Steine. Truss successfully combines wry humor with a fair-play mystery. Agent: Anthony Goff David Higham Assoc. (U.K.). (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Shot in the Dark: A Constable Twitten Mystery." Publishers Weekly, 3 Sept. 2018, p. 73. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A554250977/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a0d06794. Accessed 10 Sept. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A554250977
The Man That Got Away: A Constable Twitten Mystery
Lynne Truss. Bloomsbury, $27 (304p)
ISBN 978-1-63357-073-1
Truss's comic mystery debut, 2018's A Shot in the Dark, concluded with Constable Peregrine Twitten, of the Brighton, England, police force, discovering that the mastermind orchestrating organized crime in that seaside resort was none other than Mrs. Groynes, the police department's unassuming charlady. In this delightful sequel, also set in 1957, Twitten has been unable to persuade anyone else of that truth. His duel with Groynes and continued efforts to get his dim superior, Insp. Geoffrey Steine, to see the light serve as backdrop to his inquiry into the throat-slitting of 17-year-old Peter Dupont, a junior clerk in the Sewerage and Waterworks Department. By chance, Twitten previously eavesdropped on a cryptic conversation the victim had about running away with his girlfriend, Deirdre Benson; during that talk, Peter warned Deirdre that their plans must be kept secret from her violent family, which she claimed were responsible for killing "Uncle Ken" and leaving part of his body in a trunk at the train station. Twitten's dogged sleuthing and Steine's unrelenting idiocy build toward a surprising but logical reveal. Truss perfectly blends humor and detection. Agent: Anthony Goff, David Higham Assoc. (U.K.). (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Man That Got Away: A Constable Twitten Mystery." Publishers Weekly, 19 Aug. 2019, p. 78. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597616442/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=419a7699. Accessed 10 Sept. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A597616442
Truss, Lynne THE MAN THAT GOT AWAY Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) $17.00 10, 15 ISBN: 978-1-63557-423-4
Criminal conspiracy doesn't rain in 1957 Brighton: It pours.
Waiting on a staircase inside the Maison du Wax for blind sculptor Pierre Tussard and his daughter and assistant, Angelique, to finish preliminary measurements of Brighton Constabulary wireless star Inspector Geoffrey St John Steine, their latest model, Constable Peregrine Twitten overhears two teenagers whispering how much they'd love to run away together and how careful they have to be around the people who cut off Uncle Ken's head. Laboring to remember all the proper names the couple dropped--Blackmore, Hoagland, Dickie--Twitten has no clue that he's stumbled onto the tip of a very large and felonious iceberg. Further enlightenment arrives, along with further mystification, when Peter Dupont, the neophyte town council clerk Twitten overheard, is found with his throat cut, and his girlfriend turns out to be Deirdre Benson, whose brothers, Frank and Bruce, along with their mother, run a profitable family crime syndicate out of the Black Cat club. And there's more. Veteran con artist Joseph "Wall-Eye" Marriott accosts Adelaide Vine and her friend Phyllis, a pair of Brighton Belles given the job of helping strangers; then he pretends to be Lord Melamine Colchester and offers to sell them gold at the bargain price of 25 pounds a brick--that is, unless it really is the Marquess of Colchester and those bricks really are gold. Dickie George, a lounge singer at the Black Cat, emerges from a week in the Brighton sewers only to be struck dead by a giant piece of candy. And Palmeira Groynes is ready to execute any number of foul schemes that Twitten could foil if only he could persuade Inspector Steine that the constabulary's charlady was the evil genius he's recognized as such ever since A Shot in the Dark (2018). Truss' period burlesque extends from individual character types and obligatory scenes to the longer narrative arcs beloved of more recent franchises.
Too relentlessly facetious to take seriously but more frantic than funny.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Truss, Lynne: THE MAN THAT GOT AWAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596269540/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8ca9c854. Accessed 10 Sept. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A596269540
A Shot in the Dark by Lynne Truss, book review: ‘Fresh and beguiling’
Comic crime has a new chief inspector: ‘Eats Shoots & Leaves’ author Lynne Truss (Photo: Penguin Random House)
Barry Forshaw
1 year
Wednesday July 11th 2018
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The notion of “cosy” crime fiction produces derisory chuckles among many hardcore thriller fans, who regard the genre as twee and inoffensive, redolent of an earlier era. Such books, naysayers complain, are closer to Cluedo than real life.
A similarly dismissive response is often prompted by the comic crime genre, generally regarded by aficionados as a poor relation of the more serious detective genre (despite the highly diverting efforts of such droll writers as Simon Brett and LC Tyler).
Read more: ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ author Lynne Truss just wants to write about cats, not commas
It takes a writer of Lynne Truss’s wit and intelligence to take on the cosy and comic fields, shaking them up to forge something fresh and beguiling
Might these dual prejudices be overturned? Perhaps it takes a writer of Lynne Truss’s wit and intelligence (not to mention her popularity as the sworn enemy of the sloppy use of English) to take on both the cosy and comic fields, shaking them up to forge something fresh and beguiling.
Truss is, of course, most celebrated for her tongue-in-cheek book on grammar, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, but she has also made her mark as a novelist and as a radio dramatist – this new book is an extension of her successful BBC Radio 4 series featuring the obdurate Inspector Steine.
Truss’s locale here is Brighton, the year 1957. After the discreetly handled scene of mass murder that opens the book (in which two rival criminal gangs destroy each other), Inspector Steine maintains that there is no longer any lawbreaking in Brighton, and resists any suggestions to the contrary. His life is comfortable – no crime and no criminals (he claims), just a series of undemanding duties.
Such local lowlifes as “Stanley-knife Stanley” hardly register on his radar, and when an energetic and enthusiastic newcomer, Constable Twitten (a name designed to irritate the opponents of comic crime), begins to shake things up at the station, Steine is obliged to accept that things are slowly turning nasty in the city of Brighton, some time before it becomes London-by-the-Sea.
Read more: JK Rowling, Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf named on list of 100 essential books by female writers – list in full
When Twitten attends a theatrical opening night, he finds himself sitting next to a poisonous theatrical critic, who is murdered during the play. The town is plagued by a series of burglaries, and Inspector Steine’s saturnine colleague Sergeant Brunswick, a man whose days as a war hero are long behind him, is frustrated by his boss’s refusal to confront reality. But Brunswick is bumped by Constable Twitten into accepting that the town is starting to look more like the crime-ridden book Steine despises, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.
Not only is the whole thing delightfully witty, it also functions very successfully as a novel in the vein of the genre it is satirising: the police procedural
A large cast of strongly drawn characters (including an “angry young man” dramatist) helps keep things bubbling along, and not only is the whole thing delightfully witty – more early Evelyn Waugh than Agatha Christie – it also functions very successfully as a novel in the vein of the genre it is satirising: the police procedural. And, as in Brighton Rock, we are given a vivid picture of the town in its pre-chic heyday, with the kiss-me-quick hats and candy-floss era providing bags of local colour.
Sceptical readers will not only find their prejudices against comic and cosy crime being swept away, but will be eager for more outings with Twitten
Twitten, in particular, is a delightful creation; the name is misleading, in that he’s not an idiot, but the classic copper in conflict with his complacent superior, the latter as much of an obstruction to the pursuit of justice as any criminal.
Sceptical readers will not only find their prejudices against comic and cosy crime being swept away, but will be eager for more outings with Twitten and co. And, needless to say, there is not a single misuse of the English language in the entire book.
A Shot in the Dark by Lynne Truss (Raven Books, £12.99)