As a fan of novels about writers and Hollywood/Los Angeles, this one immediately piqued my interest. And it's a pretty amusing mystery. Well-written, with interesting characters and a keen eye for the city and its peculiarities. I didn't find it as amusing as some of those who provided blurbs, but it was a fun read.

Mayday is a very funny, very cynical ‘text’ about a self-sabotaging writer called Ernest Mayday.
Like Jonathan Lynn’s greatest creation Sir Humphrey Appleby, he has been a civil servant.
A theme in the book is an exploration of language and how we say one thing, and mean something else, and how the meaning of one phrase can shift from sentence to sentence. One character repeatedly uses the words “a kick in the ass.” Sometimes it signifies a good thing, and sometimes bad.
Sir Humphrey often says something is courageous, when he really means it is suicidal. In Mayday, the absolute minimum condition is great, or major, which in fact is merely adequate.
Ernest is a rich writer and consultant, and has a great life. Except that he doesn't. He is creatively blocked, cannot form meaningful relationships, and is thoroughly miserable. He cannot be happy and find love, until he gets out of his own way.
The plot of this book is quite silly, and involves lots of Hollywood types, a cult leader, and women Ernest cannot hope to understand. And a gun. The farcical elements remind me of classic Michael Frayn, and the ending is quite unexpected although it makes perfect sense.

Jonathan Lynn is a brilliant comic writer, but I didn't think Mayday added up to all that much in the end.

First published in 1993, this is the story of Ernest Mayday, a cynical and grumpy Englishman and writer of potboilers who has moved to Hollywood to work but who finds himself blocked. His girlfriend is heavily involved in a "church" whose founder and guru is about to be tried for financial and sexual misconduct. Mayday becomes embroiled in a clever, convoluted scheme to try to get the inside story and adapt it for his next novel, while at the same time pitching a screenplay for an adaptation of an earlier book.

It is all very well written and it's a decent story, but it did feel a bit stale to me, I'm afraid. The targets of Lynn's satire are all thoroughly deserving of ridicule; vacuous intellectual pretentiousness, the shallowness and dishonesty of the film business, exploitative fake religions, the mangling of language and so on…but they have all been pretty thoroughly skewered both before and since Mayday was published. This ended up feeling a bit like an amalgam of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, The Bonfire Of The Vanities (which Lynn explicitly references) and the TV series Episodes. The story just managed to keep me reading and is cleverly twisty, but it did get very wordy and preachy, especially in the last few chapters, and in the end I was rather glad to finish the book.

For me, this hasn't aged all that well and for a comedy genius like Jonathan Lynn, I don’t think it counts among his best work. It's OK, but no more, I think.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

3 and 1 / 2 stars

Ernest Mayday has hit a wall. He is a famous writer, mostly in Britain, who suddenly has developed writer’s block. He goes to Los Angeles to check out the scene there and in hopes of coming up with an idea for a book. Historically, he has written some action novels, filled with financial facts and mostly based in the financial world.

He gets an agent and a lawyer – they seem to come together in LA. Casting about for ideas, he notices an advertisement in the classified section of the newspaper. It seems a woman named Joanna needs $10,000.00 and is willing to do anything to get it. What an interesting idea. That would make a good book!

He writes to the woman. Time passes and he gets no reply. Slowly, he forgets about the idea. When she does finally contact him, he is pleasantly surprised and flustered. He arranges to meet her in a local bar.

What follows is a ride though tinseltown. We meet many odd and unique personalities along the way.

I did not realize when I opted for this book that it was a re-print. But, no matter, it is a nice book. It is well written and plotted and reads very well. Mr. Lynn’s background in comedic television serves him well in this novel.

I want to thank NetGalley and Endeavour Press for forwarding to me a copy of this book for me to read.