The Midmorning Murders

by Julian Clary

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

'Utterly hilarious and thrillingly disgusting' Miriam Margoyles

'Perfectly ridiculous and very funny' Dawn French

There's no business as deadly as show business...

Jayne enjoys her new job as a researcher on popular daytime TV programme Morning All!, but the usual fare of cookery and fashion items are a bit bland and ratings are plummeting.

So when Jayne comes up with the idea for a segments investigating cold case murders - where the viewers can help to solve the mystery - the show knows they've hit the jackpot.

The trouble is, these cutthroat execs will do anything to keep the newly boosted ratings. And when a new case is needed, and fast, it might just turn to murder...


Discover this autumn's most entertaining, devious and fabulous mystery from author, actor and comedian Julian Clary.

Release date: October 8, 2026

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 304

Sample

There’s a man who sits on the pavement outside the Kerching supermarket in Camden High Street. He holds a cardboard sign which informs the reader that he’s homeless and hungry, and concludes with a hopeful ‘God Bless you!’ If you slip some money into his paper cup, he says, ‘Thank you, boss.’ This irks me. I feel cast in some sort of colonial set-up where I’m running a cotton plantation and he is my employee, or a grim Dickens drama where I am landed gentry flinging a few coppers at a malnourished beggar boy. Over the weeks, we have little scraps of conversation. His name is Andy and he’s from Kirkintilloch in Scotland. He is twenty-three. Can I get him anything to eat? He’d love a Crunchie bar.

One day, I ask how he is and he pulls off his boot and shows a big red abscess on his ankle.

You ought to get that seen to, I tell him. Then, the next day, he’s gone, never to be seen again. I make up a story, telling myself that a compassionate nurse at A&E referred him for drug counselling, there he got clean and returned to his family in Scotland. In the bracing fresh air, he found love and is now happily working as a fisherman. His rosy-cheeked wife sends him off to work each day with a wholesome packed lunch and a bite-sized Crunchie for afters. He remembers me fondly, of course, and often, while mending the nets on the shore, breaks into a self-penned sea shanty about the fragrant homosexual from Camden whose simple act of kindness saved him from a sordid life on the streets.

Why do I tell you this? According to my editor, this story means I risk being accused of virtue signalling. Which is the ‘practice of expressing one’s views or acting in a way thought to be motivated primarily by a wish to exhibit good character [or] social conscience,’ in case, unlike her, you didn’t go to Oxbridge. She also dares to wonder what this has got to do with the rest of the book? Is Andy from Kirkintilloch a central character? Is he going to reappear later? ‘Or,’ she snaps, ‘is the simple truth that you are padding out this book in any way you can and, what is more, you fancied that poor young man outside Kerching and wanted to get your manicured hands on a bit of rough, red-pubed, Caledonian cock? Eh?’ How very dare she. I mean, I am a happily married man.

I can explain. I tell you about Andy because of his eyes. So dull and far away. Like the eyes of a dead cat I once saw in a ditch. More pertinently, like the eyes of television producers. Now we’re getting to the point. The world of television is what this book is going to focus on and, believe me, it is a world I know something of. In Andy’s case, of course, it was the crack. In TV types, it is far worse: it’s the foetid corrosion of their souls. There is far less hope for them. As we shall see.

A search of the Camden New Journal reveals that the body of Andrew Campbell, originally from Kirkintilloch, was found in a bin shed on Mornington Terrace on 15 February 2015. The cause of death was hypothermia.

The reader should note that Mr Clary is a champagne socialist and a fantasist. Everything he writes should be taken with a pinch of salt.

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My publishers are called Orifice, and they are an inscrutable lot, take it from me. So, it is always a worry when you’re summoned into their offices for a meeting. It might well be a reflection of my own delicate sensibilities, but I always imagine something sinister is afoot.

The email didn’t indicate anything one way or the other, so it was difficult to know what sort of persona to adopt for the occasion. I have a selection to choose from. Cheery or humble? Grateful or indignant? I decided to go with placid and dignified, a combination that I’ve found works in most situations of this nature. My lot operate from a huge tower block on the Embankment. I always thought it was called Caramelite House, like some kind of low-calorie dessert, but in fact it is Carmelite House, if you please.

The Carmelites were nuns who took vows of silence, seclusion, abstinence and austerity, but things have moved on, clearly. There’s a vast reception area with security men who look inside your clutch bag and long, uncomfortable sofas where you sit and fidget as you wait to be collected.

Above you, each floor is dedicated to a different literary genre, be it Poetry, Biographies, Crime or Self-help, etc. The receptionist looks me up and down and says, ‘Celebrity Authors Department?’ with, I detect, a slightly withering tone. We are the lowest of the low, clearly. She doesn’t wait for an answer before tapping on her computer and inviting me to ‘Take a seat,’ which is a phrase that always reminds me of a gay club of the same name in Copenhagen where I once spent an energetic evening.

I’m taken up in a lift so smooth it doesn’t even hum, by a bright, educated-looking girl who I suspect has more A-Levels than teeth, and ushered through an open-plan office populated by more academically gifted girls in funky cardigans crouched over computers, until I am unceremoniously deposited in a glass office. Three vaguely familiar-looking women bustle in and share gossip for a few minutes, hooting about the box of phallic cream cakes that a relentlessly cheery TV judge had delivered to them. It’s only when we all sit down and the commissioning editor, apologising for the bubble gum her toddler stuck in her fringe that morning, fixes me with her beady stare that we get to the point of the meeting.

‘So, your last novel was great, fabulous feedback, everyone loved it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t reflected in your book sales. The celebrity book market is very tricky at the moment. Unless you’ve got Claudia Winkleman on the cover, the public don’t want to know. Which meant our profit margin was a little on the teeny side, I’m afraid. So for your next book we are going to be trying something innovative, which we are all very excited about here at Orifice.’

I had a sinking feeling. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Product placement,’ she said with a bright smile that was fooling no one. The other women in the room looked pained and fiddled with their embroidered sleeves.

‘Er,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ she continued breezily. ‘We’ll take care of it all during the editing process. Just a bit of sponsored content. It’s the only way we can make things work at our end, given the quirky, rather niche nature of your – I’m going to call them novels. The reader will hardly notice it!’

‘Oh no,’ I began, ‘I don’t think––’

‘So that’s settled,’ she cut in. ‘We think it is the way forward if the book industry is to survive.* Oh, and one more thing we wanted to flag up was that people thought there was rather a lot of you in the last book, Julian. Can we cut down on that this time? Maybe skip it altogether? A bit distracting, readers thought. Let’s keep it all strictly fiction this time.’

I managed a thin smile of my own. ‘Of course!’ I said. ‘The public’s wish is my command.’

The trouble was, I was already halfway through the book and, er, I feature in it rather heavily. Who were these snippy readers who bought my book but didn’t want me to be in it? The nerve. Well, the reader will get what they are given, I’m afraid. My books are private ruminations, and their publication is little short of an inconvenience. I’ll thank them to keep their small-minded observations to themselves. As for product placement – I’m not happy about it at all. What a fucking liberty! I only hope it doesn’t disturb the flow of the narrative. Orifice had better watch out. I could self-publish the next book and sell it at Camden Market. Then they’ll be sorry.

* My editor requires me to tell you here that all of this is a falsehood. We had a heated debate about it but she won.

Jayne Oxley

Bright, direct, loyal. From the Midlands. Used to work as a theatrical dresser but is ready to move on. Friend of Julian Clary.

Julian Clary

Camp comic and renowned homosexual. Author. Panto royalty. Now at a difficult age where his neck is beginning to sag and he has trouble with his ankles. Married to the much younger, fitter Rolf.

Selma Tibbins

TV Executive, CEO of Zesty Productions. Swishes around the place like she owns it (she does). Unfeasibly thin, obsessed with ratings, chic in a severe, non-smiling way.

Roo Tibbins

Selma’s daughter. Rather solemn, friendless eleven-year-old who seems older. She has more or less brought herself up. Happiest alone or playing on her iPad. Enjoys eating unhealthy food when her mother isn’t watching.

Ritchie Thomas

Presenter of Morning All! Very forgettable, with a bland personality and lifeless eyes. Smells inexplicably of cloves and might have been happier as a dentist.

Joy Simmons

Presenter of Morning All! Mistress of the wide smile and enigmatic laugh, she knows these are her main assets and doesn’t aspire to any other TV work where her limits might be revealed.

Carol Harrison

Fashion correspondent on Morning All! A jazzy, unconventional woman with a genuine gift for styling and making people feel good. She feels a little constrained by her role on the show but endeavours to make the most of it.

Manuel Tortellini

Cookery expert on Morning All! A talented chef who may be faking the extravagant Italian charms and mannerisms necessary for TV, but no one seems to mind.

Jayne Oxley is a cheerful, upbeat woman in her late thirties. She comes from Wolverhampton and works as a theatrical dresser, mostly on touring musicals, which she enjoys and is very good at. She laughs a lot and is amused by life. But Jayne is not an extrovert. She will sit quietly, smiling to herself, amused by an overheard conversation on the bus or a sudden memory. Her mind, her private, positive thoughts are her secret joy. That is enough for her, which isn’t to say she is mute or stand-offish. She may not initiate a conversation, but if someone starts chatting to her, Jayne is friendly and easy to talk to. Her voice is clear and her eyes hold a steady gaze. The Midlands lilt, her gently sardonic take on things draw you in, and very soon you are smiling too. If you stop talking though, so will she.

So Jayne is much liked by those she works with. She is a skilled seamstress. She can make and repair costumes efficiently. She always arrives at work on time and performs her duties cheerfully. Sometimes the ‘stars’ don’t notice her much. Jayne is just the woman who helps them dress or get changed, who delivers the clean, pressed costume to their dressing room and takes away the dirties. If they don’t speak to her beyond a please or thank you, then neither does she. Which is fine. Jayne understands that they have their performance to worry about and she is just there to help them. But sometimes, over the course of a three-month tour, barriers come down and intimacies are shared. A touring company becomes a family – and Jayne is usually at the heart of it. Jayne looks out for people, is happy to share, cajole or just have a good old laugh.

Dressers are required to wear black clothes so as not to distract from the wings, so that is what Jayne’s wardrobe mostly consists of. Black jeans, black T-shirts, black sweatshirts, black jackets. Functional. She does not draw attention to herself. Her skin is glowing and her eyes shine, but not with the help of any make-up. Her shoulder-length hair is a natural light brown.

If you asked Jayne about her love life, she’d shrug. ‘Is Leonardo DiCaprio available?’ No, she didn’t pursue that matter these days. It wasn’t on her radar. She had a boyfriend when she was a student and there had been a disastrous liaison with someone called Robin from a dating app, which ended badly. She regretted letting her guard down with him, that was for sure.

If pressed, she’d sigh and tell you the story.

‘I was on tour in Bath with a play called Leopard Spots. Robin was an estate agent and we matched on Tinder. When we met, he had that twitchy jaw thing which I like. Although it was just meant to be a casual thing, it became more than that. When the tour moved on, he kept in touch and visited me in various towns when he could. But I should have known it was all too good to be true. Like all estate agents, Robin was dodgy. All was not what it seemed. There was a techy guy on the tour called Spud, who, unbeknownst to anyone, was a part of some big gang, and was using the tour as a cover to move vast quantities of drugs around the country. Robin wasn’t an estate agent at all. He was an undercover cop, using me as a cover while he kept Spud under surveillance. The romance, everything – it was all fake! It could only happen to me, really. Used and betrayed. And you wonder why I don’t bother with men anymore?’

Sometimes life gives you a helping hand. A chance encounter, a casual remark and suddenly you are led in an unexpected direction. This is what happened to me when I met Carol. I was feeling a bit stuck in a rut, still based in a suburb of Wolverhampton, despite the fact that my parents had both died now. I couldn’t see a way out, so I just bobbed along. I wasn’t there much, it’s true, as my work as a dresser on touring musicals meant I was constantly on the road. I loved my job, but I had a vague sense of stagnation creeping into my bones. I was happy enough, but it was all a bit ho-hum. I noticed I kept looking around, scanning the horizon, widening my peripheral vision, as if I expected something exciting to be charging towards me.

I’ve never gone in for self-examination. Never assessed myself, as some do, standing in front of a mirror with a critical eye, tutting at my body’s shortcomings. I think I vaguely enjoyed how ordinary I was, in body and mind. I didn’t aspire to change, so when it came, I was bemused, fascinated. Was this really me? Was I changing? How come? Then I went with the flow, realising that this was what my vague dissatisfaction had been leading me to. And it all happened by chance. Or so it seemed to me at the time.

Then I met a woman called Carol when I did the Jesus Christ Superstar national tour a couple of years ago. She was also a dresser, like me. There was a quirky glamour about her. If you sat next to her on the bus, you’d guess she was probably something to do with the theatre. She struck me as rather brisk and self-absorbed to begin with, but I liked how she made the most of life. She drew me in quickly after that and I enjoyed her attitude and her sense of fun. She didn’t just sit in her digs waiting for showtime wherever we found ourselves for the week, she was out investigating and filming things for her vlog called Second-Hand Carol, which was all about finding bargains in charity shops and being fabulous on a budget. She had 70,000 followers and was, she told me, considered to be ‘an influencer’.

Carol could sniff out a battered old designer handbag from under a mountain of trash in the darkest corner of an Oxfam shop. I’ve seen her peruse a crammed rail of clothes in Cancer Research and hone straight in on a Vivienne Westwood blouse hidden under several layers. ‘Come on out, my lovely,’ she’d murmur and hold the garment up to the light.

She always inspected the armpits first. She nodded approvingly. ‘Hardly worn.’

‘Rich housewives,’ she told me. ‘Shopping is their therapy, takes their minds off their miserable marriages and disappointing children. They shop till they drop – the more expensive, the better – just to annoy their unfaithful husbands. Then every few months they have a clear-out to make room for more stuff. Everything is sent to the charity shop – sometimes with the original price tag on.’

Her technique was to hide the designer blouse in a pile with a few tasteless rags and then saunter up to the till and say, ‘Three pounds for this lot?’ with a shrug. Invariably, it worked. She was very clever and creative, making lace collars out of doilies, turning summer dresses into blouses, stitching, sewing, altering and unpicking. She was dedicated. Everything was photographed, filmed on her phone, then edited and shared with her Instagram followers far and wide (@secondhandcarol).

I took to going with her ‘for a rummage’, as she put it. I’d always just worn comfortable clothes. Mainly dark colours – it’s the actors I was used to dressing, not myself, so I never really thought about what I looked like. In fact, looking back, I can’t quite pinpoint why I felt more comfortable dressing other people, and hiding myself in the metaphorical wings, but Carol grabbed me by the oversized hoodie and made me fall in love with clothes for me.

With Carol guiding me, I picked up a whole new wardrobe for next to nothing. Without me realising it, Carol restyled me. By the end of the tour, I was rather daringly wearing high-waisted flared trousers, jaunty coloured tops, floaty scarves, chenille jackets, with platform shoes and big, baggy suede handbags. One day, between shows, she dyed my hair henna red, pulled it away from my face and held it in place with a large tortoiseshell claw grip.

‘Fabulous, Jayne!’ she declared. But before I was allowed to look in the mirror, she said, ‘Hold on a minute …’ Ignoring my protests, she then set to work plucking my eyebrows with her tweezers, applying some bronzer to my cheeks and a smudge of grey around my eyes.

‘Am I going to look like Leigh Bowery?’ I asked.

‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘I know what I’m doing. I have a gift for helping people to realise their full potential and you, little did you know, have been my secret project. Now you may look. The makeover is complete.’

I turned to face the mirror.

‘Oh my,’ I said, beaming at myself. ‘Look at me!’

‘I’m glad you like it,’ she smiled back at me. ‘You look so happy.’

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘how a few simple changes can change the way you feel.’

Carol nodded sagely. ‘Oh, yes. A new beginning for you Jayne.’

The next day, I sent my old chum Julian Clary a selfie of the new me.

‘Surprise!’ I said. I had dressed Julian in panto at the Birmingham Hippodrome years ago and we had stayed chums ever since.

‘Oh my!’ he replied. ‘It’s five stars from me. Hot! Hot! Hot!’

I didn’t work with Carol again in the theatre. Her vlog started to get attention in the media and a year or so after my makeover she sent me a text to say she was being screen-tested for the fashion slot on the popular daytime TV show Morning All! I was in Aberdeen at the time, on a tour of Hamilton, and forgot all about it. A few weeks later, I turned on my TV one morning and there she was, draping Vanessa Feltz in faux-fur and feathers for a trip to the Oliviers. Or it might have been the Soap Awards, I forget which.

I kept in touch with Carol only occasionally by text. But she had trained me well and I kept my hair red, scouring the charity shops wherever I was for items for my new wardrobe. There was no going back to the old Jayne; I felt as if I had found the look that suited me. I had paid no attention to myself before, but that meant no one else did either. I had enjoyed being invisible, but now I was ready for a change. Funny how something as superficial as a few second-hand clothes and a bottle of hair dye can make such a difference. I not only changed outwardly, but on the inside too. I felt a bit more extrovert. Life was more fun. I had a fling with the drummer and rather enjoyed the feel of his calloused hands rooting around my nether regions. At the end of the tour, I told him it had been fun but that was the end of it. He sent me a few wistful texts but just received a lipstick emoji in response. That wouldn’t have happened a few years ago, I thought to myself. But then neither would the fling.

When I was offered a three-month stint dressing for Grease! which was a summer staple at the Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, I put a post on Facebook to see if anyone knew of an affordable room to rent in London.

Carol got in touch and that’s how I came to be sharing a flat with her. It was a ground-floor, 1930s flat in Muswell Hill in North London, with big square rooms, original parquet flooring and lots of light from huge sash windows. Carol had furnished it with exotic carpets, walls painted oxblood-red and vases full of ostrich feathers. The windows were draped with swathes of gol. . .