Charles Paris

Charles Paris returns again, in a fringe show at the Edinburgh Festival, with another nubile girl to provoke him, his accommodating wife to console him and a gory murder to challenge him. Edinburgh and the Festival are both background and foreground with Charles flitting between a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a ‘mixed-media’ satire, a late-night revue and his own one-man show on Thomas Hood. Then a fading pop star is murdered, there’s a bomb scare in Holyrood Palace and someone makes a suicide leap from the top of the Rock….

Charles Paris has landed a dual role in a lavish West End musical: onstage as a bit player, offstage as an undercover sleuth. The production's nervous backers fear that someone is trying to kill the play. The ultimate showstopper would be to eliminate the star.

Christopher Milton is one of TV’s brightest stars and the natural choice to play the lead in Lumpkin!, the musical version of She Stoops to Conquer. His is a ruthless, egomaniacal talent, guaranteed to turn his co-cast’s rehearsals into nail-biting hell. Charles Paris suspects him of harbouring at least one dark secret from years past. And then the ‘accidents’ begin. Soon it is plain that someone will stop at nothing in order to sabotage the show for their own ends.

On the night of the final performance of The Seagull, in which Charlotte had taken a leading part, her husband Hugo jealously watched her dancing with younger men at the backstage party. He started drinking heavily and continuously. Two days passed in an alcoholic daze. Charlotte disappeared, presumably with her lover, and, when her body was found in the coal shed, strangled with her own scarf, every sign pointed to Hugo as the murderer.

A rising young stage comedian, who is about to receive his profession's award as ‘Most Promising Newcomer’, dies sensationally on stage at the start of his act; as he picks up the mike, he is electrocuted. Faulty wiring seems to be the cause; no one person is to blame; a verdict of death by misadventure is returned at the inquest.

Charles Paris, middle-aged actor turned amateur sleuth, is vacationing at a small English seaside town. Irresistibly drawn to anything theatrical, Charles seeks entertainment at the local music hall and endures a series of not-so-wonderful vaudeville acts in the hope that the man given star billing will be worth watching. This performer, Bill Peaky, comes on stage with his electric guitar, grasps the microphone, and drops dead, due to faulty wiring of the stage equipment.

When Andrea Gower’s body is discovered in an editing suite, with gashes in her wrists and two razor blades nearby, the cause of death seems obvious, with the words she spoke only hours before taking on a completely different meaning... Working as a radio actor for the BBC was all new to Charles Paris: a new kind of work, a new jargon, and a lot of new faces - some of them quite pretty.

"I want you all out, gone, dead, exterminated!" high strung Alex Household had cried out when, after a lifetime of struggle, he lost the starring role in a new play called The Hooded Owl to an actor who couldn't remember his lines. But did that mean that it was Alex who had shot the leading man dead during his climactic speech? Charles Paris, for one, could see many logical suspects: from the devious producer, to the gullible playwright, to the young starlet's overprotective mother.

Charles Paris is, as ever, waiting for a phone call from his agent, and is driven to painting and decorating to make ends meet. A rare evening out at a high-profile restaurant among stars of stage and screen promises a break in the depressing routine. But when the restaurant’s handsome, temperamental chef is brutally murdered, Charles finds himself drawn into the ensuing investigation. At first it seems an open and shut case: the chef’s

Charles Paris is on his way up again, career-wise. No longer ‘resting’ or playing a corpse in a cupboard, he finds himself doubling almost every role in a provincial production of the play dreaded by superstitious theatrefolk: Macbeth.

Charles Paris is in clover. He has been contracted for three whole months to play brainless bobby Sergeant Clump, foil to the charismatic amateur sleuth, Stanislas Braid, in a TV series of that name. Recourse to the whiskey bottle is still needed, however, to get him through a day’s filming - one made all the more arduous by the pompous posturings of the show’s star, and the constant outraged interruptions of the ancient author whose detective novels are being adapted. Indeed, there is plenty of friction about.

Charles Paris's star gig is as "forklift-driver-for-a-day" in a corporate video. Charles must position the forklift and then declaim in the trained voice of an actor the wonders of the company and its big, happy family of employees. He delivers his lines with his usual aplomb, but he can't help wondering about the "happy family". It's rather fun to learn to manipulate a forklift. But it's a responsibility, too, as Charles learns to his horror: a forklift can be a tool for murder.

Charles Paris’ acting career plumbs new depths when he takes the part of a possible murder victim in ‘Public Enemies’, a true-crime television series. Finding himself in a bizarre world somewhere between police procedure and showbiz, Charles is inexorably drawn into the investigation... especially after the dismembered limbs start turning up. The viewers of ‘Public Enemies’ get caught up in the macabre jigsaw puzzle of death; it is ghastly, of course, but it does make good television.

Simon Brett's oldest and most beloved character, Charles Paris, is back. Paris, the often out-of-work actor, has a good part for a change, playing Sir Toby Belch in a summer festival production of "Twelfth Night." But when the director takes ill and then Paris' friend in the production is the apparent victim of intentional food poisoning meant for Paris, it's not long until the bodies start to turn up. Paris is forced to deal with a wild young director whose idea of Shakespeare the bard himself would hate.

Charles Paris' old friend Mark, who runs a recording studio in Bath where Charles is making a talking book, has a drinking problem that amounts to a death wish. But it's not the drink that kills Mark, it's somebody in the cast of Charles' play who has a dirty little secret that Mark must not be allowed to reveal...

After a long period of "resting", life is looking up for Charles Paris, who has been cast as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father and First Gravedigger in a new production of Hamlet. Ophelia is played by Katrina Selsey, who won the role through a television talent show. Hamlet himself is also played by a reality TV contestant, Jared Root - and the two young stars have rather different views than the more experienced members of the cast. But when the company reach the first staging post of their tour, matters get more serious, with one member of the company seriously injured in what appears to be an accident, and another dead....