By David Bishop
Starring Helen Kay and Toby Longworth

Quotable quote: ‘I fear you’re guilty of vastly over intellectualising my work’

Review by Richmond Clements

This latest Judge Dredd audio drama sees a number of return visits. The series of Dredd audios from Big Finish is one, of course - but also the return of characters Slick Dickens and Truman Kaput and writer David Bishop.

Eliza Blunt, a Brit Cit writer and critic comes to MC-1 in pursuit of her obsession with writing genius Truman Kaput. This take an unexpectedly violent turn however, when Slick Dickens himself, Kaput’s most famous character, turns up and starts killing!

Can Dredd and Blunt stop Dickens as his crime wave escalates?

This is a welcome return. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed these audios until I put this one on and the sound of the theme tune and Toby Longworth’s gruff and perfect Dredd voice drifted into my ears.

There is a lot of fun to be had here. But I suspect the person having the most fun is David Bishop. Bishop, as you may know, now teaches a creative writing course in Napier University, and it feels to me that he’s getting a lot off his chest here in Blunt's discourses on writing and writers! There is a quite brilliant section when she meets a group of odious literary critics, and Bishop's glee at having her deliver the line about one critic having ‘earned ... praise from a generation of other critics.’

It’s written in a lovely style. I was about to write that it was a pastiche of the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but, of course, it’s written in the style of a Slick Dickens novel and again, Bishop is having a load of fun in doing so.

And I haven’t mentioned the Dredd/Slick Dickens slash fiction yet!

This is not to say that this is not without problems. This particular one is a problem with audio dramas in general and not just this one. If you have a story that is, at heart, a whodunit and the cast consists of only four or five characters, then the twist when it comes is rarely a surprise. And so it is here too.

Don’t let that put you off though, because it doesn’t detract from the considerable enjoyment you’ll get from this. In fact, I listened to it again before writing this, and if anything, it’s even better on repeated listening. There are many marvellous turns of phrase in the narration that I missed first time round, and found myself pausing and going back to pick them up.

And even if the twist is rather obvious, the ending itself is delightfully dark, downbeat and quite horrible.

Order Judge Dredd audio dramas from Big Finish