Ex Bookworm group review:I have always liked Ben Elton. I think he is a funny and intelligent man. But I did not like this.The main problem for me was that Elton just couldn’t decide what the book should be. It certainly wasn’t a novel of suspense. After all, it took at least half the book to even get the policeman to the scene of the crime. It wasn’t really a “whodunnit” because the clues weren’t there for us to work out. (Mind you, I always thought Shannon had done it simply because he was so ...

The First Casualty of War is of course truth: with hindsight it is easy to label WW1 futile and lament the loss of A 'Golden Generation' At the time anyone who spoke out against the senseless carnage risked imprisonment, or social obvilion at the least. and so having defended himself in court, explaining why he refuses to climb into a uniform and shot some hapless German citizen whose government is also urging him to kill Brits & their allies by whipping up the same propaganda, our hero find...

Nowhere near as mind-blowingly awesome as Elton's Blackadder Goes Fourth, The First Casualty remains an interesting addition to the field of contemporary WWI fiction.Part murder mystery, part thinly veiled Siegfried Sassoon (or is it Wilfred Owen?) lovefest, The First Casualty takes a conscientious objector, Inspector Douglas Kingsley of Scotland Yard, and plunks him down in Flanders to investigate the murder of a famous poet-soldier-anti-war agitator.The book is slick (but maybe a little too sl...

Novel opens during a court case for crime of being a consciousness objector in WWI Interesting main character Douglas Kingsley, a Met Police inspector who argues with the judge about pointless killing during all wars. He even argues that fighting on behalf of Belgium was wrong as they were slaughtering native people in [Belgian] Congo - which caused rage in the judge & courtroomKingsley, Abecrombie, Hopkins et al are unusual & richly drawn war time characters - they are conscientious obj...

Ben Elton's best work... and it's not satire of dark comedy!.How about a military police investigation taking place on the Ypres frontline in 1917, during the First World War!!! On top of that ingenious scenario Elton holds nothing back on the utter senselessness of war, gender inequality and Suffragettes, the treatment of homosexuality, class distinctions, British Bolsheviks, conscientious objectors, the Irish uprising, the penal system etc,... and still puts together a highly engrossing myster...

Another great read from Ben Elton - who knew?
Researches his topic and the period so well. Learn a lot about a lot. Not just a whodunnit.

Ben Elton is a brilliant story teller. This book is set in 1917 and concerns a conscientious objector policeman who is sent to Flanders to investigate a murder. Some of the battle scenes are very graphic but do show how life must have been in the trenches.

Reading this page turner made me realize just how much of the British current collective psyche has been influenced by the two Great Wars. The protagonist's moral awakening, to his one man revolutionary crusade failure; his abject realization of failure during incarceration; his rebirth after his rescue to his voluntary participation on the Flanders front completes the formation of British psyche in the Industrial age. Elton's assertion that 'Compromises a man has to make with misery and injusti...

Ben Elton is a clever man.That's the whole plot of this book. Ben Elton is a clever man, and his main character is a thinly disguised Ben Elton wish fulfillment fantasy.WATCH! As Ben Elton explains to a court of law why he's too clever to fight in WW1, using the sort of arguments that historians don't put together until the thirties.GASP! As Ben Elton, despite being too clever to fight in WW1 becomes a better soldier than the bastard child of Captain America and Leonidas of Sparta.GRIMACE! As Be...

My second Ben Elton and while it was better than the first book I read - Blind Faith - it isn't saying much as Blind Faith was a mere '2 Star' read for me. This was not a bad book, but I thought that it could have been done better, given the interesting premise.Douglas Kingsley is a stubborn idealist (not a pacifist, mind you) who works as a policeman in World War-I era Britain. And alike all egoistical idealists, he denies to participate in the war even though that means his family would also h...