cover image Beef Wellington Blue

Beef Wellington Blue

Max Davidson. Heinemann Educational Books, $0 (273pp) ISBN 978-0-434-17520-8

Fleet Street journalist John Wellington, known as ""Beef'' because of his weight, senses a story for his scandal-mongering London daily when he sees rising M. P. John Carter lunching with a leggy blond. Beef tracks down this beauty and finds not only that she is Carter's abandoned mistress but that she was married to Carter's best friend, murdered by a hit-and-run driver, who may have been Carter. The indefatigable Beef uncovers Carter's indulgent and criminal tarantella through respectable circles. In this second novel (The Wolf was his first), irony is Davidson's forte. While not a blood brother, Beef is a distant cousin of Orwell's George Bowling of Coming Up for Air. The English slang is not obtrusive. Carefully, sometimes leisurely plotted, this novel lends credence to the old adage that at what the Frenchman calls ``the love,'' the Englishman is the champ. January