Best Served Cold
by Richard Garner
(Umbria Press, £8.99)

HAVING finally hung up my dancing shoes as the Star’s industrial correspondent, I’ve returned to Liverpool this week for what could be my last trip to a national teaching union conference.

These events have taken me to Cardiff, Brighton and Harrogate over the past three years. They attract a full pack of journalists on the road, as opposed to the depleted industrial corps of three, maximum, that cover the other unions.

And as the press pack collectively dine in faded Indian restaurants and mingle with officials and delegates in the hotel bars, there’s often an air of intrigue.

So my thoughts have often wandered to what a little creative licence could do to these unusual meshings of characters. And that’s exactly what Richard Garner has applied in his debut crime novel.

After a journalists’ dinner at the National Association of Head Teachers conference some years ago, veteran education correspondent Garner was joined by a rival paper’s reporter on a night on the town.

When he left the nightclub for his hotel room, his rather tipsy fellow carouser insisted she would stay on.

Her failure to surface at the conference the following day led another education veteran, the Mirror’s Mark Ellis, to leave her a tongue-in-cheek answerphone message: “Call Richard, he’s worried he’s killed you.”

In real life, she soon resurfaced, heavily hungover. In Best Served Cold, she does not. And Roy Faulkner, the fictionalised version of the author, soon finds himself the prime suspect for Kate Williams’s murder.

Worse still, the investigating police detective is the drummer from Faulkner’s teenage band, who still harbours a grudge against the journalist for running off with his love interest.

It is left to the typically dysfunctional private detective Philip Rivers to uncover the truth.

Garner’s novel zips from the characters’ failed relationships of the present to their teenage anxieties of the past.

Compared to his pithy news copy, Garner’s narrative prose is often a little strained, especially when depicting dialogue. Unlike reporters, novelists don’t have the luxury of selecting the best lines from reams of delegates’ speeches, having instead to come up with their own.

The novel’s romantic encounters too are awkward but not entirely unrealistically.

And in spite of the clumsier moments, Garner has produced a riveting read that not only grips us in a race against time but captures the unique spirit of a fascinating niche.

Conference, I move.