Charles Paris: The Cinderella Killer: A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Simon Brett · Jeremy Front

Feb 2017 · BBC Digital Audio · Narrated by Bill Nighy, Full Cast, and Suzanne Burden

About this audiobook

Charles Paris returns in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Simon Brett’s humorous theatrical mystery, starring Bill Nighy.

A job in pantomime seems the perfect way to spend the Christmas season for Charles, but the cast of Cinderella are a motley crew from reality TV and Charles finds himself having to explain the traditions of panto to their baffled American star whose career is on a downward trajectory.

When the star is shot dead, and Charles finds the body, he finds himself under suspicion. As the slapstick makes way for a murder investigation, he decides to clear his name by doing some sleuthing of his own. With a host of suspects and the body count rising, the line 'they're behind you' soon begins to take on a very sinister meaning indeed...

Bill Nighy (Love Actually, Skylight, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) stars as Charles Paris, with Suzanne Burden as his wife Frances, in this funny and fast-paced dramatisation by Jeremy Front.

Written by Jeremy Front, based on the novel by Simon Brett.

About the author

Simon Brett was born in Worcester Park, Surrey, on 28 October 1945. He was educated at Dulwich College and Wadham College, Oxford, where he read English and was president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. After graduating in 1967 he worked as Father Christmas in a department store before landinga job at the BBC as a radio producer. During his ten years there, he worked on such programmes as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Week Ending, The Burkiss Way, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and Just a Minute. He moved to London Weekend Television in 1977, where he produced Maggie and Her, End of Part One and The Glums (a popular spin-off from radio’s Take It From Here). Brett’s first Charles Paris novel, Cast In Order of Disappearance, was published in 1975, and by 1979he was able to leave LWT and become a full-time writer.He has written over eighty books, including nineteen Charles Paris books, fifteen Fethering Mysteries and six Mrs Pargeter novels, as well as several non-series titles such as A Shock to the System (1984), which was adapted as a film starring Michael Caine. He has also contributed to several anthologies and scripted many sitcoms for radio including No Commitments, Smelling of Roses and After Henry. Other radio work includes several one-off plays for Radio 4, and a number of episodes of the detective series Baldi. A former Chair of both the Crime Writers’ Association and The Society of Authors, he is currently President of the Detection Club, as well as being involved with various writers’ organisations. He is married with three children, and lives in West Sussex.