Minutes of the Mudford Magistracy
A Novel in Court Documents

About this book:

Step into the courtroom of Mudford-in-the-Fen, where justice wears a top hat, evidence arrives in soup tureens, and the greatest threat to public order is a whistling apprentice with a hare. Through depositions, warrants, and gloriously pompous bench transcripts, Major Sir Reginald Fotheringay dispatches Victorian law against crimes both petty and preposterous: a purloined prize marrow, a rogue velocipede, a belligerent goat, and the scandal of an improperly painted mailbox. Each case unfolds with the bureaucratic grandeur of a Dickens parody and the sharp wit of a P.G. Wodehouse farce.

Constable Gudgeon sniffs out boiled vegetable fragments with his notebook pencil; Mrs. Gable identifies thieves by their "offensive wobble"; and the Reverend Aloysius Prowdle detects music-hall depravity in every syncopated breath. From the Tiddlywinks Syndicate to the Counterfeit Sovereign, no infraction escapes the Magistracy's meticulous, mirthful scrutiny. Here is a novel built not from chapters, but from the glorious paper trail of English eccentricity—where a marrow's "peculiar pale streak" carries the weight of a crown jewel, and a boy's whistle becomes a constitutional crisis.

By the final verdict on the Mudford Bench, you will know the parish's rhythms better than your own street: the clay on a weaver's boots, the vapor rising from a scullery copper, the exact hour the church clock chimed wrong. *Minutes of the Mudford Magistracy* is a masterpiece of comic epistolary fiction—arch, affectionate, and utterly original—that proves the law is an ass, but the minutes are a delight.