Otley - Martin Waddell

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Otley

by
Martin Waddell

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Otley
Author:	Martin Waddell
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1966
Length:	166 pages
Availability:	Otley - US
	Otley - UK
	Otley - Canada

Otley was made into a film in 1969, directed by Dick Clement and starring Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider.

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Our Assessment:

B- : too elaborately blurred

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Kirkus Reviews	.	1/8/1966	.
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	14/8/1966	Anthony Boucher
Sunday Times	.	10/4/1966	Julian Symons

From the Reviews:

"It's strenuously tedious." - Kirkus Reviews

"(A) brightly written, near-parody thriller with a fine anti-hero of the malcontent British generation. (...) Waddell has rediscovered the great principle of uncertainty, of early Ambler and early Hitchcock; you never know who's on which team, nor even what sides the teams are on. The result is fresh, funny, tricky and often breathtaking." - Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book Review

"Stays amusing to the end, but also passes the point at which we can suspend disbelief." - Julian Symons, Sunday Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The opening line/paragraph of Otley is catchy enough:

I picked the hunchback up and slipped him into my pocket.

       The hunchback in question turns out to be a small wooden figure, with narrator Gerald 'Gerry' Arthur Otley snatching it at the end of a party he's at, thinking it: "was going to put jam on the bread and butter for a week or two", as Otley is loosely involved in selling and facilitating the selling of such often dubiously procured items. As it turns out, this isn't exactly the kind of object he at first thinks; eventually, in fact, he'll come across a lot of identical hunchbacks ..... But by then he has much bigger problems.
       Otley leaves the party with the very drunk Lambert, whom he wants to help get home. Lambert does not get home.
       Among Otley's difficulties is that he has no idea who he is dealing with; the people he encounters frequently are not who they seem, from the taxi driver who isn't driving a taxi to the police. Then there's the fact that Otley only recovers from the events of Monday night -- the day of the party -- on Wednesday; as he comes to realize: "I don't remember a thing about Tuesday".
       It's unclear how much remembering what happened on Tuesday might help him, as even when he is aware of what is going on it leaves him completely befuddled. He can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, nor, often, official authorities from those involved in apparently nefarious activities. Meanwhile, however, everyone seems to think he knows much more and is much more involved in ... whatever is going on (the readers are left pretty much as out of the know as Otley himself).
       So there's lots of futile questioning and prodding, such as:

'What do you know about ICS ?' she said wearily. 'You've got to tell me that before we can do anything. Otherwise we just sit here until I think of something.'
''I don't know anything about ICS,' I said. And that's the God's honest truth.'

As Otley admits near the end -- echoing what many a reader likely also feels about the goings-on

     'I'm a bit mystified,' I said.
     He said he hadn't time to explain.
     I said that was the old, old story. I said I was getting a bit fed up with it

Despite the danger he sees he is obviously in -- threats from various sides, of everything from arrest to grievous bodily harm and worse -- Otley does want to get to the bottom of things, and so he can't help sniff around (rather than, for example, accepting that plane ticket to Ireland which would get him out of the country for a while at least, until everything has settled down):

'Trying to be a little detective,' he said.
'There was nothing else I could do,' I said.

Otley is an amusing enough guide as he muddles through, and there's some decent action, but for all the confusion and how far-reaching what he's gotten himself involved in the pay-off isn't really there, not nearly enough getting properly cleared up. There's enough suspense and amusement to read through to the end, but the fog never fully lifts; Otley is only limitedly satisfying as thriller and less so otherwise.
(It apparently did well in its day, however, made into a movie and with three follow-up volumes making for a tidy Otley-series (even as author Waddell then pivoted to writing -- much more successfully -- children's books).)

- M.A.Orthofer, 30 August 2026

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Links:

Reviews:

Kirkus Reviews

Otley - the film:

IMDb page

Martin Waddell:

Official site

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
See Index of Contemporary British fiction
See Index of Irish literature

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About the Author:

Northern Irish author Martin Waddell is best known for his children's books. He was born in 1941.

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