Book Review: The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers

I received an Advance e-copy of this book thanks to the publisher. All opinions are my own. The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers will be on sale 13 February 2024.

Mari Hawthorne is a ghost writer. She is the unnamed voice behind several celebrity memoirs. She is the one who comes in, gets to know said celebrity, becomes privy to the deepest secrets they are willing to admit, and then creates their voice on the page. If she’s lucky, she’ll get a nod in the acknowledgements. Mari is good at what she does but her career footing is not solid after her last job went poorly. Her personal footing is even worse since she’s living on the couch in an apartment that her sister’s not-quite-boyfriend owns.

Mari has a chance for something big though when she’s tagged to ghostwrite the memoir of Anke Berman. Anke is an old woman now, a jewellery designer, but in her youth she was at the centre of one of rock and roll’s greatest moments. The Midnight Ramblers are the fictional band at the heart of this novel. Ostensibly huge in the late 1960s, early 70s, the book tells us they are somewhere up there with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. A band you grew up knowing and listening to, regardless of your generation. Anke was married to their lead singer, Mal, in 1969, married to him when he drowned in a pool under somewhat suspicious circumstances. After his death she went on to have relationships with two other members of the band before returning to her home country of Germany to live a quieter life. Now, on the 50th anniversary of Mal’s death, Anke is finally ready to tell her version of the story.

Mari knows that getting this job could catapult her to new heights. But when things don’t go quite according to plan, she finds herself unable to just walk away. Instead, Mari ends up in Las Vegas, embroiled in a decades old mystery and involved with some of the most famous people in the world.

While this isn’t exactly a mystery, there is a mystery to be solved within the plot of the story, so I don’t want to give too much away. Mari’s story went in an unexpected direction for me, particularly after she arrived in Las Vegas. The setting of Anke’s desert home and oasis and the high-rolling hotels and atmosphere that Mari finds herself in in Vegas were well drawn and evocative. There is always a sense of Mari’s discomfort and the fact she doesn’t belong in these places. Tomlinson does this through food – what Mari orders in a restaurant – or references to clothing, always placing Mari on the outside. There’s a certain amount of discomfort in watching her navigate these circles.

I don’t read a lot of celebrity memoirs so I can’t say I know what they focus on. There’s a lot of emphasis in this novel about Mari having limited access to the celebrities. She has a set amount of time to interview them and then has to write an entire book about their lives, in their voices. So it seemed strange that for the two celebrities she ends up spending time with, Mari only asks them questions about someone they last interacted with 50 years ago. Surely, someone who had been in the public eye for 50 years, who had lived a complicated life with multiple relationships, would devote only a few chapters to a former co-worker? There’s no sense that Mari will write a book about what Anke was doing in her 40s or 60s, only that Mari wants to learn what really happened to Mal and so that’s what the book will be about. Frankly, I don’t think I’d hire Mari as my ghost writer.

This leads me to my primary problem with the novel which is the age old problem of too much telling and not enough showing. While Tomlinson is evocative with place, the characters are more weakly drawn. We’re supposed to see Mari as particularly skilled and insightful and thus good at her job but we’re primarily told that she is skilled and insightful, rather than seeing her in action. We’re supposed to believe that Anke is so compelling and magnetic as a person that of course Mari won’t be able to simply leave this job behind. And yet that never fully comes across on the page. I wanted these characters to really spark and come alive on the page but it never quite hit me the way I think the author wanted it to.