Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does… In another memorable tale in the Batch Magna Chronicles, a hapless gang of Birmingham crooks, led by self-styled criminal mastermind pawnbroker Harold Sneed, pull off ‘the big one’, a wages snatch at a factory in Shrewsbury. Two members of the gang take the money from there by train back to Birmingham, changing at Church Myddle, a station almost on the doorstep of Sir Humphrey of Batch Hall. And it’s there that things starts to unravel. The money goes missing. Misunderstanding follows misunderstanding, until it leads them to Batch Hall on a day when everyone is busy with another wheeze to help keep the estate afloat
a historical re-enactment show. And among the replica firearms is a real gun, with real bullets, carried by pawnbroker Harold Sneed with murderous intent and Humphrey in mind. Sneed, who was unstable to begin with, is now convinced that Humphrey
Humph, the Lord of the Manor and an overweight former short-order cook from the Bronx, with a taste for Hawaiian shirts and torpedo cigars
is a Mafia mobster laying low there. And on top of this, Sneed is convinced Humph has what he now regards as his money; as a result, the spectators for the re-enactment find that there’s an extra event on the programme. AUTHOR: Peter Maughan’s early career covered many trades, working on building sites, in wholesale markets, on fairground rides and in a circus. Later he travelled the West Country, picking fruit, and sleeping wherever he could, before moving on to wherever the next road took him. After travelling to Jersey to pick potatoes, he found work in a film studio in its capital, walk-ons and bit parts in the pilot films that were made there, and as a contributing script writer. He studied at the Actor’s Workshop in London, and worked as an actor in the UK and Ireland, subsequently founding a fringe theatre in Barnes, London, and living on a converted sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway. His idyllic, heedless years by the river, inspired him to write the Batch Magna novels, set in a peaceful river valley in the Welsh Marches. He is married and lives currently in Wales.
