Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If Liam Neeson can make a passable reboot of the unassailable Naked Gun, then Christian Dart can be indulged in the most spoofed of genres, hard-boiled detective fiction. ‘Treat it like a pantomime!’ he implores with knowing naffness for this entirely lightweight but amusing one-man playlet.

Certainly, you'll immediately recognise all the tropes and archetypes of the 1940s New Yoik beat of private dick Gummo Custer, aka Gumshoe! Seductive femme fatale, check. Fey Irish police chief, check. Sometime partner with a day till retirement, check. At some point all of these fatuous cliches will grow too far removed from their original source material. Yet Dart's determined to drive the jokes into the cold, hard earth before then.

And of course, there's the brooding central protagonist, taunted by his nemesis, the Anagram Killer. Not too brooding though. Recalling the big, bearish petulance and supreme ego of Henry Lewis from Mischief Theatre's The Play That Goes Wrong franchise, Dart's adolescent inclinations go beyond his toy gun and nerdy, incongruous video game references, with numerous otherwise incidental clues attesting to Gumshoe's sexual prowess.

Intermittently peeling back the fourth wall to point out his meagre budget and to acknowledge the unrelenting silliness of his enterprise, distinctions between Dart and the character enjoying themselves - firing off bullet sound effect after bullet sound effect to emphasise punchlines, or just to dispatch a problematic character or wrinkle in the plot - are essentially non-existent.

The narrative is as nonsensically cut and paste as the cinematic references he tosses in willy-nilly, while a nod to Raymond Chandler's best-known creation is as superficially rendered as everything else. 

With a well-judged level of audience participation and a scampering, jazzy soundtrack, Dart keeps the action romping towards its inevitable unmasking of the piece's villain, the flashbacks and contrived logic for the denouement going way beyond self-satire to pinnacles of ridiculousness.

There's a contemporary, feminist twist that Dart periodically returns to, clunky yet deliberately so. The sheer, overblown stupidity of Gumshoe! is what it needs to be appreciated for. And on that metric, it delivers.

• Chortle’s coverage of sketch and multi-character acts at the Edinburgh Fringe is supported by (but not influenced by) the Seven Dials Playhouse. Read more

Review date: 14 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower