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Bad English the III: The Mostly True Tales of a Son of a Brit
During the Global Pandemic of 2021, two women meet for an interview in a London hotel room. The subject? An unsolved 1989 robbery, known as "The Oxford Street Bank Holiday Heist," that left one owner with retrograde amnesia and the other clinging to life. From behind a sunflower mask, Robbin relates a crazy story to reporter Britt Starling involving David "DJ" Jones.
Fending off perceived taunts of bigotry while blaming his father for his mother's untimely passing, seventeen-year-old DJ wields an attitude as forceful as his precious "axe." At his wit's end, after learning he won't be graduating with his new senior class, the devastated teen is soon getting in and out of trouble with an English accent.
Meeting the girl of his dreams, Veronica, while avoiding his childhood nemesis, DJ risks losing it all with the unexpected arrival of his enigmatic grandfather. Will DJ choose to do the right thing? Or is being bad more fun?
Come along with David English Jones in a unique coming-of-age story with an equal blend of suspense, romance, & laugh out loud comedy where nothing or no one is quite what they seem.
Fending off perceived taunts of bigotry while blaming his father for his mother's untimely passing, seventeen-year-old DJ wields an attitude as forceful as his precious "axe." At his wit's end, after learning he won't be graduating with his new senior class, the devastated teen is soon getting in and out of trouble with an English accent.
Meeting the girl of his dreams, Veronica, while avoiding his childhood nemesis, DJ risks losing it all with the unexpected arrival of his enigmatic grandfather. Will DJ choose to do the right thing? Or is being bad more fun?
Come along with David English Jones in a unique coming-of-age story with an equal blend of suspense, romance, & laugh out loud comedy where nothing or no one is quite what they seem.
450 pages, Paperback
Published December 8, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 1, 2025
Davis reframes classic tropes of a con artist being caught by their own con and the absurdity of social status through the lens of a mixed-race US teen in the 1980’s, creating an engagingly modern satire.
Grieving the death of his mother, angry at his father for moving them to a different area almost immediately after, and facing the threat of failing to graduate, seventeen-year-old David “DJ” Jones decides to pretend he is English; and, as his father emigrated from England, his fake accent and knowledge of Britain are good enough to fool people—for a while.
The novel opens during the Covid-19 pandemic with a woman being interviewed about her claim to know the truth behind an unsolved Oxford Street jewel robbery over twenty years before, a story the woman says starts with DJ waking up on the morning of his first day at his new school. After following DJ’s attempts to be cool, get the girl, and avoid his father’s criticism for a while, the book cuts back to another scene of the interviewer being puzzled at how the life of a mixed-race teenager in the US is relevant to a jewel robbery in London and the interviewee’s veiled answers. This interweaving of timelines and narrators continues throughout the book seeming, as with DJ taking a trip to England, to converge but also exposing contradictions between DJ’s experiences and the official story of the robbery that likely subvert the reader’s growing theories.
While the story is pitched as heist and the characters treat it with the seriousness of a crime thriller, DJ’s catalogue of misfortunes and his reactions to them have a consistent hint of the absurd, with the reader’s discovery that DJ and his father have only moved to a neighbouring part of the same city and so his reinvention is only ever one unlucky chance encounter away from collapsing.
Davis leavens the slapstick with sharper observations on the nature of popularity and normality drawn from DJ’s experiences as an outsider, initially as the child of a mixed-race marriage and later as a foreigner in England. These darts are targeted at all groups, including DJ, equally, making this very much a puncturing of the human weaknesses of pretension and arrogance rather than a story that tacitly assumes there is a normality from which some people or societies deviate.
The novel closes with DJ experiencing another unexpected shift in circumstance. Although this removes any thought the reader might have of a happy ever after, the scene fits entirely within the established instability of his life, and thus does not notably reduce the sense of a firm ending—let alone create a cliff hanger.
While DJ is in no wise a protagonist with the razor wit and moral cause of a Blott, the combination of a convoluted scheme with serious consequences and absurd humour evokes an echo of the works of Tom Sharpe and others that is likely to please fans of modern social satire.
DJ is very much a flawed protagonist, his troubles as much caused by his own lies and impulsiveness as circumstance; however, his choices are driven by a desire for popularity and a relationship, likely evoking the sympathy of any reader who remembers the experience of not being the monarch of their year at school. Although not a character readers might aspire to be, the equal or greater flaws of other characters make it likely the reader will wish to see DJ succeed on the basis he doesn’t deserve such terrible consequences to his imperfect decisions.
Davis avoids the bleakness and implausibility that comes from making every character a poor example of humanity, building his supporting cast from both those who do display real moral failings and those who are mostly decent people but, for a variety of reasons, cannot express it in a fully functional way—especially while interacting with DJ.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel greatly. I recommend it to readers seeking a fast-paced comedy of errors.
Grieving the death of his mother, angry at his father for moving them to a different area almost immediately after, and facing the threat of failing to graduate, seventeen-year-old David “DJ” Jones decides to pretend he is English; and, as his father emigrated from England, his fake accent and knowledge of Britain are good enough to fool people—for a while.
The novel opens during the Covid-19 pandemic with a woman being interviewed about her claim to know the truth behind an unsolved Oxford Street jewel robbery over twenty years before, a story the woman says starts with DJ waking up on the morning of his first day at his new school. After following DJ’s attempts to be cool, get the girl, and avoid his father’s criticism for a while, the book cuts back to another scene of the interviewer being puzzled at how the life of a mixed-race teenager in the US is relevant to a jewel robbery in London and the interviewee’s veiled answers. This interweaving of timelines and narrators continues throughout the book seeming, as with DJ taking a trip to England, to converge but also exposing contradictions between DJ’s experiences and the official story of the robbery that likely subvert the reader’s growing theories.
While the story is pitched as heist and the characters treat it with the seriousness of a crime thriller, DJ’s catalogue of misfortunes and his reactions to them have a consistent hint of the absurd, with the reader’s discovery that DJ and his father have only moved to a neighbouring part of the same city and so his reinvention is only ever one unlucky chance encounter away from collapsing.
Davis leavens the slapstick with sharper observations on the nature of popularity and normality drawn from DJ’s experiences as an outsider, initially as the child of a mixed-race marriage and later as a foreigner in England. These darts are targeted at all groups, including DJ, equally, making this very much a puncturing of the human weaknesses of pretension and arrogance rather than a story that tacitly assumes there is a normality from which some people or societies deviate.
The novel closes with DJ experiencing another unexpected shift in circumstance. Although this removes any thought the reader might have of a happy ever after, the scene fits entirely within the established instability of his life, and thus does not notably reduce the sense of a firm ending—let alone create a cliff hanger.
While DJ is in no wise a protagonist with the razor wit and moral cause of a Blott, the combination of a convoluted scheme with serious consequences and absurd humour evokes an echo of the works of Tom Sharpe and others that is likely to please fans of modern social satire.
DJ is very much a flawed protagonist, his troubles as much caused by his own lies and impulsiveness as circumstance; however, his choices are driven by a desire for popularity and a relationship, likely evoking the sympathy of any reader who remembers the experience of not being the monarch of their year at school. Although not a character readers might aspire to be, the equal or greater flaws of other characters make it likely the reader will wish to see DJ succeed on the basis he doesn’t deserve such terrible consequences to his imperfect decisions.
Davis avoids the bleakness and implausibility that comes from making every character a poor example of humanity, building his supporting cast from both those who do display real moral failings and those who are mostly decent people but, for a variety of reasons, cannot express it in a fully functional way—especially while interacting with DJ.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel greatly. I recommend it to readers seeking a fast-paced comedy of errors.
August 4, 2026
"Bad English the III" grabs you by the throat from the very start and takes you on a non-stop rollercoaster ride through Baltimore, MD and London. DJ, the 17-year-old hero of the novel, lives a wild, frenetic life that moves quickly and with hilarious consequences. He has all of the angst of a teenager while meandering in and out of youthful and adult situations. His adventures with young women, family members and others are nearly all dysfunctional, but, at heart, this is a story about what's left of a mourning family trying to heal. And some of the desperate things they do to get by. Overall, the novel moves quickly and is very well-written. Move over, Holden Caufield!
January 16, 2022
While I'm slightly biased, this book is unlike anything I've ever read. It's absurdist, funny, weird, mysterious, offensive. It's like Oliver, but with a Twist. Several twists. It's wildly cinematic and apparently based on a true story. Or stories. It's like one of those Novelizations of a movie that hasn't even been made.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews