Never Mind The DaVinci Code, Here's Rat Scabies

Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn't? by Christopher Dawes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In which Christopher Dawes, a mild-mannered music journalist, somewhat improbably discovers that he's been living across the street from one of his boyhood idols, Rat Scabies (real name: Chris Millar), the former drummer for the seminal English punk band, The Damned.  Even more improbably (this is nonfiction, believe it or not), it turns out that Scabies' father, an antiquarian bookseller by trade, is something of an amateur expert on Rennes-le-Chateau, being both a crony of Henry (Holy Blood, Holy Grail) Lincoln and a past president of the UK branch of the Sauniere Society, an enthusiasm he's managed to pass on to his son. Consequently, Scabies decides, more or less on a whim, to rope Dawes into helping him look for the Holy Grail.  His method, to the extent he can be said to have one, consists primarily of careering around southern France half-drunk and freaking out the locals, which, when one thinks about it, is probably not that far removed from the approach previously used by King Arthur.

This book is not only hilariously entertaining but it proves once and for all that The DaVinci Code isn't entirely useless, as Dawes and Scabies discover at one point when they run out of rolling papers.


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