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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Gilbert Adair’s signature heroine, the well-known (and eccentric-looking) mystery novelist Evadne Mount, is the perfect vehicle for his ingenious pastiches of classic Golden Age crime novels. Aficionados enjoyed the first two, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style; here, the series continues with another piece of wordplay on an Agatha Christie title, And Then There Was No One. With her blue tricorne hat and odd manner, Evadne is a wonderfully comic protagonist -- and mixes elements of Marple and Poirot while being very much her own woman. But while Adair keeps his tongue firmly in cheek (his trademark in these books), he ensures that his novels work on their own terms as clever crime novels in the classic fashion.
The small Swiss town of Meiringen is to host a crime fiction festival (mainly because of its proximity to the Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes and Morality took a dangerous tumble). But when the unsparing Gustav Slavorigin, a prize-winning novelist who has enthusiastically courted controversy, is found murdered, an arrow in his chest, it’s up to Evadne Mount to start collating clues.
As well as the pleasurable parody of the detective story, And Then There Was No One is distinctly post-modern (as one might expect from Gilbert Adair), adding a literary game of hide-and-seek between author and characters that is both ingenious and fun. The real achievement, though, is adding a core of intelligence to a narrative that (on the surface) seems lightweight and soufflé-like; no easy task, and it’s one that Adair pulls off with some skill. --Barry Forshaw
Book Description
The brilliantly witty and charmingly grisly new murder mystery from the author of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
It's different. Very different to the first two in the trilogy. He's dropped the Agatha Christie murder mystery and written a Literary (with a capital L) post-modern book that will probably be disliked by most readers of the first two books.
This is a fake memoir by the author himself set in 2011 at a Sherlock Holmes literary festival. It starts post-modern and becomes magical realist by the end. I would be surprised if more than a handful of his readers will like the book all the way to the very end. I dislike magical realist stuff but it has been handled well enough with the tweeness dimmed way down.
Personally I have a taste for weird books so I liked it. If you're wanting more of the same deliberately cliched stuff and have no interest beyond what you're expecting then you'll probably struggle with this one.
It's an impressively weird book. The best comparison I can make is with the last Nightmare On Elm Street movie. The previous six films were about a deceased murderer who could get inside teenagers dreams and kill them. Then movie seven was about the people making a new film in the series who are then haunted by the fictional murderer. That is what happens in this book. The two previous books were old fashioned murder mysteries. Now in book three the author himself becomes involved in a murder investigation and meets his fictional sleuth in the flesh.
The ending maybe over-eggs the post-modernism a bit too much, and I can't say it's particularly satisfying. Having said that I didn't have any actual problems with it. It was an okay if slightly silly ending.
It's a well written book and I liked it. If you're willing to accept something way off the obvious beaten path then there's no reason why you can't enjoy it as well. Just don't expect more of the same.
This is a fake memoir by the author himself set in 2011 at a Sherlock Holmes literary festival. It starts post-modern and becomes magical realist by the end. I would be surprised if more than a handful of his readers will like the book all the way to the very end. I dislike magical realist stuff but it has been handled well enough with the tweeness dimmed way down.
Personally I have a taste for weird books so I liked it. If you're wanting more of the same deliberately cliched stuff and have no interest beyond what you're expecting then you'll probably struggle with this one.
It's an impressively weird book. The best comparison I can make is with the last Nightmare On Elm Street movie. The previous six films were about a deceased murderer who could get inside teenagers dreams and kill them. Then movie seven was about the people making a new film in the series who are then haunted by the fictional murderer. That is what happens in this book. The two previous books were old fashioned murder mysteries. Now in book three the author himself becomes involved in a murder investigation and meets his fictional sleuth in the flesh.
The ending maybe over-eggs the post-modernism a bit too much, and I can't say it's particularly satisfying. Having said that I didn't have any actual problems with it. It was an okay if slightly silly ending.
It's a well written book and I liked it. If you're willing to accept something way off the obvious beaten path then there's no reason why you can't enjoy it as well. Just don't expect more of the same.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Readers coming straight from the first two books of the trilogy will have been expecting another 'Golden Age of Crime' parody. That is not what they found as 'And then there was No-one' is a metafictional treat for the serious reader or writer with convolutions of fiction versus reality that will make the reader laugh out loud or re-read with admiration and delight. I loved it, although it was not an easy read. Adair is the main protagonist, interacting with Evadne Mount who is an amalgam of her fictional character and the real woman who Adair claims to have used as a model. Read it and wonder at the man's genius.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Literary novelists, it seems, get perennially frustrated that (their) 'quality' work gets snubbed by the vast majority of readers, who prefer formulaic whodunits with cardboard characters. Some cope by writing whodunits themselves under another name (like Julian Barnes) or calling a separate category of their work 'entertainments' (like Graham Greene) or attempting to write a 'literary' whodunit (as Umberto Eco and Martin Amis did). Gilbert Adair has (apparently) written two previous Agatha Christie pastiches, and this is the third in the series. Except that this time he includes himself as a character alongside his detective, Evadne Mount - who is a mystery writer too. The suspects are all writers and critics at a Sherlock Holmes festival in the Swiss town near the Reichenbach Falls where Conan Doyle 'murdered' his creation. One of the writers has written a controversial book about 9/11 and is being targeted by American right-wing extremists. He dies, and Gilbert Adair and Evadne Mount 'compete' to see who can solve the mystery.
On the way there are lots of great jokes at the expense of both whodunits and literary novels. One character writes mysteries set each time around a different sport, with terrible titles like _Murder Under Par_ and _Ping Pong You're Dead_. Real celebrities 'appear' in the book, as they do in, say, Pat Booth novels. There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes parody right in the middle. And there are some nice thoughts, done with a light touch, on the biggest mystery: why do people prefer whodunits to Literature? I'd better not reveal the dizzying twists, but I thought it was entertaining and brilliant!
On the way there are lots of great jokes at the expense of both whodunits and literary novels. One character writes mysteries set each time around a different sport, with terrible titles like _Murder Under Par_ and _Ping Pong You're Dead_. Real celebrities 'appear' in the book, as they do in, say, Pat Booth novels. There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes parody right in the middle. And there are some nice thoughts, done with a light touch, on the biggest mystery: why do people prefer whodunits to Literature? I'd better not reveal the dizzying twists, but I thought it was entertaining and brilliant!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Adair is no Chesterton
This book manages not just to be slightly confusing, full of weak in-jokes and well-known trivia served up as exciting arcane information but also potentially insulting to people... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Mrs. H. V. Aver
Metafiction is the word
"And Then There Was No One" by Gilbert Adair concludes the short series that began with "The Act of Roger Murgatroyd" and "A Mysterious Affair of Style". Read more
Published on 12 Aug 2009 by Roger Johnson
Schizophrenic shocks
Apart from some entertaining observations on the detective story and different types of plagiarism, the book's appeal would be exclusively to those readers who are fascinated by... Read more
Published on 23 July 2009 by Dominic Swayne
POSTMODERN IRONY
A brilliant book which defies categorisation. The thriller element is not very pronounced but the extraordinary introspection of the narrator - the real and the fictionalised -... Read more
Published on 23 Mar 2009 by Dr. J. Gold
Excellent
Having read the first two books in the series, I was looking forward to this final piece. As the review above says, if you are completely confused by the first few chapters, just... Read more
Published on 25 Jan 2009 by Lord Huxley Smythe
so far so brilliant
As im only halfway through the book its not a full review.
But i did want people to know - if u loved the first two and are confused by the first three chapters of the... Read more
But i did want people to know - if u loved the first two and are confused by the first three chapters of the... Read more
Published on 21 Jan 2009 by Ms. C. N. Sweeney
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