The Gilbert Adair Festschrift

Writing this blog has led to many interesting and enjoyable experiences and encounters, plenty of them wholly unexpected. One example was an invitation earlier this year to contribute to a festschrift celebrating the work of the late Gilbert Adair, whom I'd never met, but about whose detective pastiches I've written on this blog. And now the Verbivoracious Press (try saying that name after a couple of drinks!) has published the festschrift.

My essay is called "Gilbert's Games and the Golden Age of Murder", and it discusses Adair's last three novels, which feature Evadne Mount, in the context of Golden Age game-playing. I rather think Anthony Berkeley, for instance, might have appreciated Adair's ironic and ingenious attempts to play around with the idea of the whodunit.

I haven't as yet read all the other contributions, but I was pleased to see that one essay is written by Sergio Angelini, whose blog, Tipping My Fedora, is chock-full of interest. There's some overlap, not surprisingly, between his essay and mine, but we tackle our subjects from different angles, and Sergio also covers two earlier books by Adair, one of which I haven't read. The other is A Closed Book, which I read not long after it came out. Sergio is an expert on film as well as fiction, and I learned from his essay that A Closed Book was turned into a film four years ago, and with a very good cast. It seems to have sunk without trace in box office terms, but there is a DVD, and I will be sure to seek it out, though Sergio warns that the film is very different from the book.


This essay is the third I've published this year, in very different books. Morphologies, quite a high profile book edited by Ra Page, included my thoughts on Conan Doyle as a short story writer, while Mysteries Unlocked, a festschrift honouring Doug Greene and edited by Curtis Evans, is a splendid resource for those interested in reading essays about the genre; my piece focused on Anthony Berkeley's short stories. There's always a danger that invitations to write essays can distract one from the current novel, and sometimes I'm guilty of digressing when I should be focusing. But the occasional digression is, I'm sure, good for a writer, and helps to keep one's writing fresh.

Saturday Selection - Gilbert Adair and Margie Orford

I first encountered Gilbert Adair’s fiction when I read A Closed Book some years ago – it was an intelligent and ingenious spin on the crime genre. More recently, Adair has mined the fertile ground of the classic Golden Age whodunit for two amusing and neatly constructed pastiches, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style. Both featured an agreeable amateur sleuth, Evadene Mount.

Now Evadne has returned in And Then There was No One, sub-titled The Last of Evadne Mount. It involves the murder of a Booker Prize winning novelist during a Sherlock Holmes festival in Switzerland. The Faber blurb is rather witty and pretty much irresistible:

‘It’s a novel like no other, a hall of mirrors, a hole-in-one, a tour de force of stylistic brio and narrative ingenuity, a conjuring act which ends with the conjuror, or author, actually sawing himself in half’.

Blimey!

A little more conventional is the tag-line ‘A killer who won’t stop. An investigator who won’t give up’ which adorns Margie Orford’s first novel Like Clockwork (Atlantic). The author lives in Cape Town, and that is where the story is set. A profiler, Dr Clare Hart, does the detective work and, needless to say, ‘is drawn into the web of a brutal serial killer’. The material may be samey, but Michael Connelly has given the book a very positive blurb, which makes it seem rather tempting.