And Then There Was No One

There’s self-conscious and parody, then there’s this!  And Gilbert Adair's Then There Was No One uses some reasonably familiar tropes to create a detective story with a difference: the novelist meeting the detective he has created, fictional detectives coming alive, corny fictional endings from fiction coming alive (in another piece of fiction).  Adair uses his own real novels as fictional constructs, and the line between fiction and fact becomes incomprehensibly fractured.  Personally, I found it all too mannered, although often amusing, and would find any more of this style really quite fatiguing.  (My views may be influenced by having read, unwittingly, the third novel of a trilogy first).  But to a true aficionado of the genre – and I confess myself one – there is a real pleasure in spotting the references, meeting heroes old and new and seeing the ending becoming clearer and clearer – but always being wrong.  Also, for me a winning point, the fictional hero, Gilbert Adair (and presumably his creator, the genuine Gilbert Adair) has a healthy contempt for Agatha Christie. 

The book is set in Switzerland, where a Sherlock Holmes literary convention has been established in a town near the Reichenbach Falls.  A mystery guest arrives, and turns out to be a novelist who has been hiding from threatened assassination (not from Islamic extremists, but from the rich far right in America) following outrageous public comments on the Twin Towers disaster.  He is murdered, and his killer is only unmasked after a baffling and surreal series of false trails and a liberal sprinkling of literary clever-cleverness.  A pleasure for Holmes fans is that Adair has reconstructed some of the “missing” stories, and he reads to the conference, and to us, a story called The Giant Rat of Sumatra, which, somewhere in the Holmes canon is referred to as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.  Here it is – and quite fun it is, too.

Comments

[Mr Cornflower]

Many years ago The Spectator's weekly parody competition set readers the task of writing the opening to The Giant Rat of Sumatra. The competition was headed simply "The Big One" - an acknowledgement of that unwritten tale's bewitching influence on readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories. I entered - along no doubt with hundreds of others - but happened to be away when the winning entry (not mine!) was published so never saw it. I can't recall exactly what I wrote, but the ingredients were a reference to 'the Batavian possessions of the House of Orange' and a Dutch sea-captain clumping up the stairs of 221b Baker Street with a hessian sack over his shoulders.

[Harriet]

I am hoping Faber are (or should that be is?) sending me some free copies of Gilbert Adair's crime novels, which I am curious to read. This one sounds as if it might be a bit too clever for its own good.

[glo]

No, there is always someone rambling around over the blog, even at this very unsociable hour!
You have written (and read) so much over the last week, I can't believe it. And I am quite jealous aswell. I'll come back later to comment more accurately.
Meantime, just wishing you and the lovely Cat a nice day.