And Then There Was No One (Evadne Mount Mystery 3) Book

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 ForshawRead More