Status
Available
Call number
Series
Genres
Collections
Publication
Faber and Faber (2008), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 272 pages
Description
The brilliantly witty and charmingly grisly new murder mystery from the author of A Mysterious Affair of Style.
Media reviews
Just how much you enjoy this book depends on your capacity for ingesting the riffs of an inveterate clever-clog as he nods and winks his way through a catalogue of movie and literary references. Adair is a writer who has always worn his intellectualism heavily. Yet the Mount escapades make for
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guilty pleasure, told with the gusto of a great uncle who realises he's pushed a yarn to the point of incredulity, then tips back the brandy and continues. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member adpaton
The first in Gilbert Adair's clever series of spoofs was good fun, a witty, tongue in cheek but clever who-done-it set in the Golden Ageof Detective stories in a typical Christie-type country house weekend in the middle of winter. The second, set ten years later, was also good, although at times
If you like postmodern metafiction, packed with authorial self-reference, and novels that jump the shark to such an extent they barely qualify as fiction at all, then this irritatingly clever book might do it for you. The main charcater is Mr Adair himself, who is surprised when attending a Literary Festival at Meiringen in Switzerland, the home of the Reichenback Falls, to come across his supposedly fictional creation, detective story writer Evadne Mount.
It seems far from being fictional, she was based on a real character and Adair was sharing his royalties with her. No sooner has the festival begun than one of the participants is murdered so, predictably, the two authors attempt to solve the mystery. If Eunesco wrote a detective story, this would be it.
If you followed the series from the begining and read it as a straightforward murdr mystery, albeit a homage to Agatha Christie and others of her ilk, the about turn is a slap in the face, as if Gilbert Adair had been stringing us along for the big reveal, the let-down when he destroys any willing suspension of disbelief and displays the ugly inner workings of his writer's mind.
At best the book is a disappointment, at worst a self-congratulatory wank.
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the distinction between fiction and reality was deliberately blurred: the writing was on the wall and the third confirmed my fears.If you like postmodern metafiction, packed with authorial self-reference, and novels that jump the shark to such an extent they barely qualify as fiction at all, then this irritatingly clever book might do it for you. The main charcater is Mr Adair himself, who is surprised when attending a Literary Festival at Meiringen in Switzerland, the home of the Reichenback Falls, to come across his supposedly fictional creation, detective story writer Evadne Mount.
It seems far from being fictional, she was based on a real character and Adair was sharing his royalties with her. No sooner has the festival begun than one of the participants is murdered so, predictably, the two authors attempt to solve the mystery. If Eunesco wrote a detective story, this would be it.
If you followed the series from the begining and read it as a straightforward murdr mystery, albeit a homage to Agatha Christie and others of her ilk, the about turn is a slap in the face, as if Gilbert Adair had been stringing us along for the big reveal, the let-down when he destroys any willing suspension of disbelief and displays the ugly inner workings of his writer's mind.
At best the book is a disappointment, at worst a self-congratulatory wank.
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LibraryThing member riverwillow
Be warned this is very different to the first two Evadne Mount novels, but is absolutely brilliant. The first couple of chapters are confusing but do perserve as you will end up reading a complex, elegent book that defies classification. Wonderful.
LibraryThing member timtom
The whodunnit author Gilbert Adair is invited to a literary festival in Meiringen, Switzerland, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried (and failed) to end the life of its hero Sherlock Holmes. When one of the festival invitees is found murdered one morning, investigation is taken over by Evadne Mount,
Peppered with literary references, puns and allusions, Adair's "metafiction" can be a bit hard to swallow for readers less versed in the writer's milieu, but it's definitely an entertaining read. And, as with every good whodunnit, there's a good twist at the end :)
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the main character of Adair's own novels come to life. Things get even stranger when the novel itself becomes closely intertwined with the story it is currently describing...Peppered with literary references, puns and allusions, Adair's "metafiction" can be a bit hard to swallow for readers less versed in the writer's milieu, but it's definitely an entertaining read. And, as with every good whodunnit, there's a good twist at the end :)
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LibraryThing member AmberMcWilliams
A murder at the Reichenbach falls, at a Sherlock Holmes-tribute / murder mystery writers' convention, written by a murder mystery writer who has used one of the other murder mystery writers as a detective in his fiction and who becomes the detective in this 'fictional' account... Ah, the postmodern
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metacritique! What's fun is that the book takes the mickey out of its own stylistic affectations, which gives the critical reader lots of 'in joke' laughs. I really enjoyed this, despite watching the text contort itself to disappear up its own cleverness at times. Show Less
Language
Physical description
272 p.
ISBN
0571238815 / 9780571238811
Local notes
Presented in the form of a (fictional) memoir written by a British author called Gilbert Adair who has recently published two successful whodunits featuring mystery writer turned amateur sleuth Evadne Mount entitled The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style. In September 2011, he travels to Meiringen, Switzerland to participate in the town's Sherlock Holmes conference. While he is staying there, two unexpected things happen: firstly, Anglo-Bulgarian novelist and essayist Gustav Slavorigin, the star of the festival, is murdered; and secondly, to his great surprise, Adair discovers Evadne Mount, the inspiration for his protagonist and the sharer of royalties from the two novels, sitting among the audience.
Ex-library.
Ex-library.