The D. Case by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini (and Charles Dickens)

Together, Carlo Fruttero (1926-2012) and Franco Lucentini (1920-2002) wrote several crime novels, short stories, and collections of criticism from the 1960s until Lucentini’s death. I’m not familiar with their work, but understand that they have a fair following in Italy and that The D. Case, or, the Truth about the Mystery of Edwin Drood (1989) is unusual, even given their trademark humour and strangeness.

In some ways, The D. Case is a work of criticism masquerading as a novel. In others, it’s a parody of detective fiction and the shoe-horning in of social commentary. Mainly, though, it’s just a weird and fascinating read.

There are two narratives here: Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, famously unfinished at his death, is republished chapter by chapter and interspersed with a ‘contemporary’ narrative in which multiple detectives from the pages of fiction gather together at a conference to try and determine the ending.

I have probably missed some, but these are the fictional detectives I spotted: Sherlock Holmes (and Watson), Hercule Poirot (and Hastings), Dr Thorndyke (and Astley), Nero Wolfe (and Goodwin), Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer who form an amusing double act, basically doing the same thing at all times – with one being famously considered a rip-off of the other, Father Brown, Superintendent Battle, Sergeant Cuff, Hercule Popeau, Toad-in-the-Hole (the anti-hero in Thomas de Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’), Porfiry Petrovich(!), Inspector Bucket, Gideon Fell, Dupin, and Maigret.

The detectives bicker and divide themselves into cliques – including over the question of whether The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a mystery novel or a psychological thriller. Plagiarism is a constant discussion, as character quarrel over whether Dickens plagiarised Wilkie Collins and whether Robert Louis Stevenson plagiarised Dickens. Hercule Poirot is forced at several points to confront the fact that he himself exists as a result of Agatha Christie plagiarising Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Hercule Popeau (there’s no mention of M. Poiret). Yes, the characters are perfectly happy in their own fictionality – including Inspector Bucket, who knows he was created by Dickens. Sherlock Holmes remains oddly silent because he knows that Arthur Conan Doyle contacted Dickens in a séance and asked for the solution. So, he already knows the truth.

Throughout, existing (real-life) theories and proposed solutions to Dicken’s novel are brought up and evaluated before Poirot presents the ‘truth’ – not only about how the novel should end but also why it was never finished. This theory, so outlandish and like something out of a crime novel that it works in a work of fiction and not in a work of literary criticism, is universally accepted and, at the end of the book, universally hushed up. The 'D.' in 'D. Case' turns out to stand for three things: Drood, Dickens, and the fourth solution proposed.

Since plagiarism forms such a lively element of the discourse throughout – including being at the heart of Poirot’s solution – it is interesting that Fruttero and Lucentini seem not to have been too bothered about copyright infringement. Perhaps this can be classed as parody, but I don’t really know enough about copyright law to know how it works. In my English translation (but not, a friend tells me, in the original Italian), Agatha Christie Limited is thanked for permission to use the character of Poirot – but no other author or estate is thanked, and there is no reference to the other Christie characters: Hastings and Battle. Nonetheless, The D Case counts technically as the first authorised Hercule Poirot continuation novel. Mystery upon mystery!

Murder Off Miami by Dennis Wheatley

You might remember that I reviewed the Usborne Mystery Files a couple of years ago. Around that time, I acquired two 1980s ‘facsimile’ editions of Dennis Wheatley’s 1930s interactive murder mysteries, including Murder Off Miami (1936). The concept here is that you go through the physical evidence of a crime and solve the mystery yourself. While original readers had the actual artefacts to play with, the 1986 editions are photocopies, bound in book form.

I thought that lockdown would be a pretty decent time to pull one of these out and give it a go. And on a day I should have been settling down in Chester to lay the ground for our now-postponed Golden Age of Crime conference, my spirits were low. So, I’ve just spent an enjoyable afternoon in the company of Detective Officer Kettering and a shady set of suspects, one of whom committed a murder aboard the Golden Gull Yacht, just off Miami, in 1936.

The story is pretty straightforward: a wealthy businessman has apparently committed suicide, having jumped out of his cabin window on the world’s strangest holiday cruise, at which he is a guest of his arch-nemesis in soap manufacturing. Among his fellow passengers, nearly all of whom had a motive for bumping him off, we find a litany of colourful characters including a dowager battleaxe, a forgetful bishop with a secret past, an Italian nobleman who’s not on the level, and a double-dealing Japanese government official.

This is good, escapist fun at its purest. It’s also very, very golden agey. 1936 has always felt like the archetypical golden age year, for some reason – most of the TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot reset the action of its diverse source material to that year, and it kind of fits that Murder Off Miami was published and set in that year. We have a nice collection of photographs, handwriting samples, witness reports, and telegrams to sift through – and it is of course all contemporary 1936 stuff which is rather thrilling.

For me, the saddest part was having to break the seal on the solution. If it was a new book, it wouldn’t be a problem, but since even this reissue is older than I am, it felt rather sacrilegious. And then I was a tiny bit disappointed that, as each and every clue was explained, I’d got them all – so it was almost as if I didn’t need to check. Except that it gave me the most wonderful, childish glow of pleasure to have missed nothing. Given how much I talk about the puzzle aspect on this blog, I’m starting to think I’ve been too quick to dismiss it in the past. Sometimes, it’s absolutely the heart and fun of the thing.

This game-cum-book gets a hearty recommendation from me, especially in these times when we need to escape. I think I’ll try The Malinsay Massacre (1938) tomorrow.

Cain's Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers

Six murders. One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations... but only one is correct. Can you solve Torquemada's murder mystery? 

In 1934, the Observer's cryptic crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada), released a novel that was simultaneously a murder mystery and the most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written.  

The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible - through logic and intelligent reading - to sort the pages into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers.  

Only two puzzlers have ever solved the mystery of Cain's Jawbone: do you have what it takes to join their ranks? 

Please note: this puzzle is extremely difficult and not for the faint-hearted.

This beautiful limited edition box from Unbound has the 100 pages on individual cards and if you’re like me, you will spend hours finding links between pages. After a couple of weeks, I’ve now managed to get everything into some kind of order — but definitely not the right one — and some light is emerging.

It’s infuriating and wonderful. I don’t want to give anything away because I’m aware that there’s a competition attached to this and we're not allowed to share our insights, but you have to think laterally, as you would with a cryptic crossword.

On which note, Alan and I often mark ourselves out as possibly the only couple under 50 in the world who like to sit in cafés doing cryptic crosswords. But, as any Unbounder who sponsored this project will know, early twentieth century cryptic such as Torquemada's were significantly more cryptic than those we have today. It is, in many ways, a whole different language. Aargh!

Cain’s Jawbone is a hard one to review, because while there is a solution, I haven’t arrived there yet and, as far as I know, no one has. I have hope, though! It just needs a lot of time and dedication.

This is proper, old-school puzzling and I’d heartily recommend it to the dedicated player of mental games.

Mini reviews #30

My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) by Oyinkan Braithwaite. This is truly a stand-out debut. A short and witty novel written as part of an undergraduate creative writing degree, it tells the story of Korede, who constantly finds herself cleaning up (literally and figuratively) after her beautiful, pampered serial killer sister, Ayoola.

Secret Obsession (2019), directed by Peter Sullivan. I hope SJ Watson is suing Netflix over this production. It’s like someone has seen Before I Go to Sleep, missed the point entirely, and decided to rewrite it.

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective (2019) by Susannah Stapleton. An entertaining and illuminating look at the life and career of Maud West, who is probably well-known to geeks like me (and, let’s face it, you) but now unknown to most of the world. We get a glimpse here, not just of how  the detection business worked, and how a woman succeeded in a man’s world, but also at the fuzzy lines between criminality and respectability, between ethics and expediency. It’s an eye-opener and an etertaining read, interspersed with West’s florid accounts of her own cases. It’s also a beautiful book to behold.

Escape Room (2019), directed by Adam Robitel. There are a lot of films (and books) called Escape Room, and this is the only one I’ve experienced. It’s dumb as hell but oddly compelling and enjoyable. You can guess the premise. Apparent strangers are invited to experience the toughest escape room of them all, and they soon find out that the challenge has deadly implications… Will the real And Then There Were None please stand up?

The Turn of the Key (2019) by Ruth Ware. Ruth Ware is the writer I find myself recommending to other people more than anyone else. She really is the closest thing we have in print to a love child of Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier. And I don’t think she’s ever written a bad book. Her latest, as you can guess from the title, is a bit of a ghost story, but at its heart it’s a mystery thriller. And, in grand tradition, it’s epistolary. A nanny with a secret gets a suspiciously cushy job in Scotland, where she immediately gets charged with looking after three problem children for a week. And, possibly, a ghost. And, in the meantime, she tries to solve the mystery of why all the previous nannies have scarpered so soon after taking up their posts. It all takes her back to old myths and tragedies surrounding the property, a gothic building converted into a smart house, and the tension is palpable with every flying page.

Mini reviews #20

Verdict of Twelve (1940) by Raymond Postgate. An excellent psychological mystery, with two strands: the puzzle of a child's murder, and an exploration of the private lives of the twelve jurors at his aunt's trial. The very first juror we meet has gleefully gotten away with murder in the past, making the whole thing an interesting take on the justice system at an increasingly frantic point in British history. The book is also worth reading for Postgate's ironic self-portrait in the figure of a self-important socialist intellectual, and for his thinly-veiled depiction of his brother-in-law, G.D.H. Cole, as a monstrous gay academic, Dr Holmes. Notwithstanding the presence of three distinct Edwards, it's an engaging and memorable novel.

The Secret Vanguard (1940) by Michael Innes. Unpopularity, I really enjoy Innes' adventure novels. They are so escapist: undeniable page-turners which draw you into a fantasy Britain in which everyone is wonderfully well-read and erudite. The Secret Vanguard is a kind of cross between a detective-mystery and an adventure thriller. There are vaguely-defined German spies and mad scientists who mostly swan around inhabiting John Buchan via the Romantic poets. And Inspector Appleby plays a big role but is, as usual, quite forgettable. The really memorable part is the protagonist, Sheila Grant. Described in the blurb to my edition as 'a most attractive heroine,' she is one of the more interesting, believable, and funny lead figures I've come across in earnest fiction of the late 1930s/early 1940s. I could have done without her love interest, Dick, who doesn't do much but, by virtue of his name alone, leads to some unintentionally hilarious passages.

The Hound of the D'urbervilles (2011) by Kim Newman. Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty and his own sidekick Colonel Sebastian Moran take the lead in this extravagance of seedy Victoriana. Will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman, Tape Five, etc.

The Husband's Secret (2012) by Liane Moriarty. The mixed reviews for this book baffled me initially, until I saw the original book cover and realised that many people had expected it to be a love story. Also, being published in 2012, it was slightly ahead of the 'husband' craze in crime thrillers.  That's my best guess: the narrative itself is utterly compelling and praiseworthy.  Our starting point is a relatively normal Australian wife discovering an envelope, addressed by her husband to her, 'to be opened in the event of my death.' The husband is still alive -- can she resist? What follows is a labyrinthine and very human psychological thriller following three sets of people whose lives and deaths intersect. I can't wait to read more by Moriarty.

Holmes Entangled (2018) by Gordon McAlpine. Gloriously accessible Sherlockian postmodernism. During the Second World War, Jorge Luis Borges visits a private detective with what he claims is a manuscript written by Sherlock Holmes himself. Holmes, we learn, was a well-known detective, occassionally helped by a 'middling scribbler' called Arthur Conan Doyle (who has pretty much gone mad, after becoming obsessed with fairies and speaking to the dead). The manuscript reveals Holmes' investigation of claims by Doyle that he was visited  during a seance by the spirit of the still-living Prime Minister. Cracking the case also involves solving the murder of Edgar Allen Poe. The solution lies in poststructuralism and quantum physics. Oh, and Holmes comes up with Schroedinger's cat all by himself.

The Mayfair Mystery by Frank Richardson

I regret having listened to this as an audiobook, as I wish I’d noted down some of the one-liners, and I’d love to have a copy I can keep and consult (luckily, under its original title, 2835 Mayfair, it is available online here). I’m grateful to those of my friends who recommended Frank Richardson’s The Mayfair Mystery (1906) to me.

An eminent Harley Street doctor has been murdered – or has he? A valet discovers his master dead and summons the authorities – but, when he returns to the scene, the body has gone …

The Mayfair Mystery was the first title republished in those gorgeous Collins Crime Club editions in 2015. It’s an interesting choice, as the original publication predates the traditional parameters of the Golden Age, and the puzzle aspect (with which the renaissance seems outwardly obsessed) is not strong. Indeed, supernatural explanations for the crime are routinely flirted with and – arguably – not wholly abandoned.

It’s also not well-served by HarperCollins’ blurb, which makes it sound like a straightforward brain-teaser. In fact, the prose is absorbingly witty and satirical – as is the story architecture. Almost every other line is some loaded throwaway comment about the hypocrisies of the well-to-do, particularly those in pursuit of marriage.

I still might buy myself a copy because I am keen to read David Brawn’s introduction to the text. In particular, I’d like to find out more about Frank Richardson, who committed suicide in 1917. He was well-known as a satirist with, bizarelly, an obsession with facial hair (he is said to have coined the term ‘face fungus’), and it does not take a supersleuth to understand the moustache-obsessed hack novelist Frederick Robinson within these pages as a self-portrait.

As I listened to this book (you may have gathered, audiobooks are relatively new and not quite comfortable territory for me), I was struck by a feeling of pleasure: normally, when I ask people for recommendations, they just fish about in their favourite canons and recollect one with a gay character or LGBTQ themes.  Often these are great, but often they’re not the most enjoyable part of the canon, and I get a bit peeved that people just think, ‘oh, yeah, Jamie likes gay stuff, so the gay stuff is for him’ (I was nearly put off Kerry Greenwood by being told I’d love to start with Murder and Mendelsohn, one of her worst). So, I was delighted that people seemed to have grasped that I’m interested in society satire etc etc etc…. until I got to the ending. Oh, well! Still, it’s very interesting and put me in mind of Dorothy Bowers, who wrote some 30-40 years later.

There's one mystery I cannot solve. At the end of the audiobook, the narrator announced that authorial copyright for this novel is held by none other than David Brawn, and Google tells me it was registered in 2015. Surely, 101 years after an author's death, their work cannot be copyrighted by anyone. Now, is this simply a muddle -- i.e., is it merely David's introduction that has been copyrighted? Or has he adapted the text?

The Way of All Flesh by Naomi Alderman

Audible subscribers, at least in the UK, get ‘free’ access to selected podcasts and serials. I didn’t know this until I was clearing out my spam folder, and came across some links. There are a few interesting things that we get for free and so far I’ve listened to three. This review is of a six-part drama: The Way of All Flesh (2017) by Naomi Alderman.

The story: Zombies have taken over and won the war against humans. The world is ending.  Nine human strangers seek refuge in a country house. Before long, one of them is murdered…  It soon becomes clear that one of the surviving eight is a murderer… but which one?

The Way of All Flesh is set in the Zombies, Run! universe (Google was my friend here). It turns out that Zombies, Run! (2012) is an iPhone and Android game developed by Naomi Alderman and Six to Start, which combines storytelling with running and other healthy stuff that’s not hugely on my radar. Wikipedia calls it ‘an immersive running game’, wherein players listen to the story — partly written by Margaret Atwood! — and their own music. I might give it a go, but I can’t imagine fleeing zombies to the strains of Ethel Merman and the Spice Girls.

The zombie craze was at its peak in 2012, and it’s still going today in a kind of appropriate dead-but-not-dead way. Two of my Netflix binges are iZombie, an absolutely ridiculous comic-book-inspired programme that’s just stumbled into its fourth series, and Santa Clarita Diet, which is one of the greatest shows ever made. iZombie has maintained its relevance in Series 4 by more or less ditching its police-procedural format (it began as a show about a zombie pathologist who solves the murders of the people whose brains she eats) and turning the whole thing into a not-so-subtle allegory on the topic of multiculturalism: it presents a world where humans and zombies appear to co-exist but persecution and propaganda surge behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Santa Clarita Diet, as the title suggests, satirises white-picket-fence aspirations and the American Dream.

The Way of All Flesh also has a kind of relevance-bid, in that it’s set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war on zombies (or ‘zoms', in the parlance). Most crime fiction has a genre-referential moment, and in The Way of All Flesh it comes at the mid-way point, when the survivors reflect on Golden Age detective novels. The likes of Christie and Sayers, they agree, were popular in the aftermath of the First World War and the run-up to the Second, because they gave readers a sense of conclusion; of explaining death and disorder. In that scene, Alderman argues for her own story’s relevance in an increasingly unstable political climate.

The idea of a murder mystery set during the apocalypse has always appealed to me. I’ve always wanted to read one. I even attempted to write something vaguely along those lines as my Masters dissertation; a novella set on board the Titanic, in which the crime is explained while the ship is sinking and the passengers have to choose between staying to hear the truth and trying to escape without ever finding out (it divided the examiners). The issue here, though, is not a question of resolution — of whether the truth matters at the very end — but one of motive: why would anyone commit murder when everyone’s days are numbered?

The characters are all humorous archetypes — a journalist, a doctor, an academic, a TV celebrity — and there’s some enjoyable interaction. The egos clash nicely and, of course, hidden connections quickly emerge. However, I felt that the mystery story — which is, frankly weak — had very little to do with the zombie apocalypse. In fact, the question of why you’d kill someone during the end of the world, is quickly resolved: a strong desire for vengeance, and that is that. Vengeance could be a motive for murder in any time and any place. The setting seemed incidental. As the story progressed, I got the feeling that Alderman was not bringing her A-game. She is an absolutely brilliant author, incapable of writing anything bad. However, I got the impression that she wrote The Way of All Flesh quickly. Very quickly. It’s well-written, but I expected something … else. It’s three days since I stopped listening, and I’ve already forgotten all the character’s names. I’ve even forgotten which character died and which character killed them. And the acting is just dire. There is nothing to recommend the acting.

I don’t feel disappointed because this download was free. Based on the author and the idea, I am sure I would have paid for it (I mean, come on! Zombies! Murder mystery! Naomi Alderman!) and, had I done so, I would have been majorly irked. Each episode is 20 minutes long, so if you do choose to give it a go, it’s only 2 hours out of your life.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

The Daughter of Time (1951) is one of the most famous detective novels of the twentieth century and it remains the volume for which Josephine Tey is best known. In 1990, the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the number one top crime novel of all time, and it was in the news again recently when the body of its subject, Richard III, was recovered from beneath a car park in Leicester. I know I wasn’t the first nor the last person to have their understanding of that man completely reconfigured by reading this novel.

I first read The Daughter of Time as a sixth-former. It wasn’t my first Tey but it was the first one that made an impression. The central conceit is bizarre enough to be iconic. Inspector Alan Grant, confined to a hospital bed, is looking for something to pass the time. He ends up applying his keen policeman’s mind to a problem surrounding the historical figure of Richard III. Suspecting that Richard might not be the monster we all know him as, Grant uncovers a web of lies and propaganda, configuring Richard as a victim of political machinations and
even absolving him of responsibility for the infamous case of the princes in the tower.

A couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to hear that a serialised and apparently unabridged reading of the whole novel was being aired on BBC Radio 4 Extra. If you’re based in the UK, you can still listen to all episodes here. This review is based on listening to the reading, rather than an a close rereading of the text – although I have, of course, read it a few times.

One thing, beyond the obvious, that makes the story so special is Grant himself. He’s a great and understated detective; a poetry loving policemen before they were ten-a-penny, he also lives with a constant mental crisis, splitting his mind into distinct personalities and haunted by the fact that he will never be a manly man. Nearly all of Grant’s cases spring from his own fascination with the victim. He develops an unhealthy and uncanny obsession with the deceased – usually a beautiful man – and the case of Richard III is no different. Grant gets lost staring into the eyes of etchings and finds himself unable to reconcile such a hypnotic face with the horrible stories attached to it. That’s his starting point.

Treating the historical mystery as a contemporary psychological criminal investigation, Grant sees everything from a fresh angle, allowing his creator to gently satirise the naiveté of traditional historians, who unwittingly tow the line of archaic propaganda. There are frequent allusions to ‘the Sainted Moore’, referencing the authoritative but factually flawed writings of Thomas Moore. As one of Grant’s helpers, the excellent Marta Hallard states, with cutting diplomacy: ‘Perhaps when you’re grubbing about with tattered records, you don’t have time to learn about people. I don’t mean the people in records, but real-life people — flesh and blood’.

Of course, Grant can’t do everything by himself from a hospital bed. Not only would that be impractical in the pre-internet age, it would also be incredibly boring for the reader. One of his helpers is the actor Marta Hallard, whom Tey’s readers will already know, and another is an American student who develops a love of research purely by accident whilst helping him out. This student, Brent Carradine, provides our policeman with his fill of original documents found in the British Museum. He (Brent) is planning to write a book about Richard. When he asks if Grant would prefer to do the honours – since this is his case – Grant responds that he would never write a book. ‘It’s my considered opinion that too many books are written as it is’, he adds. And, glancing up for a moment from a detective novel that really pushes the boundaries of what a detective novel can do, the reader agrees.

There is an element of artifice in this novel, and I’m not just talking about the rather wonderful parodies of historical fiction in and out of which the author dips (Tey herself was, of course, also an historical novelist and playwright, under a second pseudonym, Gordon Daviot). No, the whole thing, the five century-long puzzle, must be tied up and resolved by the time Alan Grant gets out of hospital. And, of course, it is. When he emerges from hospital, having found out the truth, Grant makes perhaps my favourite comment in all of Tey’s work: ‘How small and queer the world looks viewed the right way up.’

Grant’s/Tey’s version of the Richard III is not quite the story we have now, but it is closer to it than the traditional Shakespearean line. It is frankly remarkable that a genre novel has been so influential. It’s not my favourite crime novel – it’s not even my favourite Tey – but the fact that it exists, and in such an entertaining and accessible form, is brilliant.

Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin

I love Edmund Crispin (aka Bruce Montgomery) and have loved him since I read Love Lies Bleeding in my school library at a tender age. I loved that book so much that I made a deal with the librarian -- I slipped her some money for wine and she marked the book as 'lost'. It was a mystery why it was in the library at all; certainly nobody had checked it out in over twenty years. Slowly, with the internet in its infancy and golden age revivals a good few years off, I pieced together a collection of Crispin's nine crime novels (I only got the short story collections recently), and decided to ration them out over my lifetime. I haven't read a Crispin for ages, so I picked one at random, and dug in. The one I picked was Frequent Hearses (1950).

I'm sorry to say that novel showcases Crispin and his brilliant donnish detective, Gervase Fen, at their weakest. The opening is glorious: a young actress, known professionally as Gloria Scott (surely a Sherlock Holmes reference), sits in a taxi, making her way through Piccadilly. When the car reaches Waterloo bridge, she alights. She walks to the edge of the bridge, and jumps to her death. A clear suicide -- but why? The young woman had just obtained her dream role in movies.

Meanwhile, Fen has been called to a film studio to advise on a new biopic of Alexander Pope. He learns of Gloria's death and sets out to investigate. Before long, there is a murder... and then another one...

The puzzle element is more pronounced than in some other books, but it is also less well integrated than anything of Crispin's I've ever read. In fact, when the solution to the mystery is revealed, it feels very much like a Sherlock Holmes story updated to fit the mid-twentieth century. I get the impression that this is an idea that should have remained firmly in a notebook; a nice and ingenious story, not fabulously realised. It should have been developed into more of a homage to the genre's heritage.

The prose is wonderfully overblown, especially when Crispin sets a scene, and it's deliciously pithy in places. For example, I love the initial description of David Crane as 'a young, thick-set man, going prematurely bald, of a type that emanates social uncertainty like ectoplasm.' The pith has its down side, however, especially when Crispin introduces working class types and women. I have not noticed this problem to any great degree in my other reading of the same author.

While I would recommend Crispin to nearly every reader, I would not recommend starting with Frequent Hearses. It is dated in all the wrong ways, and is a snivelling shadow of the author's rapier wit at its best.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

After reading a lot of hype about The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018), I was delighted to get hold of an ARC. Admittedly, I follow a lot of agents, publicists, publishers, and authors on Twitter, so it’s not that surprising that I read a lot of hype. But the central concept seemed so interesting that I couldn’t wait to read the book in all its 505-page glory.

At the heart of this truly unique novel is the narrator, who wakes up one morning, unable to remember who he is, where he is, or why he’s there. All he can remember is a name: Anna. That’s the opening, but it’s not the hook. The hook is altogether weirder. I quote the blurb:

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. 

 But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. 

 And some of his hosts are more helpful than others…

Irresistible, right? The novel, originally titled The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, is being marketed as ‘Gosford Park meets Inception by way of Agatha Christie’ and I think that the skew to the visual is significant: it’s already been optioned for television and feels like something that should and will be filmed. It’s a debut novel from Stuart Turton, who is a travel journalist – and I have no idea if or how he’s going to follo such a stand-out.

This novel’s chief virtue is its high concept, executed through immaculate and mind-bogglingly complicated plotting. Aiden lives through the same day seven times, each time in the body of another character, and sometimes he dips in and out of ‘hosts’; but every time he tries to change what has happened, he finds himself making it happen. It’s that time-travelly paradoxy stuff you get on TV all the time. And how the author managed to plot this all so expertly, with a rather complex murder mystery on top of it, is truly beyond me. It must have taken ages.

The story is set non-specifically. Technically, the action could be taking place any time between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, although it feels kind of 1930s-ish, and the end casts everything in a new light. Aiden is a relatively blank character – he’s the kind of scrupulous conscientious man that is essential in fiction and wouldn’t be allowed in real life – and every time he wakes up in a new host, he takes on elements of their personality: at first this is simply a case of knowing how to play chess, but it develops into helpful traits like a policeman’s peripheral vision, or obstructive ones like a rapist’s violent aggression. As he fights the influence of his hosts, he learns more about himself – and why he’s in this loop.

As for the mystery: the Hardcastle family is hosting a lavish masquerade ball to mark the return of their estranged daughter, Evelyn, after twenty years. There’s a sinister assortment of guests, whose greed and avarice glitter like the freshly-dusted chandeliers (Turton very nearly veers into that sort of description, but mostly reins it in). Everyone is hiding something, much of it connected to who sired whom and a long-unmentioned family tragedy.

In the evening, after a ground-shaking announcement, Evelyn appears to commit suicide. But we know that, contrary to all appearances, it is murder. Sifting through suspects – at the same time trying to work out which ones are actually him in future incarnations – Aiden soon discovers that he isn’t the only one trying to solve the mystery: he has competition from fellow intruders-in-disguise. In the meantime, getting to the bottom of his own identity and purpose, Aiden has to find this mysterious ‘Anna’, and work out if she is friend or foe. Although we learn a lot about our hero in the course of the investigation, we never actually get to ‘see’ the real him: which I think is a marvellous touch, adding to a haunting ambiguity after the resolution has been delivered.

The solution to the mystery is in three parts and, contrary to appearances, it isn’t overly complex. It takes over 100 pages to unfold, but at the core are three very simple steps (all of which seemed familiar from television, but not in combination). The author also plays fair: you know how, reading a mystery novel, you have several half-thoughts about the solution, which you quickly abandon as new information comes to light? Take all those thoughts and put them together, and you’ve probably solved the whole thing. So, although I saw all but one twist coming at some point, as a collective whole it bamboozled me.

Depending on execution, an idea like the one at the heart of Seven Deaths could prove to be a bestseller, or it could win the Booker. Turton has gone for the former, and the result is extremely readable. I read it in three 150-170-page sittings. The prose is not seamless, the switch from past to present tense seems to have happened late in the order of things, and the author has invented a truly unique approach to the comma – but, as I mentioned at the outset, Turton’s plotting skills are unparalleled. As a piece of craftsmanship, Seven Deaths is majestic.

It’s such a weird and wonderful novel that it will appeal to nearly everyone.