Books Novels by Stuart Turton, Jill Mansell, Dan Sheehan and Laura Carlin, and essays by Colson Whitehead
An amnesiac narrator goes into a creepy mansion, but will he live to tell his tale?
There’s a story about the first film adaptation of The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s famously complicated, groundbreaking mystery. Midway through filming, Humphrey Bogart and Howard Hawks got into an argument about one of the many deaths. Did the chauffeur commit suicide or was he murdered? They checked with the screenwriter, who thought it was murder but wasn’t sure, so they telegrammed the author, who replied, “Damned if I know.”
There are more than seven deaths in The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton’s time-travelling, body-hopping murder mystery: there are beatings, shootings, stabbings, drownings, abductions, disappearances, suicides, murders-disguised-as-suicides and suicides-disguised-as-murders. This is the most complicated mystery novel I’ve ever read.
It begins with the narrator waking up, mid-stride, with total amnesia. He’s in the woods. It’s pouring with rain. He remembers only a name: Anna. He sees a woman being chased, then hears a gunshot. He stumbles through the woods and comes across a crumbling English country house: Blackheath. He pounds on the door and is admitted by a disfigured butler. The house is filled with mysterious servants and sinister guests. The guests have been invited to attend a masked ball, which is being thrown by the Hardcastle family to commemorate one of their children, murdered there 19 years earlier.
A masked man appears and warns there will be another murder that night: the beautiful Evelyn Hardcastle. To escape Blackheath, the amnesiac narrator must identify the killer. If he fails – or is murdered by his unknown rivals, who also seek to solve the mystery and escape – he will wake up again in someone else’s body and relive the day. He has eight days and eight different hosts. If he fails to solve the murder, he loses his memory and goes back to the start.
The narrator’s predicament creates some interesting strategic possibilities. If you’re cornered in a darkened hall with no weapon to defend yourself against an oncoming assassin, you could, for example, resolve that a future host would come to the hall earlier in the day and hide a shotgun behind a nearby curtain, then draw back the curtain to reveal it. But what if an even later host resolves to retrieve the gun and shoot the assassin before he traps the earlier host in the hall? You can see how things get messy.
Turton avoids getting too bogged down in paradoxes or metaphysics. He doesn’t have words to spare for anything other than his dense, intricate plot. This isn’t a profound book: it is overwritten and the characters are paper-thin, but you can’t help but admire its ambition.
Does it all make sense, though? Do all the murders, riddles and clues – hidden chess pieces, cryptic whispers, pages torn from diaries – encountered by the many hosts across their eight timelines add up to a coherent whole? Damned if I know.
THE SEVEN DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE, by Stuart Turton (Raven Books, $27)