Too clever by half
Eight Detectives Alex Pavesi Penguin
British novelist Alex Pavesi's innovative Eight Detectives has arrived in Canada to the accompaniment of a somewhat bewildering chorus of praise from other countries, where it has been heralded as a unique act of homage to the fabled Golden Age of the mystery novel — and an achievement worthy of Agatha Christie at her most ingenious.
Indeed, a neatly rendered reworking of Dame Agatha's And Then There Were None, is one of the seven short stories this book features. Under the title of Trouble on Pearl Island, this corpsestrewn yarn testifies to the infinite number of variations that can be spun out of the central situation of stranding a group of characters in an isolated place and then knocking them off one by one. Another story invokes U.S. legend Ellery Queen's trademark device during the 1930s of pausing, just before all is revealed, to issue a challenge to readers to assemble all the clues and solve the crime first.
But, for all the deftness in plotting, one remains nagged by an important question: How many of these stories really amount to an acceptable pastiche of the style, tone and temperament of the era when authors like Christie, Queen, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers were leaving an indelible imprint on the genre?
It is possible to enjoy these seven tales for themselves, but unfortunately they are part of a more lofty purpose on the part of author Pavesi, who has enclosed them within a larger umbrella narrative involving their reclusive creator, one Grant Mccallister, who believes it's possible to give “mathematical definition” to a murder mystery and has written these stories in support of his thesis.
So what does all this add up to for readers of Eight Detectives? One thing is certain: Author Pavesi, a mathematician himself, isn't afraid of committing overload. He can't resist burdening his story with Mccallister's turgid mathematical theorizing about the rules governing crime fiction. All this does is remind us that Ronald Knox and W.H. Auden did it much better with their famous maxims.
Ultimately, Eight Detectives is a cleverly conceived book besotted with its own cleverness.