Gilbert Adair isn't an author commonly associated with crime fiction. Indeed, until I came across some mentions of his Evadne Mount trilogy, he wasn't even an author I'd associated with anything much. He earned his stripes as a literary critic and translator, it appears, having famously translated a novel from French which didn't use the letter e - the translation does the same thing.
Adair, it seems, was a keen fan of the postmodern and wordplay, and many of his other works of fiction work in this regard. For reasons I'm yet to find a good explanation for, though, he turned to detective fiction in the final years of his life, with Roger Murgatroyd being released in 2006 and its sequels A Mysterious Affair of Style in 2007 and And Then There Was No One in 2009 (Adair died in 2011).
As fans of Agatha Christie may have already picked up from the titles, the Mount trilogy are modern - or perhaps postmodern - takes on the "Golden Age" detective stories that Dame Agatha and her associates in the Detection Club turned into the true art form they are regarded as now. If the term doesn't mean so much to some readers, think of all the classic tropes of detective fiction: British middle- and upper-class characters, country houses, snowdrifts ensuring that only people in the house could have done it, servants providing comic relief, police as sort of well-meaning duffers, everyone with secrets and motives and plots falling just the right side of convoluted. Odds are that you will have just visualised the kind of thing that Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot or one of the many other great detectives could be counted on to solve.
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd falls into the Marple category, particularly as Evadne Mount is a female amateur detective, rather than the professional male investigator such as Poirot (or, to take an example from another author, John Dickson Carr's Dr Gideon Fell who is as good as a professional investigator). Mount is in fact a crime novelist herself, which most likely serves as a tip of the hat to Poirot's occasional associate Ariadne Oliver. Given the chance to do some sleuthing of her own, she jumps at the opportunity and spends a good deal of the novel getting in the way of the retired Chief Inspector Trubshawe.
The plot takes place in and around ffolkes Manor (the two lower-case letters are themselves a nod to the era, as a lot of the upper classes had names like that) in roughly the 1930s - there are mentions of "the War" with a clear link to the 1914-18 conflict - during a Christmas gathering. Colonel and Mrs ffolkes have invited a group of their friends (exactly the sort of people you would expect in a novel like this) to spend the Christmas period, along with their daughter Selina and her friend Donald. Together with the two younger ones comes Raymond Gentry, a gossip columnist, whose murder sets the plot in motion.
As a murder, it's quite a clever one. One of the great traditions of the Golden Age was the "locked room mystery", and as crime fiction has moved away from that genteel era a lot of the art form of having a dead body in a room locked from the inside with no evidence of anyone going in or coming out has been lost a bit, but that's how Gentry is found. Suspicions are rife, and Trubshawe (and Mount) have their work cut out for them in finding a way through a very tangled web.
Where Roger Murgatroyd suffers a little, to be frank, is in not quite knowing what it wants to be. A lot of what I'd read about this novel suggested that it was a very clever send-up of the Golden Age mystery, but Adair's humour doesn't quite seem to translate so well. There are some amusing moments - the scene below-stairs where the cook doesn't "hold with ideas" (or jokes, later on) and one of the maids tries to recount the plot of one of Mount's novels, complete with malapropisms and general confusion is a particularly good example - but the humour tends to be more in the vein of an arched eyebrow than a proper laugh.
Some of this may be because the best of the Golden Age novels actually are quite funny themselves. While it's easy to laugh at David Suchet's impeccable television performance as Poirot, his pedantic nature is just as amusing on the printed page, and the same is true of Miss Marple's home-spun wisdom. Catch a performance of Christie's iconic The Mousetrap and you'll see genuinely funny dialogue and a thoroughly twisted murder mystery in perfect counterpoint. Therefore, I did catch myself wondering at times whether the Golden Age really needed a send-up in quite the same way as some other styles of novel perhaps do. In fairness, there's a particularly clever dig at the custom of having "maps" or "plans" at the start of many of these novels - one is provided, but it's completely irrelevant, and Mount then discourses on such a thing as she explains everything at the end.
Secondly, some of the detection isn't in keeping with the "rules" of the style. While there's nothing to say that you can't write a Golden Age novel while having certain clues kept back from the reader until the end (Mount does a pivotal piece of sleuthing completely offstage), it just doesn't feel right. Say what you want about Christie's famously intricate plots, but even Murder on the Orient Express is scrupulously fair in giving the reader every conceivable clue to solve the crime. The fact that we still can't is our error, rather than hers.
There are also, perhaps, slightly too many telegraphed plot twists for my liking. I won't reveal any of them here, but I tend to prefer my everyone-gathered-in-the-study scene to feature moments where I wonder how on earth I didn't realise that the clue was what it was, rather than ones where I think "Saw that coming".
That said, one real highlight throughout is in Adair's willingness to pay homage to those who went before him. Mount is offended when people describe the murder as being similar to those in her novels for the simple reason that she leaves locked-room murders to John Dickson Carr (and rightly so, the man's ability in this regard was nonpareil), and she later invokes the "little grey cells" to work out the solution. At one point, she even makes a passing reference to Carr's immortal "Locked Room Lecture" from The Hollow Man.
But it's not only this. Mount and others are constantly providing synopses of her own novels, all of which are squarely in the Golden Age tradition. A "re-written" Oedipus Rex as a courtroom drama would seem slightly unusual, but we're also treated to the plot of a novel in which the crime is "solved before anyone knew it had happened" (due to the detective's rather intimate knowledge of the thief's anatomy), the solution to a novel in which an English teacher identifies his killer by a grammatical quirk and brief descriptions of plots involving one identical twin murdering the other and a victim being killed while singing "Auld Lang Syne" and nobody noticing he was dead. While there are vague hints at some of the classics of the style hidden away there - Agatha Christie's notebooks apparently contain a lot of discussions of "twin murders" - these give a certain bizarre flavour to everything.
All in all, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd is an interesting little entry in the files. Judged purely as a murder mystery, it lacks several key ingredients. Judged as a parody of the style, it is likewise a bit lacking. As a loving homage to the genre, though, it's far from bad.
Recommended with reservations. Three stars.
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