I've reviewed Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd earlier on this blog, and at the time that it was written, Adair apparently intended it to be a standalone novel. 2007's followup, A Mysterious Affair of Style, seems to have come about as a perverse attempt at "never repeating himself", if we give the dedication any credence - Adair realised that because he'd never written a sequel, writing a sequel was therefore something different to do. Nonetheless, here we are.
Style, which of course owes its title to Agatha Christie's debut The Mysterious Affair at Styles, picks up roughly a decade after Evadne Mount and the retired Chief Inspector Trubshawe solved the earlier case. Trubshawe is enduring a rather bland retirement, when he happens to renew his acquaintance with Mount after stopping in at the Ritz for a cup of tea.
Mount invites him along to a charity variety performance, which is scheduled to begin with a brief sketch she'd written, and this leads (via a rather interesting, if under-explored, satire on stage whodunits) to a renewal of acquaintances with Cora Rutherford - Mount's long-standing friend and another character from Murgatroyd. The world has moved on since the earlier case, with some off-hand references to the aftermath of the Second World War providing a bit of colour. For our purposes, though, what's more important is that the cinema has replaced the stage as the premier location for actors.
Rutherford is cast in a film by the director Alastair Farjeon, and sees this as a way of reviving her flagging fortunes. Unfortunately, "Farje" has been killed in a fire, and the film is in doubt.
The plot meanders along through all of this before - roughly halfway through - arriving at the dramatic scenes as Rutherford's scenes are filmed. All of this leads to a seemingly impossible murder, committed in plain view of almost everyone on the set, but with very few motives among those who had the opportunity.
Mount and Trubshawe are drafted in by the younger policeman investigating the murder, and gradually discover that while the lack of motive may be true, all the suspects had a strong motive to commit an earlier murder, but yet no opportunity. What can it all mean? Well, in Mount's hands, it leads to the conclusion to the whole mystery and a rather surprising (cinematic, I suspect) denouement.
Does it work, though? Ultimately, no it really doesn't.
As in Murgatroyd, the plot gives Adair plenty of opportunity to come up with bizarre scenarios for whodunits. This time, the scenario's are Farjeon's films, rather than Mount's novels. The problem is, though, that while there are some very creative ideas, Farjeon himself is sufficiently clearly a caricature of Alfred Hitchcock that Adair needs to parody Hitchcock's films. The jokes are clever, but much more heavy-handed than they probably need to be - as an example, An American in Plaster of Paris sees a character with a broken leg attempt to investigate the murder he thinks was committed in the apartment above him, with all comparisons to both Rear Window's plot and An American in Paris' title being entirely intentional. Jokes like this confirm that it's surprisingly easy to be arch and clever without being particularly funny.
Style also gives Adair more of a chance to play around with the form of the classic whodunit. The solution doesn't break nearly as many rules as Murgatroyd did, but the meandering nature of the plot (the murder doesn't occur until about the halfway point, which prompts the characters to make throwaway remarks about how strange a whodunit would be if the murder didn't occur until the halfway point) doesn't really seem like an improvement. There's an awful lot of the characters standing around and waiting for the plot to switch on again, rather than anything genuinely happening - and, sadly, none of the characters are sufficiently three-dimensional to be interesting in the absence of a plot.
In the long run, that's the flaw in Style. Where Murgatroyd didn't quite work as a whodunit but worked as a snarky parody, Style works as neither by trying too hard to be both.
Two stars.
