Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi

"In even the most innocent scenes there is darkness to be found at the corners," he said, "from the way the light falls on the frame."

"Are fictional detectives fundamentally dishonest?" She thought about the question. "That could be the title of a doctoral thesis". He waited for her to answer, the silence punctured by birdsong. "I would say no. No more than fiction itself".

Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi is an entertaining and quirky detective novel. You can compare it to a game of Cluedo, as you move from chapter to chapter, master the act of deduction, following the clues to solve the murder mystery.

Julia Hart arrives to an island in the Mediterranean where the reclusive Scottish author and mathematician Grant McAllister lives his solitary life. His book of mysteries, published many years ago, during the golden age of detective fiction, might be published again, with an introduction and re-edited material. 

McAllister's claim to fame is that he came up with a mathematical theory of crime fiction. His book of stories is meant to support his theory. "All of these stories derive from a research paper that I wrote in nineteen thirty-seven, examining the mathematical structure of murder mysteries... The aim of that research paper was to give a mathematical definition of a murder mystery".

The paper lists all of the possible permutations of detective fiction. When Julia queries that there must be an awful lot of these permutations, the professor explains, "Strictly speaking, there are infinitely many, but they divide into a small number of archetypes. In fact, the main structural variations can be counted on two hands. The stories were written to illustrate these major variations... The mathematical definition is simple... Effectively, it just states the four ingredients that comprise a murder mystery, with a few conditions applying to each one".

"The first ingredient is a group of suspects; the characters that may, or may not, have been responsible for the killing".

"The second ingredient of a murder mystery is a victim, or a group of victims. Those characters that have been killed in unknown circumstances".

Following that logic, you might guess that the third ingredient is a detective, or a group of detectives. "Those characters that are trying to solve the crime. I considered this one to be optional, which is to say that the group of detectives can have nobody in it... We make no restriction on the size of the group".

And finally, the fourth component is the murderer. "A killer, or a group of killers; those responsible for the deaths of the victims. Without that it's certainly not a murder mystery". The condition is that the killer(s) must be drawn from the pool of suspects

The concept is an intriguing one. 

The book is divided into chapters with seven different short stories, which are not connected between themselves, except by the genre (murder mystery). Each of the stories has hidden inconsistencies, or "jokes", as the author tries to explain later. The reader is supposed to work them out, if they are smart enough to pay attention to all the details.

Each chapter goes on like that: under the pretext of editing and re-writing the book of crime stories, Julia reads a story to McAllister to stimulate his memory, then she explains to him what she thinks the inconsistencies are, and keeps pestering him for personal information. He is happy enough to talk about his stories, but is reticent about his personal affairs, and rightly so.

It appears Julia suspects McAllister of being involved in an old unsolved murder case, which happened many years earlier.

The stories are quite underwhelming, unpleasant, and leave a nasty aftertaste. The writing clearly emulates the style of the golden era of the British crime story, but in an amateur way (which will be explained at the end of the book). It might be presented as the homage to the classic crime stories, but overall these are derivative and affected stories.

The fifth story, Trouble on Blue Pearl Island, is described as the homage to Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None), but it's not so much the homage as the direct stealing borrowing of the crime setting and scenario.

Some of the stories are plain disturbing. You can argue that all murder stories are disturbing, but here they are so clinical, unemotional, merciless and plain unpleasant. I don't think there is a single likeable character in the book, including Julia who has her own agenda and hounds the old man with her cleverness and cunning.

As it happens, by re-writing each story Julia is trying to trick McAllister into confession regarding the unsolved murder mystery which happened years earlier in London, dubbed as The White Murder. She believes he might have been involved or at least knows something about it.

As a reader, you feel somewhat cheated, since it's not something that you can predict, following the plot.

The ending with the solution to the "main" murder mystery is rather heavy-handed and not very plausible. 

Eight Detectives has been lauded as a box of delights by The New Yorl Times (see the endorsement on the cover), which I tend to disagree with. 

I had rather high expectations, reading the book endorsements and reviews in the papers. The narrative is very dry, as if dissected with the precision of the scalpel, and arranged on the mortuary slab. Totally devoid of any human emotion. 

You can argue it's clever, in a textbook-style of writing, but it's lost its soul on the way. 

To find a positive slant, I liked the cover design of this book, it's playful, curious and original. There are way too many crime stories now with the almost identical figures of women in red/yellow/blue shown from the back against some dark, stormy, gloomy background. There are so many of them, they begin to morph into one design. I wonder if these design artists all studied art in the same school.

SPOILER ALERT!

If you haven't read this book, please do not read further, as there are some major spoilers.

In the end we find out that the stories are actually written by a woman (and later re-written by another woman). Yes, there are plenty of women who write crime stories, and some of them do pile on a lot of gruesome details, but... The style of these stories feels masculine to me. The re-written story about the nasty sadistic detective, where he drowns the young woman in the bathtub, then tortures the "suspect" for the confession... That ending with the body on the mortuary slab being all his. I don't see this necrophiliac story as a work of a woman.

Have you read Eight Detectives? Did you find it a box of delights?