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the complete review - fiction

And Then There Was No One

by
Gilbert Adair

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : enjoyable, with a particularly good conclusion

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(E)in wahres Spiegelkabinett aus historischen Anspielungen, literarischen Indizien und kriminalistischer Fährtensuche. (...) Immer wieder überholen die Fiktionen bei Adair die Wirklichkeit, und immer wieder fragt man sich als Leser Zug um Zug, ob sein durchtriebenes Spiel gelingen kann." - Tobias Döring, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "(T)he narrator, and indeed central character, is Adair himself, who has some extraordinarily good fun at his own expense in his self-portrait. (...) The final volume of the trilogy, then, could be said to be clever-clever-clever: by which I mean its clever-cleverness is redeemed. There is an almost poignant audacity in this work. (...) It is an illusion, of course: after one puts the book down, we can see it for the inert artefact it is, but while reading it we feel a delicious sensation of vertigo. This book seems to buzz with its own self-generated life. It's transcendentally good." - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
  
  
• "Just how much you enjoy this book depends on your capacity for ingesting the riffs of an inveterate clever-clog as he nods and winks his way through a catalogue of movie and literary references. Adair is a writer who has always worn his intellectualism heavily. Yet the Mount escapades make for guilty pleasure, told with the gusto of a great uncle who realises he's pushed a yarn to the point of incredulity, then tips back the brandy and continues." - Christian House, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "Anders als der für Adair untypisch monotone Vorgänger ist der neue Roman bis zum Verstummen des Erzählers von einer munteren Stimmenvielfalt beseelt, die dank fabulierenden Ausschweifungen die Handlung zur Nebensache degradiert und den Leser trotzdem bei Laune hält." - Thomas Hermann, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "What follows is . . . well, even here, the decencies of the whodunnit apply: I can't give away the plot. In general terms, then, it is a riot of cleverness and clever-cleverness, simultaneously delirious and irritating, at times infectiously funny -- the closest thing to chickenpox you will find between hard covers. I wasn't sure at the end whether I wanted to worship Adair or kick him." - Robert Hanks, New Statesman
  
  
• "Gilbert Adair -- though fantastically clever-clever, and horribly addicted not only to alliteration but also to puns and to literary in-jokes so self-referential that he is perpetually disappearing up his own recto (oh dear, his style is catching) -- has created a hugely enjoyable entertainment. (...) Adair has managed to tease and beguile even this jaded reviewer into enjoying this intelligent, silly, serious, sparkling little squib. The central conceit flirts outrageously with know-it-all conceitedness, but knows it does -- a layer of self-consciousness that might merely have compounded the offence. It is Adair’s triumph to transmute this knowingness into apparently self-deprecating wit -- a trick of charm which is as British as Agatha Christie." - Caroline Moore, The Spectator
  
  
• "Evadne’s admirers will find this third volume very different. (...) And Then There Was No One is a huge improvement on the previous Evadne books, which, for all their allusive larkiness, replicated the main fault of most classical whodunnits: after the discovery of the corpse, the writer is simply killing time for the bulk of the book until the revelation of the murderer. (...) This novel is an immensely entertaining jeu d’esprit, a ragbag of puns and allusions that literary trainspotters will delight in rummaging in, but is there anything to distinguish it from a dozen other such books ? I would say, yes: its quiet poignancy." - Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       And Then There Was No One is the third (and final) volume in Gilbert Adair's series of "Agatha Christie parodies-cum-celebrations-cum-critiques" featuring British mystery-writer Evadne Mount. Evadne makes her first appearance only well into the novel -- but she does appear, in the flesh, which is, at first sight, a bit of a head-scratcher: as readers will recall, and as Adair reminds them, the first two instalments of the series were set in the mid-1930s and then just after the Second World War, while this story is set in ... 2011, which would mean: "that the woman must now be pushing a hundred-and twenty". Adair does offer a reasonably satisfactory explanation for why instead she's only: "a month or two short of her sixty-sixth birthday", but it's not the first (or last) of the fictional contortions on offer here -- though, of course, these are generally very much part of the fun in any Adair-fiction.
       Much of And Then There Was No One is, in its most basic outlines, like the previous two mysteries, not least in the borrowings from and echoes of Christie, beginning with the title. Once again, the murder only takes place about midway through the novel; once again there is a small group of people who all manage not to: "have an altogether satisfactory alibi" and could potentially be responsible; once again, Evadne makes a friendly but high-stakes wager as to whether she will figure out whodunnit -- and once again, she does figure it out. But Adair still has few tricks and twists up his sleeve, too, and while he bides his time, the novel's conclusion -- a longer Epilogue-chapter -- turns things quite beyond the previous variations on Adair's theme, making for a very nice conclusion to this trilogy (and more).
       The novel begins with a Prologue, an overview of the life and career of author Gustav Slavorigin -- including, in the opening sentence, the information that he was murdered on 11 September 2011, at a Sherlock Holmes Festival held in Meiringen, Switzerland (which is, of course, right by the Reichenbach Falls that Holmes and nemesis Moriarty (apparently) fell to their deaths from). The Bulgarian-born Slavorigin had a brilliant career, named to Granta's Twenty Best Novelists after publication of his first novel and going on to win the Booker Prize for his second, but it all derailed with the publication of a book of essays, Out of a Clear Blue Sky. The collection of anti-American essays culminated in the notorious title-piece, which discussed the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and other targets, a callous: "polemic designed to stir up controversy" -- which it very effectively did. Slavorigin soon found himself with a Rushdie-like fatwa against him, and a bounty of a hundred million dollars on his head, courtesy of a reclusive Texan billionaire, forcing the author into a life of hiding.
       The novel proper then begins in 2011 -- and properly introduces the narrator, our very own author, Gilbert Adair, playing himself. He receives a last-minute invitation (or summons) to the Sherlock Holmes festival in Switzerland -- last minute, but not entirely out of left field, as his most recent work of fiction was the (fictional) The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Among the expected other guests is Umberto Eco (a no-show), as well as a motley group of authors whom Adair vaguely knows -- not least among them, Evadne Mount -- as well as a mystery guest (not that there's any mystery about who that will be).
       Adair has good fun with the festival-scenes and authors, and even slips in a decent little Holmes-story from his fictional collection, 'The Giant Rat of Sumatra'. He even summarizes his Q & A after his public reading -- where, among other things, he insists that there would be no follow-up to The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style, as:

I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.

Gilbert Adair the postmodernist ? What a joke ! What a farce ! What you don't seem to realise, Gilbert, is that this is 2011. Postmodernism is dead, it's so last century, it's as hopelessly passé as Agatha Christie herself. Nobody gives two hoots about self-referentiality any longer, just as nobody gives two hoots, or even a single hoot, about you. Your books are out of sight, out of sound, out of fashion and out of print, but you just won't let go, will you ? You just won't give up. Even now, even in this very chapter, even with this very conceit [...] you're hoping to seem more postmodern than Borges or Burgess, Barth, Barthes or Barthelme. Botheration, now you've got me doing it !

- M.A.Orthofer, 12 February 2019

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Links:

• Faber & Faber publicity page
• C.H.Beck publicity page

• Asylum
• Die Berliner Literaturkritik (German)
• The Bookbag
• crossexaminingcrime
• Durchleser (German)
• Euro Crime
• Focus (German)
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian
• Independent on Sunday
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• Metro
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• New Statesman
• Rezensionszeitschrift zur Literaturübersetzung (German)
• Jonathan Rosenbaum
• The Scotsman
• The Spectator
• The Telegraph
• Watching the detectives (German)
• Die Welt (German)
• Wheredunnit (German)
• Wiener Zeitung (German)

• Gilbert Adair at British Council Literature
• Gibert Adair at Blake Friedman

• The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
• [Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires]
• A Closed Book
• The Death of the Author
• The Holy Innocents (a.k.a. The Dreamers)
• [The Key of the Tower]
• Love and Death on Long Island
• A Mysterious Affair of Style
• The Real Tadzio

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• See Index of Series and Sequels under review

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About the Author:

       British author Gilbert Adair (1944-2011) wrote several novels, as well as several works of non-fiction. He also translated Georges Perec's A Void, for which he won the Scott Moncrieff Prize.

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© 2019-2021 the complete review

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