Gilbert Adair’s new novel from Scotland is just the right medicine for the glut of cold-blooded psychopath thrillers crowding the market.
“What seems more interesting than hair-splitting debates over what is and is not crime writing is the fascination, at the moment, with the blood-and-guts, in-your-face forms it takes. If the bestseller charts are anything to go by, readers lap up the slick, explicit, “this isn’t some kind of parlour game” fictions. Which makes me yearn all the more for the Golden Age of Crime, and which makes Gilbert Adair’s adorable novel, The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd, such a perfect tonic.
“It is possible, nowadays, to enjoy the Golden Age writers – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers et al – with a kind of camp twist. Rex Stout is a perfect example. The detective, Nero Wolfe, is massively obese, inexplicably rich, rarely leaves his brownstone apartment and employs a French chef and orchid gardener. There’s a wonderful one called Too Many Cooks, where Nero actually does leave the apartment to take part in a gourmet competition: the same dish is made 13 times, with 12 of them omitting one of the 13 necessary herbs. Of course, someone ends up poisoned. It is – and this is the joy – preposterous and unbelievable.
“Adair’s novel is in a similar vein, but it is deliberately tongue-in-cheek, not beached as kitsch with the changing tides of fashion. In a snowed-in manor house, on Boxing Day, in the 1930s, one guest – the despicable gossip columnist for the Trombone, Raymond Gentry – is found dead. He has been shot. In an attic room, locked from the inside, with iron bars on the only window, and with no gun, or murderer, in evidence. ”
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