An audio book.
Benjamin's birthday is New Year's day. As usual, his sister Abigail has organised a Mystery Murder Night for New Year's Eve. This year, post-Covid, she's hired Yew Tree House, AirBnB. She arrives early to hide the clues - the murder weapon's a champagne bottle. The theme is The Jazz Age. Steven plays the detective. Cormack and Olivia are the only couple. There's Margaret and Barbara too. It takes 2 hours to find the clues. In the morning Ben's dead in a locked room.
Part 2 begins with a cast list - Auguste Bell (detective), DI Ferret, a butler, Docus (maid), an aunt (sister of Abi's dead father, a mistress) and the characters from the modern case. We're presented with 3 sets of rules for writers of detective novels, from 1928. They include items like "No Chinamen"; no use of the idea that a dog didn't bark because it knew the intruder; the wish that the reader and the detective should have the same chance of solving the case.
Bell arrives. It's a locked room case. The doctor's convinced that it's a suicide. After their father died, Ben looked after the family business while Abi looked after the house. Barbara is a secretary at the company. Margaret is a jilted lover. Declan has gambling debts that Ben had stopped helping him with. It's not suicide because that would break Van Dyne's 18th commandment - we're advised to go back to the lists of rules because we probably skipped them. We're told that Sakker "serves an important literary function", giving us a chance to find out what Bell's thinking without him having to soliloquize - he lets Bell "Watsonize". Bell collects clues - noises in the night; a missing screwdriver. Was it a botched burglary? Bell has previous books - as an author? or is he a character in them? Bell tells Ferret that if he hangs on until chapter 16 he'll learn more. Bell finds a book of the case. At the end there's a clue-index. He and Ferret look back at their story.
While all this is going on there are sections that return to 2023. Abigail deals with the funeral. She returns to work. There's a set of rules about how the fridge and kitchen at work should be used. Abigail gives multiple statements about how she and Ben spent Xmas - or several Xmases. She's fed up with friends. She complains to HR about how colleagues are trying to help. When Steven asks for help, she says she expects help from him. He plans to leave Ireland. She talks to Ben's friends and colleagues to discover more about him.
Bell tells the assembled suspects in the drawing room that (he refers back to Ch.13) Steven is the murderer. This "reveal" scene is enacted several times with different outcomes each time. In the final one, Abigail is accused.
In the final section Ben is 8. The family go to the beach. Ben and Abigail play on the beach, making sandcastles.
Hegarty is a literary writer. I've read (and liked) short stories that she's written. On www.writing.ie she writes "Detective novels of that [Golden] age, and their authors, were concerned with a fairness that could never exist in the real world. ... it is also interesting how little our coping methods have changed since then: sales of Agatha Christie and “cosy crime” have peaked once more since the start of the pandemic. ... Abigail dips between real life and the imaginary world of the detective novel. In both worlds she is looking for answers – for clues – to understand her circumstances. The murder mystery provides her with a familiar pathway amidst the unpredictability of real life and also much-needed comfort in her time of grief. In a detective novel, we know that as each chapter goes by, we are getting closer and closer to a conclusion "
If I had a printed copy I'd go back through to see if a therapist had suggested to the 2023 Abigail that she should use writing as therapy. The framed whodunnit suggests that there were many possible reasons for the suicide (and the whodunnit might reveal what Abigail thought about friends) but in the end Abagail blames herself - as the bereaved sometimes do.
The blurb says it's "For fans of Anthony Horowitz, Tana French, and Sally Rooney", which is optimistic. The whodunnit takes up a large portion of the book. Could it stand alone? It has multiple, unresolved endings. Characters refer to the book version of the events and to the Golden Age rules. It's framed by a story that has its own challenging elements. In one section, "my brother is dead" is repeated dozens of times because that thought is always on her mind. The repeated statements about Xmas day are more puzzling. And the final section - an account of an idyllic childhood beach outing - appears out of the blue.
On Goodreads the book gets 2.8/5. Some people don't like meta-murder-mysteries. Some do, but feel there's a glut of them currently, or that this isn't a good example of its type. What is its type? Though the whodunnit fills many pages, I'd say it's literary, barely mainstream.
Other reviews
- Ray Palen
- josbookblog (The raison d’être of this second narrative isn’t immediately revealed, but I thought it was both clever and original when its purpose became clear. I felt patronised as a reader. [when] the author adds “I would like to ask the reader to turn back a few pages and read through the Fair Play Rules which you probably skipped earlier”. ... To make things worse, the detective’s sidekick is described in those rules of fair play: “his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader”. I believe that Hegarty has grossly underestimated a reader’s intelligence, as Bell’s sidekick is, for want of a better term, an idiot. To claim that this individual is only ever so slightly below that of the average reader is, I think, insulting. Finally, I think that if you’re going to incorporate the rules of fair play into your novel that the reader should at least be able to expect you to abide by them.)
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