Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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Grant McAllister is a retired mathematician living on a remote island in the Mediterranean. Over twenty years ago he wrote a collection of mystery stories and had a meager publishing of them. Julia Hart is an editor representing a small publisher who found a copy of the book and wants to republish the collection. She arranges a meeting and they read and discuss each story methodically, fitting them into his carefully designed mathematical theory of mystery construction. The Eighth Detective" had my name written all over it. All in caps. With big blinding lights. It seemed written thinking in all my reading tastes, so...why didn't I enjoy it as much as I should? No, seriously, someone tell me why I didn't, cause I'm not sure. Eight Detectives is a brilliantly conceived novel in which a publisher’s editor has taken an out-of-print short story collection and gone to a present-day-ish island to talk to its author about republication. While talking, each of the eight stories is printed and then discussed by the two. Some of the stories are straight, some are twist-in-the-tale, there is even a condensed version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Though now retired the author of the book within the book was once a brilliant mathematician who wrote this collection to prove that the elements of a detective story could be represented in mathematical or logical terms, using Venn diagrams. Think of two circles separate from each other: one represents the suspects, the other the detective. Now think of two circles one within another: the detective is also one of the suspects. Think of three separate circles: the detective, the suspects, and the murderer who was never one of the suspects. As each story appears (these are the odd numbered chapters, one to thirteen) the following discussion (in an even numbered chapter) reveals how each story can be Venn mapped, each in a different way to those previous. Yet the author, Grant McAllister, it is clear, can barely remember and explain his work, ground-breaking though it was. Nor can he explain the incongruous imagery to which his visitor, Julia Hart, draws his attention in questions of near forensic detail, even as she explains McAllister’s own rules of permutation to him. Eight Detectives , w ith its necessity to keep reconsidering what has gone before, even while we move to the solution of the mystery (yes, there is a solution, and Julia Hart is its detective), may make readers think of last year’s Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastleby Stuart Turton (like Alex Pavesi a first time author), rather than Gilbert Adair’s Christie pastiches ( The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, etc) of ten years ago. Unlike Evelyn Hardcastle, however, which required learning how to read a present tense, first person, point-of-view narrative (if one was not a video game player from which it was adopted) Eight Detectives makes no such demands . Eight Detectives, though, does require an understanding of rapaciousness, duplicity, evil and disappointment, or why someone such as Sarah on “Blue Pearl Island” should find such an odd way to achieve independence and happiness (and which my spoiler alert prevents me from revealing: just go read). Julia Hart is an editor who is charged with interviewing Grant for the purpose of re-publishing his book with a new introduction. She meets him on a remote island where he has been living like a recluse.

I have never read a book quite like this. It's original, clever and compelling - and the revelations at the end took me totally by surprise. Rachel Abbott A few hours earlier they’d been having lunch at a small tavern in the nearest village, a thirty-minute walk through the woods from Bunny’s house. Bunny had stood up at the end of the meal and they’d both immediately noticed how drunk he was.Submissions should be uploaded to http://tmin.edmgr.com or sent directly to Osmo Pekonen, [email protected]. Terrific. Alex Pavesi knows the genre inside out. One of the year's most entertaining crime novels Sunday Times, Crime Book of the Month

All murder mysteries follow a simple set of rules. There must be two or more suspects. One or more victims. Eventually, one of the suspects must be revealed as the killer… The two suspects sat on mismatched furniture in the white and almost featureless lounge, waiting for something to happen. Between them an archway led to a slim, windowless staircase: a dim recess that seemed to dominate the room, like a fireplace grown to unreasonable proportions. The staircase changed direction at its midpoint, hiding the upper floor from view and giving the impression that it led up to darkness and nothing else. All murder mysteries follow a simple set of rules. Grant McAllister, a mystery writer and mathematics professor, once sat down and worked them all out.Julia realizes she is the 8th detective to dig out another mystery and find out the secrets that Grant kept. The description implies that there are clues to a cold case within the stories, which is true if you know the details of the cold case, but these aren’t given until nearly the end. There was no way for me as a reader to connect the dots and make an attempt at solving that myself. That is apparently not one of the rules of murder mystery writing! It was pointed out by Julia that there were inconsistencies in the text, some that I noticed but it was a bit like they wanted us to play editor rather than solve anything.