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Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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The stories themselves are very Christie-esque. They are of a time and style that any Agatha fan would understand and recognise. We have variations on a victim(s) and a detective(s) in various settings. There is even an homage to "Ten Little Indians". The stories themselves are good enough. However it is the extended story about Grant's memories and Julia's interest that is the real story here for me.

Eight Detectives was published in the UK on 20th August 2020 by Michael Joseph, and in the USA on 4th August 2020 (as The Eighth Detective) by Henry Holt. It is also available in several translated editions, with more forthcoming. You know when you’re relieved to have finished a book that it wasn’t a good experience. The premise of this book is that a young female editor visits an elderly author who lives on a Mediterranean island to edit a collection of murder mysteries he wrote decades beforehand. She reads each out loud to him before they discuss it. The author of the stories had also written a research paper on the mathematical definition of the components of the classic murder mystery. You might think this would result in something clever but no! It’s as simple as there has to be a victim or victims, a murderer or murderers, and so on. Each story is dissected to explain how it fits in with his theory. The ending aims to surprise the reader with a twist but any intelligent reader is going to be way ahead of this. No other genre of literature has been subject to as many strict rules as detective fiction in its “golden age” of the 1920s and 30s. Crime author Ronald Knox established 10 commandments for its mechanics and insisted that it should present “a mystery whose elements are clearly presented at an early stage in the proceedings”. Jorge Luis Borges and WH Auden came up with their own formulae, the latter with an elaborate Aristotelian analysis in his essay The Guilty Vicarage. Has an intricacy rare in modern crime fiction. Alex Pavesi deserves huge applause for his plot, constructed with all the skill of the old masters Sunday ExpressTwenty-five years later, a publisher called 'Blood Type Books' wants to re-issue McAllister's stories, with an introduction explaining the mathematical basis of the tales. To this end, the publisher sends editor Julia Hart to interview McAllister.

Wait,’ she began, but he had already vanished. She heard his bare feet thudding unmusically on the steps that were as white and hard as piano keys, heard him pause as he reached the turning in the staircase and slap one palm flat against the wall to steady himself, then heard the course of his movements around the floor below. The Eighth Detective is an entertaining read, with some clever surprises. However I felt like I was REALLY reading stories published in the early 1900s....stories that had very unrealistic premises. I loved the characters, especially editor Julia Hart and mystery author Grant McAllister. I liked the theories very much although I had certain intellectual quibbles with them. (What about mysteries when you already know who the murderer is up front, but you’re just waiting to see him get caught, for example? Is that not a mystery too?) This book will make you want to race through to get to the ending, but you can’t really do that, because it’s so dense and intellectual and you might miss some clues. When you DO get to the ending though, it is a fantastic payoff. It’s the kind of book you may want to read again, now knowing what you know. The novel is ¾ made up by these short stories...and dare I say, or write, that they are at best mediocre?All in all I found this a curiously different idea. The explanation of detective stories via mathematics was intriguing. The whole broader picture I really did find entertaining. What about the ending I hear you ask. Well in true Christie style my lips are sealed however I did find the ending satisfying. Aspects of it I had my suspicions about - some parts took me by surprise. This may be a book for fans of a particular genre however I think many of them would find this entertaining as I did. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Second in the military crime series featuring Special Agents Scott Brodie and Magnolia "Maggie" Taylor, after The Deserter (2019). This is one of the most clever stories I’ve read in a long time and I love clever. It’s also a debut novel by the author and I’ll sign up for the next book he chooses to write and release. I wish I could share more but it would be much too spoilerish. It’s capped with a stunning ending that had me rewinding the audiobook to make certain I’d heard what I heard. And speaking of the audio format, the narrator was outstanding. She was not only responsible for distinctively giving voice to the two main characters but a host of others from the individual stories in the collection, which she handled excellently. This turned out to be a gem in the rough for me. An absolute triumph of a novel. I read it in two greedy gulps. Intelligent and compelling storytelling. Utterly brilliant Ali Land, bestselling author of Good Me, Bad Me

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… Julia wants to sit with the author to revisit the stories and convince him to republish his book. Julia Hart the editor wants to understand why the author is hiding from his past. Has an intricacy rare in modern crime fiction. Alex Pavesi deserves huge applause for his plot, constructed with all the skill of the old masters * Sunday Express * 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.

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This super-smart homage to the Agatha Christie tradition is a must. Stylish, ingenious and great fun * Sunday Mirror * To illustrate his ideas, McAllister wrote seven detective stories, and published them in a book called 'The White Murders.' But Julia soon realises that something's not right. Grant's stories seem to reference a real murder - one that's remained unsolved for thirty years. As Julia and McAllister discuss each of these tales, it's clear the editor has an agenda. She thinks McAllister killed a woman called Elizabeth White decades ago, a crime the press dubbed the 'White Murder.' Furthermore, Julia thinks McAllister left clues about this in his stories....which she tries to winkle out. Thus, it's a bit of a cat and mouse game between Julia and McAllister, with each one keeping secrets. In Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective (revised edition), Biblio and Tannen, 1976.

Henry strummed the guitar as a way of changing the subject. ‘Do you know how to tune this thing?’ He’d found it hanging on the wall above his chair. ‘I could play this if it was tuned.’ He watched her walk deeper into the house: successively smaller versions of her framed by further doorways along the corridor. Then he lit another cigarette. The book runs through each of Grant’s original murder mystery short stories, each interspersed with a short ‘conversation’ chapter in which Julia and Grant discuss the story and she probes the reclusive writer in an attempt to learn more about the man behind the book. Grant McAllister, a former professor of matemathics, wrote a paper called "The Permutations of Detective Fiction", in which he establishes the rules for murder mysteries and its four main ingredients: the Suspects, the Victim(s), the Detective(s) and the Killer(s), and to illustrate his work he published a collection of seven short stories under the title "The White Murders".Julia Hart is an editor who visits Grant McAllister, the reclusive mathematician, with an offer to republish his sole book of short stories. The stories are mysteries that Grant wrote about 30 years ago as illustrations of his theory of mysteries. This book consists of alternating chapters. Each of the short stories is followed by a chapter in which Julia and Grant discuss the story and she tries to ferret out hidden meaning in the story and details of Grant’s life 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. Years ago Grant McAllister wrote “The White Murders”, a book consisting of 7 unique detective stories. The book wasn’t a success and soon was forgotten.

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