And Then There Was No One
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''And Then There Was No One'' is a novel by Gilbert Adair first published in
2009 File:2009 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: The vertical stabilizer of Air France Flight 447 is pulled out from the Atlantic Ocean; Barack Obama becomes the first African American to become President of the United States; 2009 Iran ...
. After ''
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd ''The Act of Roger Murgatroyd: An Entertainment'' is a whodunit mystery novel by Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair first published in 2006. Set in the 1930s and written in the vein of an Agatha Christie novel, it has all the classic ingredients o ...
'' and ''
A Mysterious Affair of Style ''A Mysterious Affair of Style'' is a whodunit mystery novel by British writer Gilbert Adair, first published in 2007. A homage to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in general and Agatha Christie in particular, the novel is a sequel to Adair' ...
'', it is the third book in the Evadne Mount trilogy. However, rather than being yet another more or less straightforward whodunit, albeit with
postmodern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...
overtones, ''And Then There Was No One'' thoroughly blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction; or rather, reality, fiction, and
metafiction Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own narrative structure in a way that continually reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story ...
. The book is presented in the form of a (fictional) memoir written by a British author called Gilbert Adair who has recently published two successful whodunits featuring mystery writer turned amateur sleuth Evadne Mount entitled ''The Act of Roger Murgatroyd'' and ''A Mysterious Affair of Style''. In September 2011, he travels to Meiringen,
Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...
to participate in the town's
Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes () is a fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a " consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and ...
conference. While he is staying there, two unexpected things happen: firstly, Anglo-Bulgarian novelist and essayist Gustav Slavorigin, the star of the festival, is murdered; and secondly, to his great surprise, Adair discovers Evadne Mount, the inspiration for his protagonist and the sharer of royalties from the two novels, sitting among the audience. As with the first two books in the trilogy, the title is again a variation on an
Agatha Christie Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictiona ...
novel, ''
And Then There Were None ''And Then There Were None'' is a mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, described by her as the most difficult of her books to write. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939, as ...
''.


Major themes

As opposed to the other novels in the trilogy, in ''And Then There Was No One'' there is a definitive shift away from the murder mystery and its solution toward " self-referentiality", toward the author and his or her problems. One aspect is
plagiarism Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work.From the 1995 '' Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary'': use or close imitation of the language and thought ...
, which at one point is even discussed as a possible motive for Slavorigin's murder; another is the author's choice of subject. In the years before his violent death, Slavorigin had been in hiding as he had published several essays critical of the United States and had therefore become, like Rushdie in reverse, the target of a fatwā-like edict pronounced by some obscure
Texan Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by bo ...
multi-millionaire. A third aspect is the author's wish to distance himself from his own creations if not to get rid of them once and for all, to "murder" them—the way
Arthur Conan Doyle Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for ''A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Ho ...
tried to rid himself of Sherlock Holmes at the
Reichenbach Falls The Reichenbach Falls (german: Reichenbachfälle) are a waterfall cascade of seven steps on the stream called Rychenbach in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland. They drop over a total height of about . At , the upper falls, known as the ...
and Adair is struggling to dispose of Evadne Mount.


Reviews

* Tom Adair * Hugo Barnacle *
Philip French Philip Neville French Order of the British Empire, OBE (28 August 1933 – 27 October 2015) was an English film critic and radio producer. French began his career in journalism in the late 1950s, before eventually becoming a BBC Radio prod ...
* Robert Hanks * Jake Kerridge * Caroline Moore * Laura Wilson


Further reading

*
Flann O'Brien Brian O'Nolan ( ga, Brian Ó Nualláin; 5 October 1911 – 1 April 1966), better known by his pen name Flann O'Brien, was an Irish civil service official, novelist, playwright and satirist, who is now considered a major figure in twentieth cen ...
's ''
At Swim-Two-Birds ''At Swim-Two-Birds'' is a 1939 novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction. The novel's title d ...
'' (
1939 This year also marks the start of the Second World War, the largest and deadliest conflict in human history. Events Below, the events of World War II have the "WWII" prefix. January * January 1 ** Third Reich *** Jews are forbidden to ...
),
Cees Nooteboom Cees Nooteboom (; born 31 July 1933) is a Dutch novelist, poet and journalist. After the attention received by his novel ''Rituelen'' (''Rituals'', 1980), which received the Pegasus Prize, it was the first of his novels to be translated into an ...
's '' Een lied van schijn en wezen'' (
1981 Events January * January 1 ** Greece enters the European Economic Community, predecessor of the European Union. ** Palau becomes a self-governing territory. * January 10 – Salvadoran Civil War: The FMLN launches its first major offensiv ...
), and Stewart Home's ''Cunt'' (
1999 File:1999 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The funeral procession of King Hussein of Jordan in Amman; the 1999 İzmit earthquake kills over 17,000 people in Turkey; the Columbine High School massacre, one of the first major school shootin ...
) are also novels about authors writing works of fiction where various storylines become intertwined. * A host of literary allusions ranging from
Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...
to Elfriede Jelinek and from
Pierre Louÿs Pierre Louÿs (; 10 December 1870 – 4 June 1925) was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". ...
to Marianne Moore can be found in ''And Then There Was No One''. One of Adair's precursors in this field was crime writer Edmund Crispin, for example in his debut novel, ''
The Case of the Gilded Fly ''The Case of the Gilded Fly'' is a locked-room mystery by the English author Edmund Crispin (Bruce Montgomery), written while Crispin was an undergraduate at University of Oxford, Oxford and first published in the UK in 1944. It was published ...
'' (
1944 Events Below, the events of World War II have the "WWII" prefix. January * January 2 – WWII: ** Free French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny is appointed to command French Army B, part of the Sixth United States Army Group in Nor ...
).


References

{{reflist 2009 British novels Postmodern novels Self-reflexive novels British mystery novels Fiction set in 2011 Novels by Gilbert Adair Faber and Faber books