A Mysterious Affair of Style
Encyclopedia
A Mysterious Affair of Style is a whodunit
by Gilbert Adair
first published in 2007. An homage
to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction
in general and Agatha Christie
in particular, the novel is a sequel
to Adair's 2006 book, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
.
London and at Elstree Studios
, Hertfordshire
, the "mysterious affair" of the title is the murder of ageing actress Cora Rutherford on the set
of the film which she hopes will mark her comeback to the silver screen
. As it happens, mystery writer Evadne Mount, an old friend of Cora's, and Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, retired, formerly of Scotland Yard
, are watching the shooting of the scene in which the actress drinks from a champagne glass whose content, unbeknownst to everyone except the murderer, has been laced with a strong poison
. Right from the start of the investigation, a neat group of suspects presents itself to the police. However, although each of them would have had means and opportunity to kill Cora Rutherford, none of them has the slightest motive to have done so. It takes amateur sleuth Evadne Mount several days to figure out the solution to the crime, and only by linking up the murder with an accident which happened some time previously, and eventually by using a decoy
, is she able to solve the case.
fashion, Adair not only has his characters, especially Evadne Mount, discuss red herrings
, twist endings, spoilers
, and reader response
in general , he also tells a story in which he both obeys and transgresses the boundaries and conventions of the Golden Age whodunit. On the one hand, there is no violence, let alone police brutality, anywhere in the novel; the suspects are interrogated one after another in an orderly manner; during her investigation into the crime Evadne Mount accidentally finds a piece of paper with a cryptic message written on it; and in the end, when all suspects have been assembled at the scene of the crime to be told which of them has done it, it is indeed the least likely person who turns out to be the killer.
On the other hand, Adair toys with, and transcends, some of the conventions of the genre. For example, Cora Rutherford is murdered rather late in the novel, which is clearly against the rules. In a paraphrase of Ronald Knox
, who claimed in 1929 that the elements of the mystery have to be "clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings", Evadne Mount says so herself :
Yet in A Mysterious Affair of Style the murder of Cora Rutherford occurs on page 123, almost halfway through the book. Also, neither of the three people inveistigating the murder is attributed the role of the Watson
. Rather, Evadne Mount, Trubshawe and Calvert, a young Scotland Yard detective and former protégé of Trubshawe, form a perfect team and are at one point referred to as "the three friends" .
Clearly Adair is taking liberties when he makes Evadne Mount president of the Detection Club
(which at the time was headed by E. C. Bentley
). While there are references to British followers of the "thick-ear school"—the hardboiled
style of crime writing— such as Peter Cheyney
and James Hadley Chase
, Evadne Mount's major worry is Agatha Christie herself, "the rival in whose shadow it would seem she was eternally condemned to languish" despite the more than twenty successful whodunits she has published herself. Mount's long-running stage play, The Tourist Trap, anachronistically echoes Christie's The Mousetrap
, which has been running in the West End since 1952.
Alastair Farjeon, the film director in the novel, appears to be a thinly disguised Alfred Hitchcock
. Farjeon specializes in thrillers but, contrary to Hitchcock's practice, always writes his own stories and screenplays, which he then turns into successful films such as Remains to be Seen (about a photographer being stabbed while he is taking a picture of a group of archaeologists at an excavation site in Egypt) or An American in Plaster-of-Paris (alluding, again anachronistically, to both the 1951 movie, An American in Paris
and the plot of Hitchcock's 1954 thriller, Rear Window
).
Ironically, however, it turns out that Farjeon has stolen the script of If Ever They Find Me Dead—the film during whose shooting Cora Rutherford is murdered—from Philippe Françaix, one of his most ardent admirers and a fledgling film theorist
in his own right who has copied his master's style and written an original screenplay in honour of his idol. The character of Philippe Françaix seems to be modelled on film critic and film theorist André Bazin
or maybe François Truffaut
who, in 1954, advocated auteur theory
, claiming that a director's films reflect that director's personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary "auteur," and that a film critic can only write a review of a film if they like it.
References are also made to Julien Duvivier
, René Clair
, Ernst Lubitsch
, William Wyler
, and Orson Welles
.
Cora Rutherford's surname is probably derived from the actress Margaret Rutherford
who played Agatha Christie
's Miss Marple
in a series of MGM films in the early 1960s.
Finally, Adair creates a 1940s milieu by making (occasionally politically incorrect
) references to, among many other things, dirty weekend
s, street urchins, spiv
s, "syncopated
Negro music", "frogs
" (such as Philippe Françaix), Woodbines
, and the'phone .
Whodunit
A whodunit or whodunnit is a complex, plot-driven variety of the detective story in which the puzzle is the main feature of interest. The reader or viewer is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed in the final...
by Gilbert Adair
Gilbert Adair
Gilbert Adair is a Scottish author, film critic and journalist. He won the Author's Club First Novel Award in 1988 for his novel The Holy Innocents. In 1995 he won the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void, which is a translation of the French book La Disparition by Georges Perec...
first published in 2007. An homage
Homage
Homage is a show or demonstration of respect or dedication to someone or something, sometimes by simple declaration but often by some more oblique reference, artistic or poetic....
to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction
Golden Age of Detective Fiction
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of classic murder mystery novels produced by various authors, all following similar patterns and style.-Origins:Mademoiselle de Scudéri, by E.T.A...
in general and Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...
in particular, the novel is a sequel
Sequel
A sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of or expands upon issues presented in some previous work...
to Adair's 2006 book, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd: An Entertainment is a whodunit by 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 of a 1930s mystery and is, according to the author, "at one and the same time, a...
.
Plot summary
Set in post-warPost-war
A post-war period or postwar period is the interval immediately following the ending of a war and enduring as long as war does not resume. A post-war period can become an interwar period or interbellum when a war between the same parties resumes at a later date...
London and at Elstree Studios
Elstree Studios
"Elstree Studios" refers to any of several film studios that were based in the towns of Borehamwood and Elstree in Hertfordshire, England, since film production begun in 1927.-Name:...
, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...
, the "mysterious affair" of the title is the murder of ageing actress Cora Rutherford on the set
Set construction
Set construction is the process by which a set designer works in collaboration with the director of a production to create the set for a theatrical, film or television production...
of the film which she hopes will mark her comeback to the silver screen
Silver screen
A silver screen, also known as a silver lenticular screen, is a type of projection screen that was popular in the early years of the motion picture industry and passed into popular usage as a metonym for the cinema industry...
. As it happens, mystery writer Evadne Mount, an old friend of Cora's, and Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, retired, formerly of Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
, are watching the shooting of the scene in which the actress drinks from a champagne glass whose content, unbeknownst to everyone except the murderer, has been laced with a strong poison
Poison
In the context of biology, poisons are substances that can cause disturbances to organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a sufficient quantity is absorbed by an organism....
. Right from the start of the investigation, a neat group of suspects presents itself to the police. However, although each of them would have had means and opportunity to kill Cora Rutherford, none of them has the slightest motive to have done so. It takes amateur sleuth Evadne Mount several days to figure out the solution to the crime, and only by linking up the murder with an accident which happened some time previously, and eventually by using a decoy
Decoy
A decoy is usually a person, device or event meant as a distraction, to conceal what an individual or a group might be looking for. Decoys have been used for centuries most notably in game hunting, but also in wartime and in the committing or resolving of crimes.-Duck decoy:The term duck decoy may...
, is she able to solve the case.
Cultural references
In a postmodernistPostmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
fashion, Adair not only has his characters, especially Evadne Mount, discuss red herrings
Red herring (plot device)
Red herring is an idiomatic expression referring to the rhetorical or literary tactic of diverting attention away from an item of significance...
, twist endings, spoilers
Spoiler (media)
Spoiler is slang for any element of any summary or description of any piece of fiction that reveals any plot element which will give away the outcome of a dramatic episode within the work of fiction, or the conclusion of the entire work. It can also be used to refer to any piece of information...
, and reader response
Reader-response criticism
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.Although literary theory has long paid some...
in general , he also tells a story in which he both obeys and transgresses the boundaries and conventions of the Golden Age whodunit. On the one hand, there is no violence, let alone police brutality, anywhere in the novel; the suspects are interrogated one after another in an orderly manner; during her investigation into the crime Evadne Mount accidentally finds a piece of paper with a cryptic message written on it; and in the end, when all suspects have been assembled at the scene of the crime to be told which of them has done it, it is indeed the least likely person who turns out to be the killer.
On the other hand, Adair toys with, and transcends, some of the conventions of the genre. For example, Cora Rutherford is murdered rather late in the novel, which is clearly against the rules. In a paraphrase of Ronald Knox
Ronald Knox
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was an English priest, theologian and writer.-Life:Ronald Knox was born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family and was educated at Eton College, where he took the first scholarship in 1900 and Balliol College, Oxford, where again...
, who claimed in 1929 that the elements of the mystery have to be "clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings", Evadne Mount says so herself :
In real life, the seed of virtually every serious crime, not only murder, is sown long before the performance of the act itself. Yet it's one of the cast-iron rules of the whodunit, a crucial clause in the contract between writer and reader, that a murder be perpetrated, or at the least attempted, within the first twenty or thirty pages of the book. To leave it to the halfway mark would be a serious test of the reader's patience.
Yet in A Mysterious Affair of Style the murder of Cora Rutherford occurs on page 123, almost halfway through the book. Also, neither of the three people inveistigating the murder is attributed the role of the Watson
John Watson (Sherlock Holmes)
John H. Watson, M.D. , known as Dr. Watson, is a character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Watson is Sherlock Holmes's friend, assistant and sometime flatmate, and is the first person narrator of all but four stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon.-Name:Doctor Watson's first...
. Rather, Evadne Mount, Trubshawe and Calvert, a young Scotland Yard detective and former protégé of Trubshawe, form a perfect team and are at one point referred to as "the three friends" .
Clearly Adair is taking liberties when he makes Evadne Mount president of the Detection Club
Detection Club
The Detection Club was formed in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, John Rhode, Jessie Rickard, Baroness Emma Orczy, R. Austin Freeman, G.D.H. Cole, Margaret Cole, E.C. Bentley, and H.C. Bailey. Anthony...
(which at the time was headed by E. C. Bentley
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
E. C. Bentley was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics...
). While there are references to British followers of the "thick-ear school"—the hardboiled
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
style of crime writing— such as Peter Cheyney
Peter Cheyney
Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney, known as Peter Cheyney, was a British crime fiction writer who flourished between 1936 and 1951...
and James Hadley Chase
James Hadley Chase
James Hadley Chase is the best-known pseudonym of the British writer Rene Brabazon Raymond who also wrote under the names James L. Docherty, Ambrose Grant, and Raymond Marshall. Chase is one of the best known thriller writers of all time...
, Evadne Mount's major worry is Agatha Christie herself, "the rival in whose shadow it would seem she was eternally condemned to languish" despite the more than twenty successful whodunits she has published herself. Mount's long-running stage play, The Tourist Trap, anachronistically echoes Christie's The Mousetrap
The Mousetrap
The Mousetrap is a murder mystery play by Agatha Christie. The Mousetrap opened in the West End of London in 1952, and has been running continuously since then. It has the longest initial run of any play in history, with over 24,500 performances so far. It is the longest running show of the modern...
, which has been running in the West End since 1952.
Alastair Farjeon, the film director in the novel, appears to be a thinly disguised Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
. Farjeon specializes in thrillers but, contrary to Hitchcock's practice, always writes his own stories and screenplays, which he then turns into successful films such as Remains to be Seen (about a photographer being stabbed while he is taking a picture of a group of archaeologists at an excavation site in Egypt) or An American in Plaster-of-Paris (alluding, again anachronistically, to both the 1951 movie, An American in Paris
An American in Paris (film)
An American in Paris is a 1951 MGM musical film inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition by George Gershwin. Starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guetary, and Nina Foch, the film is set in Paris, and was directed by Vincente Minnelli from a script by Alan Jay Lerner...
and the plot of Hitchcock's 1954 thriller, Rear Window
Rear Window
Rear Window is a 1954 American suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by John Michael Hayes and based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder"...
).
Ironically, however, it turns out that Farjeon has stolen the script of If Ever They Find Me Dead—the film during whose shooting Cora Rutherford is murdered—from Philippe Françaix, one of his most ardent admirers and a fledgling film theorist
Film theory
Film theory is an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large...
in his own right who has copied his master's style and written an original screenplay in honour of his idol. The character of Philippe Françaix seems to be modelled on film critic and film theorist André Bazin
André Bazin
André Bazin was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.-Life:Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918...
or maybe François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
who, in 1954, advocated auteur theory
Auteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
, claiming that a director's films reflect that director's personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary "auteur," and that a film critic can only write a review of a film if they like it.
References are also made to Julien Duvivier
Julien Duvivier
Julien Duvivier was a French film director. He was prominent in French cinema in the years 1930-1960...
, René Clair
René Clair
René Clair born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker.-Biography:He was born in Paris and grew up in the Les Halles quarter. He attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. During World War I, he served as an ambulance driver. After the war, he started a career as a journalist...
, Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
, William Wyler
William Wyler
William Wyler was a leading American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter.Notable works included Ben-Hur , The Best Years of Our Lives , and Mrs. Miniver , all of which won Wyler Academy Awards for Best Director, and also won Best Picture...
, and Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
.
Cora Rutherford's surname is probably derived from the actress Margaret Rutherford
Margaret Rutherford
Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford DBE was an English character actress, who first came to prominence following World War II in the film adaptations of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest...
who played Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...
's Miss Marple
Miss Marple
Jane Marple, usually referred to as Miss Marple, is a fictional character appearing in twelve of Agatha Christie's crime novels and in twenty short stories. Miss Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St. Mary Mead and acts as an amateur detective. She is one of the most famous...
in a series of MGM films in the early 1960s.
Finally, Adair creates a 1940s milieu by making (occasionally politically incorrect
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
) references to, among many other things, dirty weekend
Dirty weekend
A dirty weekend is a romantic assignation which is commonly in a hotel so that the couple can sleep together. Places which became famous for this include Brighton and Maidenhead....
s, street urchins, spiv
Spiv
In the United Kingdom, a spiv is a particular type of petty criminal, who deals in stolen or black market goods of questionable authenticity, especially a slickly-dressed man offering goods at bargain prices...
s, "syncopated
Syncopation
In music, syncopation includes a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected in that they deviate from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak but also powerful beats in a meter . These include a stress on a normally unstressed beat or a rest where one would normally be...
Negro music", "frogs
Frog (disambiguation)
A frog is an amphibian. Frog may also refer to:-Media and entertainment:* Frog , a video game character* Frogs * Frogs * "Frogs" , by Alice in Chains...
" (such as Philippe Françaix), Woodbines
Woodbine (cigarette)
Woodbine is a brand of cigarette made in England by W. D. & H. O. Wills since 1888.In the early 1970s Woodbine Cigarettes were released in Australia as "Wild Woodbine"....
, and the
Reviews
- by Fiona Atherton, living.Scotsman.com
- by Barry Forshaw, The Independent on SundayThe IndependentThe Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
- by Carrie O'Grady, The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
- by John Self, Asylum (a litblogLitblogA litblog is a blog that focuses primarily on the topic of literature. There is a community of litblogs in the blogosphere whose authors cover a variety of literary topics. Litbloggers may write about fiction, nonfiction, poetry, the publishing industry, literary journals, literary criticism, and...
) - amazon.co.uk customer reviews
Read on
- Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at StylesThe Mysterious Affair at StylesThe Mysterious Affair at Styles is a detective novel by Agatha Christie. It was written in 1916 and was first published by John Lane in the United States in October 1920 and in the United Kingdom by The Bodley Head on January 21, 1921. The U.S...
(1920), whose title (though not its plot) was the inspiration for A Mysterious Affair of Style - Cameron McCabe's The Face on the Cutting-Room FloorThe Face on the Cutting-Room FloorThe Face on the Cutting-Room Floor is a 1937 crime novel by Ernest Borneman writing as Cameron McCabe. It was first published in London. The book makes use of the false document technique: It pretends to be the true story of a 38-year-old Scotsman called Cameron McCabe who writes about a crucial...
(1937), a contemporary mystery novel about the machinations within the British film industry, where a murder is captured on film while the identity of the perpetrator remains in the dark - Ben EltonBen EltonBenjamin Charles "Ben" Elton is an English comedian, author, playwright and director. He was a leading figure in the British alternative comedy movement of the 1980s, as a writer on such cult series as The Young Ones and Blackadder, as well as also a successful stand-up comedian on stage and TV....
's Dead FamousDead Famous (novel)Dead Famous is a comedy/whodunit novel by Ben Elton in which ratings for a reality TV show, very similar to Big Brother, rocket when a housemate is murdered...
(2001), another example of a whodunit where an unidentified murderer kills while the cameras are on, here in a late-20th-century Big BrotherBig Brother (TV series)Big Brother is a television show in which a group of people live together in a large house, isolated from the outside world but continuously watched by television cameras. Each series lasts for around three months, and there are usually fewer than 15 participants. The housemates try to win a cash...
-type reality television setting
See also
- The Evadne Mount trilogyEvadne Mount trilogyThe Evadne Mount trilogy is a series of books written by Gilbert Adair featuring mystery-writer-cum-sleuth Evadne Mount:*The Act of Roger Murgatroyd - a murder mystery set in the 1930s on Dartmoor...
(The Act of Roger MurgatroydThe Act of Roger MurgatroydThe Act of Roger Murgatroyd: An Entertainment is a whodunit by 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 of a 1930s mystery and is, according to the author, "at one and the same time, a...
, A Mysterious Affair of Style, and And Then There Was No OneAnd Then There Was No OneAnd Then There Was No One is a novel by Gilbert Adair first published in 2009. After The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style, it is the third book in the Evadne Mount trilogy...
) - A list of Evadne Mount's novels and plays (at List of fictional books)
- PastichePasticheA pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...