And Then There Was No One (8 page)

The applause was more than just polite; it was, I flatter myself, as genuine as applause ever is. Certainly, there was no hint of the muttered boos I had been advised to expect by the festival’s perhaps panic-prone organisers, and the mild euphoria I felt was marred only by the fact that nobody laughed, not once, at the cluster of jokes in the text.
*
There followed a few seconds of microphone-tapping indecision – traditional, in my experience, to these events and even reassuring to members of the public by its implication that intellectuals are human after all, as prone as they themselves are to stumbling on the twin tripwires of accident and error. Then Jochen proceeded to read, in his own German version, another tale from the collection (at greater length than the original, it seemed to me, but literature does tend to put on
weight in translation). A lot of laughter this time and, at the end, warmer applause than there had been for me.

Whereupon he suggested that we immediately move on to the public Q & A session. Now those of my fellow-writers who are reading me will understand what I mean when I say that what invariably occurs at this stage of every such event is that the audience sits there like a pile of Christmas toys for which batteries haven’t been included, and it’s only after the Q & A has been brought to an abrupt and rather ignominious end, with a wry apology to the visiting author for the congenital bashfulness of the local population, that half of those present make a beeline for the dais to ask all the questions they had been invited to ask during the one part of the evening which had been specifically set aside for their participation. Not, however, on this occasion. No doubt because I faced an assembly of specialists, some of whom were writers themselves, I found myself frantically fielding one question after another like a goalie during a penalty shootout.

We started off with the usual hoary time-and tradition-honoured posers.
†
‘Mr Adar [
sic
], where do you get your ideas from?’ Me: ‘From the dictionary.’ ‘What, if you please, is your definition of a writer, a real writer?’ Me: ‘A real writer is one who writes in the first-person-singular even when he doesn’t use the word “I”.’ ‘Do you meticulously plot out
your novels before writing them?’ Me: ‘Quite the reverse. I leap from the plane and trust not just that my parachute will open but that I won’t land in a tree.’ ‘Have you ever been tempted to imitate the writings of Grim Grin?’ Me (venturing a wild guess): ‘Not in the least. However, I do increasingly admire those novels of his which he called “entertainments”.’ ‘You wrote two pastiches of Agatha Christie,
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
and
A Mysterious Affair of Style
? Will there be a third?’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.’ A comment that prompted an embarrassingly audible, head-turning snort from the back of the hall. Then a (planted) question from Düttmann: ‘What is the difference between bookshops in Switzerland and bookshops in Britain?’ Me (not impromptu): ‘Your bookshops sell fifty types of books and one type of coffee, while ours sell fifty types of coffee and one type of book.’ Which instantly provoked an unplanted query from Hugh Spaulding: ‘What type?’ Me: ‘Lite-lit.’ Adding (impromptu): ‘What you might call skinny litte.’ (Some chuckles, but only from the small contingent of real Anglophones.)

Several more questions followed in the same unthreatening vein before we got down to cases. A bearded young man sitting in the centre of the front row having disserted at extravagant length on the sociology of those ‘relevant’
modern thrillers whose guilty party, whose least likely suspect, or most likely suspect, is infallibly revealed to be society itself, I answered, when he finally let me speak, ‘Relevance I can get at home.’ (It got the biggest laugh of the evening.) A hand at the back waved an illustrated programme: ‘You were not of course the first to do it, not by a long chalk, but may we know what made you write a collection of apocryphal Sherlock Holmes stories?’ Me: ‘Interesting you should ask that. As it happens, it was a consequence of my rereading the entire Holmes canon in the stupendously annotated edition by Leslie Klinger, which I’m certain you all know well. I eventually arrived at the first of the “posthumous” volumes,
The Return of Sherlock Holmes,
after Conan Doyle had rashly tried to kill off his creation, his Frankenstein’s monster, you might say, by having him tumble over the Reichenbach Falls, and I had just begun reading its opening story, “The Mystery of the Empty House”, when – well, ladies and gentlemen, you can imagine the surprise and pleasure I experienced on discovering – on rediscovering after a great many years – that the victim of that first murder mystery to be investigated by the Great Detective in the wake of his resurrection was the Honourable Ronald …
Adair.
That for me was, as we British say, the clincher.’ (Somebody applauded, probably Düttmann.)

Now came one of the warned-of anorak-y questions. ‘Mr Adair, in the story you just read to us, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson and Dr Eustace Gable travel to Aylesbury by the
8.15 train from the station of King’s Cross. I have to tell you this is not possible.’ Me: ‘Why not?’ ‘If you wished to travel from London to Aylesbury in the early years of the twentieth century, you must take a train from Marylebone, Paddington or Euston station, never King’s Cross.’ Me: ‘Thank you. I’ll make sure that is corrected in the second edition. If there is a second edition.’ From Sanary, who alone stood up to ask his question: ‘Why cannot you create your own detective instead of stealing somebody else’s?’ Me: ‘As a writer I’ve always been a shameless poacher of idiolects. As such I’ve never sought to conceal from the reader the referential mode, nor even the specific literary template, of any of my novels. Lewis Carroll, James Barrie, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Alfred Hitchcock, a plump cinematic cuckoo in the literary nest, these among other more peripheral inspirers have furnished successive models for my published fiction. I read a book,
Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Les Enfants terribles, Death in Venice,
or whatever, I like it, I rewrite it. I am in short a pasticheur. Less by opportunism, though, than by superstition. I long ago discovered that I could embark on a new work of fiction only if its premise had already been legitimised by one of the writers in my personal Pantheon. Each of my novels is thus a palimpsest. Scrape away at its surface and you will find, underneath, another novel, usually a classic. I offer no apology for this.’

Then just as Jochen, I could sense, was about to wrap up the proceedings, a female voice roared out from the very last
row, a voice I found unsettlingly familiar even if for the moment I could put neither a face nor a name to it. Her question: ‘In “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” you have Holmes express a preference for what he calls “minor oddities” over “major monstrosities”. Yes?’ Me (suddenly all goose-pimply): ‘Yes …?’ ‘And when he draws his finger along the floorboard and holds it up for inspection, and Watson protests that he cannot see anything, Holmes answers – and a very Holmesian answer it is too, I may say – “That is the minor oddity.” I’m not misquoting you, am I?’ Me: ‘No, you aren’t.’ ‘Well then, I’d like you to explain why you employed precisely – and I mean
precisely
– that same conceit of the absence of dust considered as a minor oddity, and in an attic to boot, in the first of your two Agatha Christie pastiches,
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd.
Also, while I’ve got the floor,’ she went on, ‘is there any special reason why Dr Gable shares the same Christian name with one of the main characters in both
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
and
A Mysterious Affair of Style,
my very dear Eustace Trubshawe, former Chief-Inspector of Scotland Yard?’

My
very dear Eustace Trubshawe?

‘I’m sorry, Miss … Miss …?’

She rose to her feet. That tricorne hat! Those pince-nez! That garish two-piece suit! Evadne Mount, as I lived and breathed!

I was speechless. By that I mean, I had no speech prepared. Even if it hadn’t been she who posed the question, I
doubt I could have offered a satisfactory response to it, since until that very instant I hadn’t realised I’d actually done what she’d accused me of doing. Yet the instant her accusations were aired, I knew them to be true. (Mortified as I was, however, I remained rational enough not to try mentally passing the buck, blaming my editor, my proof-reader, anybody but myself, for not having picked up on my self-plagiarism. Since I had failed to catch it, why should I have expected them to?) Mumbling some triteness about Homer nodding, I let a puzzled Jochen call the whole event to a decidedly anti-climactic close.

And now I must beg the reader’s indulgence with an unavoidable digression.

If by chance you’ve read those two Agatha Christie parodies-
cum
-celebrations-
cum
-critiques of mine which are alluded to above, you will recall that the first is set in the nineteen-thirties and the second a decade later, just after the Second World War. Also that, aided and abetted by her loyal, long-suffering partner-in-detection, ex-Chief-Inspector Eustace Trubshawe, the same amateur sleuth, Evadne Mount, author of innumerable bestselling mystery novels and the bastard offspring of Christie herself and her own fictional alter ego, the whodunit-writing, apple-munching Ariadne Oliver, presides over both. You will also recall that, just as Hercule Poirot never (or almost never) aged from his first to his last recorded case, from
The Mysterious Affair
at Styles,
published in 1920, to
Curtain,
published in 1975, so neither
Evadne nor Eustace, meeting up in the Ritz tearoom in the opening chapter of
A Mysterious Affair of Style,
looks a day older to the other than when they had joined forces to solve the Roger Murgatroyd case a decade earlier. That, of course, was a conscious ploy on my part. I had fun with the cliché and I hoped the reader would too.

Considering, then, what I’ve just written, it would be perfectly understandable if the same reader, re-encountering Evadne Mount in this memoir, were to shrug off as more postmodern high jinks, as yet another playful subversion of the genre’s conventions, the apparent implication that the woman must now be pushing a hundred-and twenty. No need! The Evadne Mount I stared at across a crammed lecture hall in the Meiringen Kunsthalle was just a month or two short of her sixty-sixth birthday.

How come? The story started three years ago at the West London home of the writer and publisher Carmen Callil. We were lounging in the garden before dinner, we being Marina Warner, essayist and polymath; Jules and Pat, i.e. the novelist Julian Barnes and his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh; actor and man-about-town Peter Eyre; and, of course, irrepressible Carmen herself. Somebody – it was Marina, I think – had just asked me whether I had any current project and I replied that I rather fancied writing a parody of vintage Agatha Christie, a novel in black-and-white, as it were, like one of those feebly directed but sparklingly scripted and gloriously well-acted prewar British films
which are for me one of the definitions of sheer, uncomplicated bliss, but that I hadn’t yet hit upon the iconographical trappings, both gestural and sartorial, of my cardboard cutout of a sleuth. Spearing one of her own cocktail sausages, Carmen said:

‘You know, darling, I may just be able to help you there.’

‘Oh. How so?’

‘Well … as it turns out, I’m personally acquainted with a parody, a living parody, of Agatha Christie.’

‘What
do
you mean, Carmen?’

‘I mean my friend Evadne Mount.’

‘Evadne Mount?’ I said, savouring the two strangely pleasurable words on my tongue. ‘I do like the name, but I can’t say it rings any bells for me.’

‘I didn’t think it would,’ she replied. ‘She doesn’t write the kind of books someone like you would ever condescend to read. Except,’ she spoke again after a short pause, ‘if you really are planning to do a Christie sort of thingie …’

‘Do stop teasing, Carmen,’ I said impatiently. ‘Why do you think she might interest me? It could be important.’

First asking around if anybody’s glass needed topping up, but everybody was fine, then commanding me to follow her back into the kitchen, where she had to oversee the roast, she told me about her friend.

Their first encounter had been at the literary festival in Hay-on-Wye, to which they had both been invited to debate the topic ‘Feminism or Femininity?’. In spite of the fact that
Evadne’s novels – or Evie’s, as I now feel more comfortable referring to her – were not really Carmen’s thing, they had taken an instant liking to one another and had begun to meet regularly for high tea at one of the posher Piccadilly tearooms. As for those novels, it seems that they were all conscious retreads of the cosy whodunits of the Golden Age of English crime fiction, Agatha Christie’s in particular, and had been mildly successful – she did have her following – if rather less so in recent years. In fact, said Carmen, Evie’s current anxiety was that, as a single lady without close family connections or any sort of private income, if and when she finally slipped off the mid-list (by which I mean those authors whose books sell just enough copies to persuade their publishers to keep on bringing them out until one fine day they decide not to), she would probably, and sooner rather than later, end up as a homeless bag lady.

I was as baffled as I was intrigued.

‘But what are these novels?’ I asked. ‘I read whodunits. Why have I never heard of hers?’

‘Oh, darling, you have me there. It’s been so awfully long since I read any of them myself. There was one, I remember, called
The Hour of 12.
No, no,
The Stroke of 12.
And another two which had kind of a gastronomic theme,
The Proof of the Pudding
and
The Timing of the Stew.
Quite good fun. Except that they weren’t really topnotch and it all became hugely embarrassing when Evie began badgering me to publish one of her books as a Virago Modern Classic.’