Alex Pavesi’s debut novel is a clever riff on the idea that all murder mystery writers should follow certain core principles.
He offers seven mysteries loosely based on the “10 commandments of detective fiction” devised by Ronald Knox during the “golden age” of the genre. These tales are embedded in a framing narrative which eventually leads to an eighth murder mystery.
The idea is that a mathematics professor by the name of Grant McAllister once calculated all the possible permutations of the rules and essential ingredients for detective fiction.
The number of suspects must be two or more, otherwise there is no mystery, and the number of killers and victims must be at least one each, otherwise there no murder…Then the final requirement is the most important. The killer must be drawn from the set of suspects.
He put his theory of ” the mathematical structure of murder mysteries” to the test by devising seven short stories, publishing them in a collection called The White Murders.
Thirty years later book editor Julia Hart tracks down McAllister living on a remote Mediterranean island. She’s thinking to re-publish The White Murders but first she needs to challenge him about inconsistencies and continuity errors in the stories. Were they genuine mistakes or did McAllister deliberately make errors to lead readers to another, real-life crime?
The conversations between author and editor form the structure of Eight Detectives. Hart reads one of the stories from The White Murders , McAllister explains how it supports a strand of his theory and then they discuss the inconsistencies.
Remember that I’ve rejected the view of detective stories as logical puzzles, where the clues define a unique solution and the process of deriving it is almost mathematical. It’s not, and they never do. That’s all just sleight of hand…. [T]he central purpose of a murder mystery is to give its readers a handful of suspects and the promise that in about a hundred pages one or more of them will be revealed as the murderers. That’s the beauty of the genre…. It presents the reader with a small, finite number of options, and then at the end it just circles back and commits to one of them. It’s really a miracle that the human brain could ever be surprised by such a solution, when you think about it.
The short stories all fall into the classic murder mystery model in tone. They feature increasingly bizarre forms of murder— in one, for example, a victim is killed by a deliberately loosened fork tine — and take place in a variety of settings such as a restaurant, a small island and several houses. We also get variations on the identity and personality of the “detective” figure.
These tales are not especially riveting in themselves; they are unfortunately rather bland pastiches of golden age stories. The real interest is the way they are supposed to show how authors can vary the standard recipe ingredients of victim/s; killer/s, suspect/s and detective/s. Here we find McAllister to be rather a bore when talking about his theory, clearly taking it far more seriously than we do as readers.
Eight Detectives is cleverly constructed novel but would have been more enjoyable if the characters of the editor and the author had been more fully realised. Still, it is an entertaining read perfect for a lazy winter’s afternoon.
Note: for reasons I haven’t been able to discover, this book has been published variously as Eight Detectives and The Eighth Detective.
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