Pun Salad

I put this book by Louise Hegarty on my get-at-library list thanks to a positive review from Tom Nolan in the WSJ. I was intrigued by Tom's promise of "a work of metafiction as written by the Marx Brothers." Yeah, OK. I was hoping for Groucho, and I think I got Zeppo.

It starts out as one of those old-style Agatha Christie-like mysteries: a group gathered in a rental mansion to celebrate the birthday of Benjamin and also the new year. The party-giver, Benjamin's sister Abigail, has arranged one of those "murder mystery night" contests for entertainment. But in the morning of January 1, Benjamin turns up dead! Soon enough, the gifted and egotistical consulting detective Auguste Bell appears on the scene, with his friend/assistant Sacker to investigate.

But (as promised) things get weird pretty quickly. Ms. Hegarty inserts "fair play rules", presented by T.S. Eliot, Father Knox, and S.S. Van Dine: guidelines that good mysteries should follow. (Don't have the butler do it, for example.)

You'll also notice a conspicuous lack of basic forensic detail about Benjamin's death. Sure, the door to the "murder scene" was locked. But what about…

As it turns out, that lack of detail matters quite a bit. Details keep shifting out from underneath the reader. Chapters about Bell's investigation are interspersed with descriptions of Abigail's increasingly disheveled mental state. And (slight spoiler here) what puts the meta in this fiction is that Bell seems to know that he's a character in a book.

Cute, but I found myself not caring very much. Without looking, I'm thinking the Goodreads ratings will have a bimodal loved it/hated it distribution.