Crime

And Then There Was No One, by Gilbert Adair And Then There Was No One is a metaphysical murder mystery, a deconstructionist detective story, a post-modern puzzle — all of which could, very, very easily, become as arch and wearisome as persistent alliteration. But Gilbert Adair — though fantastically clever-clever, and horribly addicted not only to alliteration but also to puns and to literary in-jokes so self-referential that he is perpetually disappearing up his own recto (oh dear, his style is catching) — has created a hugely enjoyable entertainment. And Then There Was No One is billed as the third in Gilbert Adair’s ‘Evadne Mount Trilogy’. Evadne Mount was the

Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman It was the second or third time that I ever saw Kind Hearts and Coronets that I noticed in the opening credits: ‘Based on the novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman’. It prompted a ten-year search for the book in secondhand shops that finished in a dusty corner of a Suffolk village more than a quarter-of-a-century ago. I am not given to hyperventilation, but on that occasion came perilously close to it. I have never seen another copy, and a search on the internet returns only pleas by would-be readers to find them a copy. Mine is the 1948 reprint, with an introduction by Hugh

The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries, edited by Ian Pindar This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention when I started reading the piece about Shakespeare. Of course, I’d always had the nagging sense, on the fringes of my mind, that some people questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. Eccentrics and attention-seekers, I’d always assumed. And here, I saw that they refer to themselves, rather grandly, as ‘anti-Stratfordians’. So, why do these people think that the man named William Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1516, and who died there in 1564, did not write the plays and the sonnets,

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, £17.99) is a case in point. It is the third of Kate Atkinson’s novels about Jackson Brodie, a former policeman who is crime-prone in the way that other people are accident-prone. Here he is involved in a train crash in Edinburgh, which brings him again