Faber £12.99 pp286

Gilbert Adair is a slightly unEnglish author in that he does not stick to one thing, or even two things. His novels do not resemble one another much, and he has also published essays, poetry, children’s books, and A Void, his translation of Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a mystery story with no solution — and with no letter “e” in the text.

He has tried his hand at the psychological crime novel, in A Closed Book, but the peculiar demands of the genre still seem to interest him. Here he offers a pastiche of Agatha Christie. The title pays homage to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, while the setting, a country house cut off by a snowstorm, recalls The Mousetrap.

On Boxing Day 1935, a widely disliked gossip columnist is found shot in a locked attic room at ffolkes Manor on the edge of Dartmoor. It cannot be suicide, as the gun has vanished — and so has the killer, in the half minute after the whole house heard the shot and before two men forced the door.

Among the house guests is the celebrated crime novelist Evadne Mount. She wishes people would stop telling her this is just like one of her books. “I’ve written nine novels and four plays — my latest, The Wrong Voice, is in its fourth triumphant year in the West End as we speak — beat that, Agatha Christie! — and not one of them has featured a murder committed inside a locked room.”

Despite the snowdrifts, the local doctor manages to fetch Trubshawe, a retired Scotland Yard inspector, from his cottage a few miles away. Trubshawe politely questions all, or nearly all, the suspects and finds a lot of skeletons in a lot of cupboards, but it is, of course, Miss Mount who discovers the solution. “Just think!” she says. “Here we are, a group of suspects gathered together in the library to hear how and why a murder was perpetrated!” The cast is “a perfect collection . . . The Author. The Actress. The Doctor. The Doctor’s Wife, who naturally has a Past. The Vicar, who also has a Past. Or rather, unfortunately, who doesn’t have a Past. The Colonel. The Colonel’s Wife. And finally, bringing up the rear, the Romantic Young Beau, who, like all Romantic Young Beaux, is head-over-heels in love with the Colonel’s Daughter.”

The curious thing is that, although Adair is merely engaged on a jeu d’esprit, the characters are quite well drawn. They seem at first like am-dram stereotypes, then Adair lets them take on just enough reality to catch our interest. The effect — cardboard cut-outs assuming three-dimensional form — is a little eerie. The novel’s artifice is self-conscious, and the main clues to the killer’s identity are not fingerprints or blackmail notes but small, distinct points of narrative technique. You wonder idly why certain scenes are handled a certain way. You kick yourself when you find out.

Adair does skimp on the explanation of the “how”, and he puts in a final twist that he knows is not strictly permissible. There are anachronisms, such as the mention of the George Cross (not instituted until 1940), and a rather trying overemphasis on the characters’ pre-PC attitudes, fostering the conventional delusion that people were all fools in the olden days and we’re all much better and cleverer people now, but mainly Adair treats the genre with a proper intellectual respect and turns in a good period detective story that also comments on the novel as a form. Quite why he did it, though, is anybody’s guess.

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