FAIR PLAY, by Louise Hegarty
A group of friends convenes for an overnight murder mystery party in an Irish country house on New Year’s Eve, and each guest is assigned a part by the hostess, Abigail. Her brother, Benjamin, who’s celebrating his 33rd birthday, plays the murderer.
As in any locked-room mystery — for that is what Louise Hegarty’s terrific debut novel at first seems to be — real death comes unbidden to the house. The next morning Benjamin is found dead in his room, an empty bottle of pills by his bed, the door secured from inside — an apparent suicide, though Abigail insists he wasn’t suicidal.
The whodunit is afoot. Surely it’s a case for the brilliant consulting detective Auguste Bell, a pastiche of countless famous fictional investigators? From a droll dramatis personae, we learn that Bell was “previously seen in the international best sellers ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ and ‘The Fountain Pen Mystery’” and that “he will solve this case in fewer than 30 chapters.”
It’s around this point that the novel begins to reveal its unusual nature, the cunning way it operates on several levels. It’s a witty, knowing homage to classic detective fiction, but also a deeply sensitive examination of the loneliness and confusion of grief — and a reminder that every sudden death is a mystery that can’t be fully explained.
Abigail’s own investigation into her brother’s death mostly involves scouring her memory, and those of Benjamin’s friends, for clues to his state of mind. “I’ve missed something and I’m hoping you can help me fill in some gaps,” she says to one friend. It’s a sad and frustrating endeavor.
Bell takes the conventional approach, asking loopy questions designed to demonstrate his superior acuity. “Did it rain any time during the night?” he barks at one of the guests. “Does this house have gas central heating?”
But he has an unusual degree of self-awareness for a fictional character. “My mind has been a little scrambled with all the confusion and misdirection and smoke screens and red herrings,” he says. He understands that the job of his dimwitted, Watson-esque sidekick, Sacker, is to “come up with a series of ideas for which I will invariably mock him.”
Hegarty tips her hand (and her hat) by including in the narrative three real-life lists of “rules” for fictional mysteries from the 1920s, the start of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction. The idea was that a spirit of “fair play” should govern these wildly popular works, meaning that a clever reader should theoretically be able to solve the mystery via clues in the narrative.
Among the directives: No “occult phenomena” or “preposterous discoveries made by lonely scientists” (T.S. Eliot, 1927). “Not more than one secret room or passage” (Ronald Knox, 1929). “No willful tricks or deceptions” (S.S. Van Dine, 1928). It is worth noting here that “Fair Play” merrily flouts many of these rules.
Readers will enjoy the Easter eggs hidden in the underbrush: the fox terriers named Tommy and Tuppence, the elderly couple named the Westmacotts, the references to mostly forgotten titles from the early 20th century. And with his habit of herding the suspects into the drawing room to show off how obscure details play into his thinking (“you will recall that she had been a champion gymnast in her youth,” he notes of one suspect, describing her possible aptitude for escaping via the balcony), Bell is a metafictional hoot.
I wished it were clearer how the small details of the dual investigations were meant to mesh. But they’re wonderful separately, and as a whole they serve as a bracing meditation on the different ways we perceive death (and fiction).
Abigail begins to realize that nobody can provide the answers she yearns for. Maybe that’s an answer in itself: In focusing on how and why her brother died rather than on the fullness of his life, she’s asking the wrong questions.
“He had a nice life,” a friend tells her. “A lot of hard times, of course. But I have a lifetime of good memories because of him. You do too. That’s what I focus on.”
FAIR PLAY | By Louise Hegarty | Harper | 278 pp. | $28.99
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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