And Then There Was No One
GILBERT ADAIR
To Agatha Christie,
the undisputed queen of crime fiction
‘My only pyjama hat! You should have taken the other turn to the lunatic asylum.’
‘If I have made mistake, the apologize is terrific. But if this is not the lunatic asylum what are you doing here, my esteemed friend?’
FRANK RICHARDS, Billy Bunter’s Double
As I peered, stripped naked and traversed by opaline rays, into another, far deeper mirror, I saw the whole vista of my Russian books and was satisfied and even thrilled by what I saw: Tamara, my first novel (1925): a girl at sunrise in the mist of an orchard. A grandmaster betrayed in Pawn Takes Queen. Plenilune, a moonburst of verse. Camera Lucida, the spy’s mocking eye among the meek blind. The Red Top Hat of decapitation in a country of total injustice. And my best in the series: young poet writes prose on a Dare.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Look at the Harlequins!
Note: Confronted with the eternally vexed question of footnotes versus endnotes, I have opted for the former. If footnotes resemble the subtitles of a foreign-language film, the repeated recourse to endnotes may be compared to obliging the spectator of that film to dash out of the auditorium every ten minutes to consult a bilingual phrase-book. Neither is entirely satisfactory, but I know which, as a reader, I prefer. G. A.
Prologue
Gustav Slavorigin (born July 4, 1955, died September 11, 2011) was murdered in the small Swiss town of Meiringen on the third day of its Sherlock Holmes Festival. That much is in the public domain. Nor, I imagine, will it come as news to my readers that it was in Meiringen’s museum of Sherlockiana that his body was found by the festival’s organisers, alarmed at his prolonged absence from a formal reception of which he was the guest of honour. As everybody also knows, he had an arrow through his heart.
Even before the peculiar circumstances of his death enhaloed his name with a morbid new aura, he had of course been the object of fierce speculation by Britain’s and the world’s media, and if there are readers out there discouraged by the prospect of having the sensational if stale details of ‘the Slavorigin affair’ rehearsed yet again my advice is to ignore this Prologue and proceed at once to page 23, where Chapter One awaits them. I am alive to the danger of redundancy. But I do feel that, if what I am about to relate is to be adequately contextualised, it will be necessary, at the risk of boring a reader or two, to narrate not only the private history but the public prehistory of those events which drew to their dreadful climax in the Bernese Oberland. Short as this tour d’horizon will be, I still wish to apologise in advance, as Pascal did in one of his letters, for not having taken the time to make it shorter.
Slavorigin was actually born in Sofia, capital of Communist Bulgaria. (An unfunny joke which none the less pursued him throughout his adult life was that, although he impressed strangers meeting him for the first time as being as quintessentially English as the Prince of Wales, he was in reality, ho ho, of ‘Slav origin’.*) His banker father, however, was sufficiently well-off and, more to the point, sufficiently well-connected to emigrate out of that unhappy land if and when he pleased. Hence Gustav himself became a Londoner at the age of four and, except for his student years, remained one until his death. His gap year, incidentally, and much to the amusement of the braying upper-class lefties who comprised his set, he spent ‘roughing it’, I recall him quipping, as the pampered guest of family acquaintances in Amagansett, Long Island.
It was while he was still an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, where we were contemporaries, that he wrote and published his first novel, Dark Jade, a semi-autobiographical account of a fiery homosexual relationship which instantly made his name and saw him chosen as one of Granta’s Twenty Best Novelists.† That was succeeded, three years later, by what I and most people have always regarded as his very best piece of fiction, The Lady from Knokke-le-Zoute, about a Belgian divorcee in her late thirties who, after being mugged in the forecourt of the railway station at Nice while on solitary vacation, despoiled of her passport, travellers cheques, credit cards and suitcase, rapidly subsides into first destitution then prostitution. In the hands of another writer, a short-order romancer whose brilliance depends upon his remaining ceaselessly aware of his own limitations, a Zweig or a Bunin, it would have constituted no more than a twenty-four-carat gem of a short story. What Slavorigin made of this slim yet promising premise was a multi-character fresco stretching to three hundred dense pages, a ‘scathing indictment’, as more than one hack reviewer was pleased to describe it, of the moral bankruptcy of globalised capitalism. It won him – and it would have provoked a scandal had it not – that year’s Booker Prize.
There were to be four subsequent novels.‡ (He was not a prolific writer and, the heir to one of Eastern Europe’s greatest fortunes, he never had to be.) The first, A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Causes, the account of a deadpan young madman who, in the book’s opening paragraph, scrawls ‘Not to be. That is the answer.’ on the back of an unpaid phone bill and, in its closing paragraph, swallows, one by one, a jumbo tube of barbiturates, disappointed all but his unconditional admirers by its absence of humour and its flirtation with the dated fad of magical realism: ‘turgid’ was a word that began to be applied to his style. The second, The Boy with Highlights in His Hair, a surprisingly soggy coming-of-age tale and more of a novella than a novel, passed almost unnoticed (although it was the only one of his works to be filmed – wholly unsuccessfully, I might add). But it was with the third that he enjoyed a spectacular return to critical favour, even if it sold considerably fewer copies in Britain and the United States than he was accustomed to. Wayfarer, a vertiginously synoptic six-hundred-page-long overview of his native country’s twentieth-century history, traces the individual destinies, some of them interlinked, some not, of thirty-eight school-children who posed in the nineteen-twenties for an end-of-term class photograph which its protagonist disinters exactly half-a-century later while searching through his papers for his own birth certificate in order to prove to the authorities, of whom he has fallen foul for a never specified reason, that he is one-hundred-percent Bulgarian. The novel’s formal and stylistic maestria was undeniable, and Slavorigin was once more nominated for the Booker (he lost out to a Caribbean writer whose name the world has already forgotten), although I have to say that I personally tried twice to finish it and failed both times. (I doubt even God – who sees, and presumably also reads, everything – managed to get to the end.)