The fourth speaker listed was G. Autry, a name calculated to stimulate critical inquisitiveness, like ‘B. Traven’. Nobody knew what the G. stood for, if anything. He had hardly ever been photographed (on the Festival’s flyer his photo had been replaced by a generic black silhouette against a plain white background), in recent years he had certainly never posed for a camera, and all he let be known about himself was that he was not related to Gene Autry, a once well-known singing cowboy whose horse would regularly rear up on its hind legs like that of a Spanish monarch in an equestrian portrait by Velasquez while he himself spun a lazy lasso above his head as though blowing a smoke ring. I had naturally never met him – who had? – but I had tried to read one of his novels, a sadistic thriller in the James Ellroy mode set in the racist Arkansas of the fifties. I laid it down again unfinished when the praeternatural vividness of its violence started to haunt my dreams.
Oddly enough, Autry’s work had always had a pulpy reputation until Sanary, of all people, published an eccentric defence of it with the amusing title G. est un Autry.† It was that essay which had prompted me to give his fiction a go. But I had, I repeat, so hated the novel in question that I only half-read it and, again, I couldn’t imagine why such a grouchy recluse would make one of his extremely rare public appearances at an insignificant Sherlock Holmes Festival in the Swiss Alps.
Fifth and last – or, rather, first – was Umberto Eco, no less. But when I noted the parenthesis (unconfirmed) after his name, I just knew he wouldn’t turn up. And I was about to fold up the attachment and pay for my coffee when I remarked, so discreetly boxed-off from the body of the text as to suggest that the festival’s organisers were consciously playing hard-to-get with the reader, the two words, in the smallest of block capitals, MYSTERY GUEST. Underneath them I read as follows: ‘The Meiringen Sherlock Holmes Festival is proud to announce the presence of a Mystery Guest, one whose identity, like those of so many murderers in mystery novels, will be revealed to you all in the library, that of our famous Kunsthalle. Do not attempt to guess in advance who he or she will be. You will certainly be proved wrong!’
This sounded to me as though it might be fun, but the potential for disappointment was of course also great.
* Published in Britain, considerably abridged, as Poe & Co: A History of the Mystery Novel from Poe to Po-Mo (Carcanet, 2003).
† A mischievous parody of the near-homonymous ‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is an other’), Rimbaud’s seminal poetic manifesto of the schizophrenic bifurcation of personality.
Chapter Three
In the early morning grisaille of September 10, just as I was irritably about to ring up the local minicab firm to remind it of my existence, I was collected outside my flat and driven off to the hell-on-earth that is Heathrow.
There I queued for nearly half an hour among a crowd of vacationers at a British Airways Economy check-in counter, only to learn to my fury, for my e-ticket was irresponsibly mum on the matter and I had assumed that the Festival, like most of its kind, would cut corners where its less than A-list guests were concerned, that I had after all been booked into Business Class. Two long hours later, I was finally aboard the plane, waiting for it to taxi out to the runway. Beside me, occupying a single seat, cutely belted in by a single seatbelt, were a pair of cherubic little boys (their parents sat across the aisle), just out of babyhood, identical twins identically dressed, chattering their heads off in American accents – Mid-West was my guess – as though compensating for all those months when neither of them could talk. It was distracting, and continued to be distracting during the flight itself – as always on plane journeys, I’d brought with me a computerised chess set and was forced, in order to give myself a decent chance in spite of the racket, to lower the machine’s own level of skill a notch or two, with the result that its game instantly went off – but I really didn’t mind. The chatter of my two little neighbours was so adorable that, had I not feared arousing parental suspicion, I would have joined in.
At Zurich a jewel-bright sky dazzled the airport’s multiple glass façades. I was met by the Festival’s director, Thomas Düttmann, in his late twenties, hence quite a bit younger than I had expected, preppily bow-tied and tousle-haired, with (like a lot of total strangers, I tend to find) one physical idiosyncrasy that took some getting used to: in his case, a nervous tic in the left eye whose beat accelerated in tandem with what I would later discover were intermittent fits and fevers of excitability. He shook my hand and relieved me of my suddenly inadequate-looking sole piece of luggage, a battered metal valise. At his side stood Hugh Spaulding, who had arrived twenty minutes earlier from Gatwick and struck me as even veinier and more crumpled than I remembered him. He sported (the appropriate verb) a bookmaker’s checked, three-piece, almost parodically Irish tweed suit and a tie patterned with miniature huntsmen hallooing every which way, more than half of them upside-down. Over his right shoulder was slung a drab fawn mac, and a pair of bulging overnight bags sat at his feet. He remembered me too, greeting me with a beery ‘Hello, Gil, long time no see.’ He was smoking, and I accepted a cigarette from him, my first in the four hours of the trip. Then we climbed into a waiting Mercedes, Hugh and I together in the roomy back, Düttmann in the front seat next to the driver, and set out on what was to be the spectacularly scenic route to Meiringen.
Along the way Düttmann told Hugh and me that, like all the Festival’s guests, we were to be put up at the Sherlock Holmes Hilton.
‘It is not, I think, the best hotel in town,’ he said to us over his shoulder. ‘Oh, very nice, but three stars only. Its name, you know, was what you British call the “clincher”. How could we resist the name?’
He explained, superfluously for Hugh but not for me, since I hadn’t been listed in the Festival’s emailed flyer as one of its speaking guests, that I would be ‘on’ that very evening, Hugh the next day after lunch. So far, he said, his eye blinking softly, it had all been a great success. And since we had quite a lot of free time before the evening’s events, possibly we would like, once we had checked in and freshened up, to visit Meiringen’s famous Museum.
‘It is a must. Near the hotel and displaying choice exhibits which will please you both, I am sure.’
Staring moodily out of the window at an unending succession of mountainside chalets – I reckoned he already had a craving for another cigarette – Hugh offered a grunted affirmative, while I, a tactful old pro who knew what was expected of me, said that that sounded a very nice idea.
‘But, Herr Düttman –’
‘Please call me Thomas.’
‘Thomas. I wondered when we’d be able to see the Reichenbach Falls.’
‘Tomorrow afternoon, sir. We shall go together after Mr Spaulding’s talk. A grand excursion has been arranged and the Mayor of our town has consented to make a speech.’
‘Just one thing more. I noticed you referred to this evening’s “events” – events in the plural. Does that mean another writer is also due to give a talk tonight?’
He shook his head. Immediately following my reading there would be a special screening of Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, a film with ‘the immense British actor Basil Rathbone’, which neither of us was obliged to attend. ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘I am afraid you will be obliged not to attend for, while it is being shown, we plan a dinner for all our guests in a fine restaurant, followed by some nightclub dancing.’