Review of From Aberystwyth With Love by Malcolm Pryce (Bloomsbury, 2009)

It’s a sweltering summer in Aberystwyth and a flooded village emerges from a parched lake. More used to the cold of Siberia, Uncle Vanya, a museum curator, has arrived in the town from the fabled Hughesovka, a town established by a Welsh migrant to Russia. He’s come in search of the story of Gethsemane Walters, a young girl that was murdered thirty years previously. Vanya’s daughter had acquired imaginary friend not long after, but as she got older she claimed to be Gethsemane. Then Vanya was sent to prison and he never saw his daughter again. His mission for private detective Louie Knight and his trusted sidekick, Calamity Jane, is to discover what happened to Gethsemane so that she can be given a Christian burial. Their investigation takes them into the strange world of stamp collecting, spinning wheel repairman, the Russian space programme and rumours of troll brides.

From Aberystwyth With Love is a fine addition to Malcolm Pryce’s slightly surreal detective series. Pryce takes the hardboiled private investigator genre and gives it a Monty Python spin, taking elements of Welsh culture and the local geography of Aberystwyth, and foregrounding and twisting them, and blending the whole lot with a noir sensibility and myth and fable. The result is a set of highly enjoyable yarns. Given this is book five, the characters are well rounded and developed, their back stories established. The story is intricately plotted and, despite its surreal oddness, it has an internal logic that makes perfect sense. There’s some nice intertextuality and it jaunts along at a steady clip. It might have been interesting to have spent more time on the overseas jaunt, but that doesn’t take away from the story as is. An entertaining read and I’m looking forward to book six, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still, released in August.

The paradigm-busting detective method

In Malcolm Pryce's From Aberystwyth With Love one of his detectives decides to take a novel approach to trying to investigate a case using a method set out in the magazine Gumshoe. The reasoning runs thus: if the world doesn't operate rationally, then to discover the truth a detective has to act irrationally; by investigating a hypothesis that is patently absurd one can stumble across the truth. It's an interesting idea. Here's the relevant passage.


Calamity began to read. ‘Traditional detective methods which rely on deductive reasoning are premised on the belief that life makes sense. This is a mistake. Normally, life only makes sense in novels and movies where events are shaped by the hand of a creative artist. In the real world events are born of contingency and are frequently shaped by the hands of people who are often clinically insane. Thus, because no rational process can be discerned behind the events of life, deductive reasoning is not best suited for unravelling its mysteries. In the past one means of countering this problem was the frequent use of the policeman’s hunch which proceeds by non-linear and counter-intuitive methods and aims to break the straitjacket of conventional thinking. Deployed successfully the hunch often rearranges the pieces of a jigsaw in such a way that old paradigms are superseded. Though a reliable method of unravelling stubborn mysteries, the hunch suffers from the drawback that it occurs but rarely and, crucially, is not subject to conscious control. The advanced detective seeks to summon up the paradigm-busting thinking that hallmarks the hunch by deliberately entertaining hypotheses that are absurd.’