Review of The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still by Malcolm Pryce (Bloomsbury, 2011)

Private Investigator Louie Knight has been commissioned by the mysterious Raspiwtin to track down a dead man, Iestyn Probert. Probert was supposedly hanged twenty five years ago after a raid on the Coliseum cinema. He was caught by Aberystwyth's current mayor, then a cop, after knocking down an egg-headed man in a silver suit and taking him to a doctor. The rumour is that Probert was resuscitated by aliens and escaped, and the seizure of the man in the silver suit was the Welsh equivalent of a Roswell incident. Interest in the case has been sparked by the sighting of strange lights in the sky and a sighting of Probert. Neither the mayor or a shadowy government department, the Aviary, are happy with Louie's interest. To add an extra complication, Louie has become romantically interested in Miaow, a good-time girl in a nightclub, and a soothsayer has predicted that he will become the next mayor, a job he has no interest in as the election contest involves being blown out of a cannon and taking part in a boxing match. Whatever is going on, it seemingly all links back to what happened twenty five years ago.

The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still is the sixth book in the Louie Knight series. Pryce has really hit his stride with the series now. The principal characters - Knight, Calamity, Sospan, Eyeore - are all well established and the slightly surrealist rendering of Aberystwyth and its surrounds is fully realised. I thought the first half of this book was excellent and I was sure it was going to be a five star review. The story grabs one's attention, there is a hefty dose of humour which made me laugh out loud, and the prose is vivid and engaging. Throughout the book, Pryce weaves in a fair bit of philosophical rhetoric which elevated the story beyond a parody of both PI novels and Welsh culture. The second half of the story wanders off course a little. The plot, I felt, becomes over-complicated with its various threads and subplots, and I found myself often turning back a few pages to re-read passages to try and get a clearer sense of what was going on. I'm still not sure I really understood all of it. This was a shame as the book is inventive, clever and genuinely funny in places.

Welsh humour

The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still is packed full of humour. A typical example.

'I'm applying for the human cannonball, I hear there's a vacancy.' He opened his fist and revealed a crumpled newspaper advert, roughly torn out. 'It's for the election, Ercwleff is looking for ... for ...'

I peered at the advert. 'A surrogate?'

'Yes, I could do that.'

'What happened to the other guy?'

'He hit a wall.'

'Doesn't that put you off?'

'I'm ready for it. Marathon runners get the same problem, don't they? Something to do with carbohydrates. You have to eat spaghetti. I love spaghetti hoops.'

Lazy Sunday Service

I don't usually comment on covers, but every time I look at the one for Malcolm Pryce's The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still the same thought runs through my head - this looks like a children's book. The cover imitates the 1940s and 50s hardboiled PI pulps, but seems a watered down version and its five elements (Louie, Miaow, the Buick, the UFO and the pier) just seemed randomly dropped on the page. I know this is a matter of taste, but I think something more like Megan Abbott's covers or those produced by Hard Case Crime, which are similar in style but with more coherent scenes and a bit more realism in the art work would work better. The material between the covers draws a rich, vivid picture, with some real philosophical depth in the narrative which is a long way beyond a childish pastiche.

My posts this week
Kinky philosophy
October reviews
If you're going to make an error, might as well make it a big one
One book, two book, three book, four ... and five ...
Review of Greenwich Killing Time by Kinky Friedman
In harm's way

Nice things in the post

The postman bought a nice offering this week - Louie Knight's latest case in Malcolm Pryce's The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still.

From the backcover:

It is May in Aberystwyth, and the mayoral election campaign - culminating in the traditional boxing match between candidates - is underway. Sospan the ice-cream seller waits in his hut for souls brave enough to try his latest mind-expanding new flavour, and Louie Knight, Aberystwyth's only Private Detective, receives a visit from a mysterious stranger called Raspiwtin asking him to track down a dead man. Twenty-five years ago Iestyn Probert was hanged for his part in the notorious raid on the Coliseum cinema, but shortly afterwards he was seen, apparently alive and well, boarding a bus to Aberaeron. Did he miraculously evade the hangman's noose? Or could there really be substance to the rumours that he was resuscitated by aliens? Now, as strange lights are spotted in the sky above Aberystwyth and a farmer claims to have had a close encounter with a lustful extraterrestrial, Iestyn Probert has been sighted once again. But what does Raspiwtin want with him? And why does Louie's investigation arouse unwelcome interest from a shadowy government body and a dark-suited man in a black 1947 Buick?

Sounds like a cracker.

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.’

Saturday Snipper: Unbearable Lightness ...

I spent an hour on Wednesday evening trying to find some quotes to use in a piece I was drafting on sense of place and crime fiction for Dorte's DJ Krimiblog (posted today). Below is a passage that I didn't use, but liked a lot. It's from The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce that I reviewed a couple of week ago.

We pulled out of Borth and continued gliding silently, hardly picking up speed, towards Ynyslas and Dovey Junction. The morning sun had just cleared the horizon above the flat watery world and threw a horizontal beam that made us squint and duck the dust particles that appeared from nowhere like swarms of gnats. The light had the colour of lemonade - not the stuff from the sweetshop, but the homemade drink, chilled and left on the sideboard in a glass pitcher and craved by children in the Famous Five books with the desperation of cocaine addicts. It filled the carriage with warm pale honey and gilded the golf course and beach and sea, and turned the marram grass on the dunes to golden stubble along the chin of the sky.

I don't know about you, but I'm on that train, dodging dust, squinting out at the estuary landscape and the sea beyond. Great stuff.

Review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce, published by Bloomsbury (2005)

If you like your noir, dark, comic and slightly surreal then Malcolm Pryce’s novels are for you. The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth is the third of the set. I picked it up in Enniskillen at the weekend and promptly shuffled it to the top of the ‘to read’ pile. I’ve now read three of the books (the other two being Aberystwyth Mon Amour and Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth). Some how I’ve managed to skip book two - Last Tango in Aberystwyth.

There was a stretched Austin Montego parked outside with blacked-out windows. I stood and admired and the rear window wound down in awkward jerks as someone inside struggled with a stiff handle.
‘It’s more impressive when they’re electric,’ I said.
A man in a Swansea suit and aviator shades stared ahead and spoke to me out the corner of his mouth.
‘Fancy a ride, peeper?’
‘No.’
‘Just a little ride and a chat, I’ve got a message from Ll.’
‘From who?’
‘Ll.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Ll.'
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
The stooge turned to face me. ‘It’s his initial, like “M” or “Q”, the boss right?’
‘That’s not an initial, it’s two letters.’
‘Not in Welsh. It counts as one.’
‘It doesn’t, it’s a phoneme, it’s two.’
‘Just get in for fuck’s sake.’

Private Detective Louie Knight is once again down on his luck and he and his junior partner, Calamity Jane, are having to move office to a more seedy part of town. The only cases on offer are that of Gabriel Bassett, an organ grinder, and his monkey, Cleopatra. Bassett wants a murder case from 1849 investigated, Cleopatra to find her missing son, Mr Bojangles. Knight puts Calamity Jane on the case so that she can obtain her detective’s badge and heads out for a day trip with the woman he loves, nightclub singer Myfanwy, who has regressed into a semi-comatose state at the hands of obsessive and deranged scientist, Brainiocs. A drugged ice cream later and Knight awakens to find Myfanwy gone, seemingly kidnapped. In his efforts to find her he is dragged into the mad plot of gangster Frankie Mephisto and the weird world of Sister Cunegonde and her waifrey.

The Unbearable Lightness is a well crafted book and an enjoyable read. Pryce’s alternative universe – Aberystwyth in geography, but socially kicked left out of kilter and filtered back through a noir and a nationalist parody – is fully worked through and engaging. The book is well plotted and paced, and it is clear time has been spent making sure the atmosphere is suitably noir, the similes are inventive, and the text lyrical. The story itself is meanders along a complex path and the twists are not telegraphed, which made a nice change to some crime fiction I’ve read recently. Like Jasper Fforde, Pryce’s books are nicely intertextual. In particular, I liked the Rimbaud character in this book (although he was underplayed in the plot). Rimbaud is a veteran of the Patagonia campaign – a doomed 1960s war in which the Welsh try to protect their diaspora brethren in Argentina – hassled unjustly by a bigoted local cop, he escapes into the local forestry commission land using his military skills to torment his pursuers. Indeed, the books are nicely intellectual without being pretentious.

I really like Pryce’s work but for some strange reason I’m not in a mad rush to go out and buy books two and five. I know that when I do come across them though I will purchase them and they will bypass the queue to the top of the pile and I'll spend a few hours enjoying myself in an oddly Welsh world.