 First edition | |
| Author | Gilbert Adair |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Mystery novel, postmodern fiction |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
Publication date | 2009 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 258 pp. |
| ISBN | 978-0-571-23881-1 |
| OCLC | 260207170 |
| Preceded by | A Mysterious Affair of Style |
And Then There Was No One is a novel byGilbert Adair first published in2009. AfterThe Act of Roger Murgatroyd andA Mysterious Affair of Style, it is the third book in theEvadne Mount trilogy. However, rather than being yet another more or less straightforwardwhodunit, albeit withpostmodern overtones,And Then There Was No One thoroughly blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction; or rather, reality, fiction, andmetafiction.
The book is presented in the form of a (fictional)memoir written by a British author called Gilbert Adair who has recently published two successful whodunits featuring mystery writer turned amateur sleuth Evadne Mount entitledThe Act of Roger Murgatroyd andA Mysterious Affair of Style. In September 2011, he travels toMeiringen,Switzerland to participate in the town'sSherlock Holmes conference. While he is staying there, two unexpected things happen: firstly, Anglo-Bulgarian novelist and essayist Gustav Slavorigin, the star of the festival, is murdered; and secondly, to his great surprise, Adair discovers Evadne Mount, the inspiration for his protagonist and the sharer of royalties from the two novels, sitting among the audience.
As with the first two books in the trilogy, the title is again a variation on anAgatha Christie novel,And Then There Were None.
As opposed to the other novels in the trilogy, inAnd Then There Was No One there is a definitive shift away from the murder mystery and its solution toward "self-referentiality", toward the author and his or her problems. One aspect isplagiarism, which at one point is even discussed as a possible motive for Slavorigin's murder; another is the author's choice of subject. In the years before his violent death, Slavorigin had been in hiding as he had published several essays critical of the United States and had therefore become, likeRushdie in reverse, the target of afatwā-like edict pronounced by some obscureTexan multi-millionaire. A third aspect is the author's wish to distance himself from his own creations if not to get rid of them once and for all, to "murder" them—the wayArthur Conan Doyle tried to rid himself of Sherlock Holmes at theReichenbach Falls and Adair is struggling to dispose of Evadne Mount.
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