Fair Play, a debut novel by Louise Hegarty is a flat-out delight. Steeped in a classic sensibility – Agatha Christie, anyone? — Hegarty has both a playful sensibility and a serious tone throughout the story.
Abigail, our protagonist, has rented a country mansion in rural Ireland and planned a long re-awaited New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the 33rd birthday of her beloved brother, Benjamin. Several mostly mutual friends have been invited, and the occasion is also a return to a favorite pastime: Abigial will conceive and execute a “murder mystery” game with clues, a “murder” and plenty of liquid refreshment.
The game itself goes well, each guest playing an assigned role. But the next morning, reality has bitten: Benjamin is found dead in his bedroom, an apparent genuine murder, not a playful stunt.
For the remaining party guests, not so fun – but for the reader – well, the fun is just beginning. And it is here, at the start of Part II, that Hegarty sticks her tongue firmly in cheek, with both a plethora of Golden Age crime fiction references, and an impish approach to the genre and its sensibilities, all the while playing smartly with a juxtaposition of the old and the meta.
First, a formal Cast of Characters (In Order of Appearance) written with a sly wit. Then, we are treated to three sets of different “rules” for the murder mystery author. One, “Fair Play Rules,” is from 1927 by T.S. Eliot, and includes such chestnuts as: 4. “Elaborate and bizarre machinery is an irrelevance … Writers who delight in treasures hid in strange places, cyphers and codes, runes and rituals, should not be encouraged.”
We also have “Father Knox’s introduction to The Best Detective Stories of 1928-29.” He too has some tips. Some reflect the racist tenor of the time: such as 5: “No Chinaman must figure in the story.” Number 9 is particularly pertinently: “The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader … he exists for the purpose of letting the reader have a sparring partner, as it were, against whom he can pit his brains. ‘I may have been a fool,’ he says to himself as he puts the book down, ‘but at least Iwasn’t such a doddering fool as poor old Watson.’”
And finally, S.S. Van Dine’s ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ from 1928, who certainly cuts to the chase when he advises – hell, admonishes, really, in 16. “A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.” Tell them S.S.!
Into the tragic scene marches famous detective Auguste Bell. Straight out of parody city, Bell begins his investigation. He takes an initial walk through the large home. “As Bell ascended the stairs, he took note of every creak of a floorboard, every imperfection in the polished bannisters and papered walls … He inspected the shotguns and other hunting weapons mounted on the wall of the landing, noting the blank space in the centre. He noticed a spot of damp on the ceiling above him. A dried leaf, probably brought inside on the bottom of someone’s shoe was stuck to the carpet.
All this information would gently stew in his brain until eventually – around about Chapter Twenty-Three – the solution would come bubbling to the surface.”
Yep, we’re now in the meta-universe: and it will become increasingly madcap as the story takes shape.
Yet at the same time, Hegarty, whose creative construction of the plot doesn’t simply settle for an enjoyable, reductive, goofy exercise of satire and simultaneous reverence to the genre: She also takes the reader right inside the mind of Abigail as she processes her brother’s death. Later in the story, as Abigail’s half-listening to a mundane conversation, in her mind she’s got a mantra from hell in steady rotation – my brother is dead, my brother is dead, my brother is dead….
In a recent interview with The Irish Examiner, Hegarty notes, “In Agatha Christie books, people are dying everywhere and no one seems to be overly upset … Looking at the effect of sudden death, and grief, I think when someone dies suddenly, you are trying to frantically find clues and trying to find a very easy narrative of what happened.”
Bell is soon joined by and introduces “…this is Sackler, of course. My sidekick – my associate – my Watson, you understand? You probably didn’t see him earlier, but he serves an important literary function. * The footnote is as follows:
*‘Let us know from chapter to chapter what the detective is thinking. For this he must watsonize or soliloquize … A.A. Milne’s introduction to The Red House Mystery.”
Hegarty clearly enjoys reaching back to that Golden Age of crime novels. She teases the modern setting of the story with an archaic sensibility. Beside the fun of various characters and looking ahead to later chapters, “breaking the fourth wall,” she namechecks such “people” as the Westmacotts (Christie’s pseudonym) Sir Max Mallowan (her husband), and when a clairvoyant is called in to help, we‘re told that “…she rid the Wimseys of all their ghosts…” why, hello Dorothy L. Sayers! And another police officer makes a brief appearance, a Detective Inspector Ferret (!) who is based upon Inspector Japp, who appears in several Hercule Poirot stories.
As Hegarty notes, “There is something comforting about a whodunnit … It’s very familiar, it’s a very safe world. In the last couple of years, there’s been a huge increase in cosy crime and people looking towards those familiar narratives.”
If there is a pervasively zany element to the mischief and Bell’s essentially idiotic musings, meanderings and so-called detection, an equally pervasive exploration of Abigail’s despondency over Benjamin’s demise permeates the text. It’s to Hegarty’s supreme credit that she never loses control of her narrative. Here we have an author – a debut author, at that, whose unique re-conception of a classical form both entertains and demonstrates that a clever writer can make even a cliché fresh.
Louise Hegarty’s work has appeared in Banshee, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Works. She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. Her short story “Getting the Electric” has been optioned by Fíbín Media. She lives in Cork, Ireland.
