Retrial

My Lord, members of the jury, the great Internet public, we are gathered here today to re-examine the case against one Gilbert Adair, author of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, a crime against humanity posing as postmodern literature. When he was placed on trial on the first day of November in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, the evidence was overwhelmingly against him. But in the meantime, influential bloggers such as Sergio from Tipping My Fedora pressed the case in Adair’s favour and demanded that it be re-examined. And so we bring the late Gilbert Adair back to trial to examine A Closed Book, a 1999 novel that Sergio regards highly enough to put on his “Top 100 Books” list.

…Okay, I’ve established a connection to my previous Gilbert Adair review, so I think I’ll stop the fake trial here. My original review was a very angry rant written as though I were putting Gilbert Adair on trial for crimes against humanity. He died about a month after I published the review, and I have not changed a word of that review: it stands as an example of just how furious a bad book can make me. However, it seems like putting him on trial all over again would probably be in bad taste… especially since A Closed Book is actually pretty good.

A Rant Against the Word "Cozy"

The term “cozy” really rubs me the wrong way. It’s not necessarily the word itself, which describes a niche of the mystery market decently: a book where everyone is nice and polite, the detective has a perfect love relationship, and there are plenty of cats to act as animal sidekicks. What really irks me is how this term is abused and stuck onto books and authors that do not fit the label in the least. As a result of this tomfoolery, many authors are branded with this simplistic and unfair “cozy” label.

Agatha Christie gets the most unfair treatment in this regard. Critics gleefully describe her books as “cozy”, citing her idyllic villages and how order is restored to these idyllic villages after some crime, with life going on as before. (Not to forget the usual snide remark about her upper-class worship.) To this I loudly proclaim: “Bah, humbug!”

I, The Jury

My lord, members of the jury, the great Internet public, we are gathered here today to put Gilbert Adair on trial for several counts of high treason, attempted intellectual murder, constantly beating his few funny jokes to death, being generally mean-spirited, and above all, this court is to determine a legal precedent: whether Adair’s book The Act of Roger Murgatroyd should be considered a crime in itself.

To determine this, it is best to review the evidence. The Act of Roger Murgatroyd was marketed as a hilarious send-up of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries. It contains a locked-room puzzle, when Raymond Gentry, a foul-mouthed gossip columnist, is shot to death inside a locked room, with the door locked, the windows barred, etc. This all takes place at the snowed-in country house of Colonel and Mrs. ffoulkes, who send for a retired Scotland Yard man to help solve the crime.