Eight Detectives: The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

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A young editor named Julia Hart travels to a remote village in the Mediterranean hoping to convince a writer to republish his collection of detective stories. On meeting him she realises there are bigger mysteries than the detective stories. This is a well written and original novel, it’s clever and a really good puzzle throughout. The format works well and the original stories have an Agatha Christie feel to them which I like and the post story discussions between Grant and Julia are fascinating as those are the sections I enjoy the most because they are revealing. Grant is intriguing as he’s elusive and evasive and Julia is sharply clever and persistent. I really like the concept of the novel and the solving of riddles, are the stories clues to something deeper, or are they a joke or a test? If so, who is testing who? As the end nears and the truth reveals itself (or does it?) it all comes together well. The ending is as enigmatic as Grant! Hart wants to go through each of the mysteries with McAllister, being sharp and observant, she notes the inconsistencies in each story, leaving her curious, with many questions and wondering if something bigger lies within the stories. She becomes the eighth detective, persistent and determined as she discusses each mystery after reading it with McAllister, who claims to have a poor memory and insists that there is no connection between the stories. Hart, however, is having none of this and wants to know more, intrigued with McAllister himself, who is he and what is his personal history? Why do the mysteries go under the title of The White Murders?

In Eight Detectives, Alex Pavesi constructs a remarkable puzzle that turns readers into literary detectives with every new twist. Both a celebration and a reinvention of mystery fiction Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of The Dante Club Second in the military crime series featuring Special Agents Scott Brodie and Magnolia "Maggie" Taylor, after The Deserter (2019). I said the story is present-day-ish. One reading of the dates suggests that Hart and McAllister are meeting in 1965 – twenty-five years after the short story collection, The White Murders, had first been published in 1940. To fans of meta-fiction, 1965 would fit because it was the publication date of John Fowles’ The Magus, a novel about a similarly disparate couple on a Mediterranean island, but that may be no more than serendipity. In publicity Alex Pavesi has talked about Agatha Christie and country houses, but the stories show other influences, many of them post Golden Age. The third story, for instance , “A Detective and his Evidence” is set in the grand houses around a tree-filled London square, but the detective and his motives are closer to those of G F Newman than Dorothy L Sayers or Freeman Wills Crofts. Construction of the whole novel apart, if you have liked the post-war short story collections of Julian Symons, Ngaio Marsh or Christianna Brand, you will recognise something of the same atmosphere here – crime stories, not stories of detection, even if there is a detective. The Eighth Detective is an entertaining read, with some clever surprises. However I felt like I was REALLY reading stories published in the early 1900s....stories that had very unrealistic premises.She turned to face him, her eyes narrowed. ‘Chess is a cheap metaphor. It’s what men use when they want to talk in a grandiose way about conflict.’ An hour or two, but he’s been drinking.’ Henry was sitting sideways in his chair, with his legs hooked over the arm and a guitar resting on his lap. ‘Knowing Bunny, he’ll be asleep until dinner time.’ Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for sending me an ARC of The Eighth Detective in exchange for an honest review. I loved this intelligent and inventive novel and I'm sure that it will find legions of fans amongst aficionados of classic crime. It's the most fun I've had in ages -- Cathy Rentzenbrink

Thirty years ago, Grant McCallister wrote a mathematical paper titled “The Permutations of Detective Fiction,” which set out to prove the ingredients* of every murder mystery. As part of demonstrating the paper’s arguments, he wrote seven murder mysteries later published in a collection called The White Murders. Now, Julia Hart meets with Grant on a remote island to review and edit the stories so that the collection can be republished. But Julia keeps finding subtle, deliberate errors in the stories. What do those errors mean? Are they clues showing some connection between the collection—and Grant—and a long ago unsolved murder? This is a clever, original mystery. A mathematician wrote a book of murder mystery short stories in the 1930s. The book was meant to outline the necessary rules for a mystery. ”The number of suspects must be two or more, otherwise there is no mystery, and the number of killers and victims must be at least one each, otherwise there no murder...Then the final requirement is the most important. The killer must be drawn from the set of suspects.” No other genre of literature has been subject to as many strict rules as detective fiction in its “golden age” of the 1920s and 30s. Crime author Ronald Knox established 10 commandments for its mechanics and insisted that it should present “a mystery whose elements are clearly presented at an early stage in the proceedings”. Jorge Luis Borges and WH Auden came up with their own formulae, the latter with an elaborate Aristotelian analysis in his essay The Guilty Vicarage. I did not anticipate quite how extraordinary this was going to be. The plot sounded intriguing but I was thrilled to find that every short story this fictional author wrote was also included here, on each altering chapter. Those in-between focused on the present-day fictional author and his new editor, as they battled for wits, truth, and dominance. I'm unsure which was more clever - the myriad of collected tales with their disparate and unguessable endings, or the story arc that combined them all and had me equally as floored by the grand reveals and concluding twists. The Eighth Detective" had my name written all over it. All in caps. With big blinding lights. It seemed written thinking in all my reading tastes, so...why didn't I enjoy it as much as I should? No, seriously, someone tell me why I didn't, cause I'm not sure.

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Grant McAllister is a retired mathematician living on a remote island in the Mediterranean. Over twenty years ago he wrote a collection of mystery stories and had a meager publishing of them. Julia Hart is an editor representing a small publisher who found a copy of the book and wants to republish the collection. She arranges a meeting and they read and discuss each story methodically, fitting them into his carefully designed mathematical theory of mystery construction.

Eight Detectives has been described as clever and unique, but its framing story fell flat for me. I actually enjoyed many of the seven short stories, they were eerie and had echoes of classic mysteries about them. The characters were not fleshed out but the story carried them though. These seven stories were meant to illustrate the mathematics of the murder mystery, the rules that apply to all crime fiction. I think this would have worked just as well with an introduction followed by the stories, but I guess short story collections don’t sell as well as novels. In Eight Detectives, Alex Pavesi constructs a remarkable puzzle that turns readers into literary detectives with every new twist. Both a celebration and a reinvention of mystery fiction -- Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of The Dante Club Let me go.’ She elbowed him off and ran forward, and then with her shoulders out of his way he saw what she had seen: a pointing finger of blood reaching from below Bunny’s door towards the top of the stairs, pointing straight at him.

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If you like old school detective stories meet complex/twisty/ whodunit plays, this is amazing combination for your needs. Please read it and send me thank you notes and cupcakes for showing your appreciation to my recommendation. It only took my four hours to finish it and even though I cannot feel my legs and I’m starving, it is worth for the pain. I truly enjoyed it! Mathematician and first-time novelist Pavesi creates a metamystery that could as easily go in a bookstore’s puzzle section as on the crime shelves. Many years ago Grant McAllister, a professor of Mathematics, came up with rules applying to murder fiction. He then wrote seven stories that were perfect examples of this to him. The book had little interest and he now lives on a Mediterranean island in peace and seclusion. His peace is disturbed by the arrival of Julia Hart, an editor, whose publisher wants to reprint the book. Julia reads each story to Grant and then asks him about them. There are some inconsistencies in the stories and his answers to questions.