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Ceri Gorton considers recent developments in the postmodern
detective novel.

Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth
Malcolm Pryce



Bloomsbury
£12.99 Hardback
ISBN 0747580162


Mr Cassini
Lloyd Jones



Seren
£7.99 Paperback
ISBN 1854114255

Aberystwyth gumshoe Louie Knight returns in the fourth of Malcolm Pryce’s dark satirical detective novels set in a West Wales populated by gangster druids, stovepipe-hat-coiffed strippers, and disenfranchised Patagonian war veterans. Through Louie’s deadpan narrative, Pryce slickly transposes the conventions of the detective noir genre from Chandler’s LA to Aber’s rainswept streets; complete with seedy bars, corrupt officials, femme fatales, and a cynical antihero. Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth is a pastiche of a Cold War spy thriller, in which Louie investigates the murder of a man dressed as Santa Claus in a Chinatown alley at the behest of the mysterious Queen of Denmark. Nazi war criminals, spies, and pop culture icons Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid weave a complicated web of intrigue in Pryce’s fast-becoming-legendary imagined Aberystwyth community.

   The criminals and busybodies who peppered Pryce’s earlier novels all return. And with the help of icecream seller Sospan, sidekick Calamity Jane, and Police Inspector Llunos, Louie takes on the druid gangs and former Mossad agents of the Welsh seaside town.

   While the premise of an infamous Cold War spy choosing Cardigan Bay to come in from the cold is rather fantastical, Pryce maintains Louie’s tantalisingly poker-faced narrative throughout. Like the very best comedians, Pryce combines tautly controlled language and deadpan dialogue with a plot packed with whimsical satire. In Louie Knight, Pryce has created an unmistakeably Welsh underdog hero, although even Louie looks westward for an idol. In keeping with Pryce’s self-conscious parodying of the noir genre, a photograph of Humphrey Bogart is the only thing that adorns the walls of Louie’s office.

In contrast, a 1000-mile walk around Wales inspired Lloyd Jones’s
critically-acclaimed first novel, Mr Vogel. His second novel offers a similarly vertiginous travelogue of the mind in the story of dreamer Duxie, and his haunting nemesis Mr Cassini. Duxie imagines a personal history which saw him captaining the Welsh football team, falling from grace in a series of sex scandals and deciding to return to higher education, where he meets psychology student Olly. But Duxie’s story is displaced even in the titular focus on Mr Cassini, a murderer and incidental mannequin-collector from our protagonist’s dreams.

   Duxie’s longing for his childhood memories is embroiled with a pervasive sense of national identity in flux, hanging onto Celtic heroes (both real and imagined) in order to embrace a future in full knowledge of the limitations of the past. The novel culminates with a show trial of Mr Cassini on Pumlumon Arwystli, with the likes of Merlin, Arthur Machen and Huw Llwyd of Cynfael each taking turns to interrogate the evil figure from Duxie’s dreams while enjoying one of the dreamer’s picnics, complete with weed-spiked chocolate cake.

   Mr Cassini’s Duxie and Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth’s Louie are cynical, middle-aged Welsh men. They embody contrasting identities of a mythical Wales of both beauty and grubby mundanity. They are chivalrous; both are engaged in sexless relationships with younger, emotionally stronger, female protégées. Louie relies on his detective partner Calamity Jane and becomes an alcoholic mess when she tries to set up her own agency from her living room, while Olly, in her police interview, brutally describes the power dynamics of her generous friendship with the lonely Duxie. And while both novels address personal voyages of discovery, Duxie’s quest promises to be a slightly more ambitious one through space and time. Not that finding out who killed Santa proves to be straightforward for Louie, particularly with the mysterious spectre of the vanished spy Hoffman and the secrets held by former housekeeper and Patagonian war revolutionary Mrs Llantrisant looming large over proceedings.

   Both Mr Cassini and Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth represent Welsh writers taking on the postmodern detective novel. Pryce manages this with aplomb. His characters, plot and setting challenge narrative and cultural conventions with a fluid re-imagining of both the life of an ordinary private detective and of a nation fallen from imperialist grace after a botched colonial war in Patagonia. Pryce’s self-consciously deconstructed and self-reflexive narrator is even further nuanced by macabre humour and ironic Welsh stereotypes. Lloyd Jones’s Mr Cassini, meanwhile, ticks all the postmodern boxes, disturbing structural norms and narrative conventions to create a swirling multilayered novel which engages with philosophy, nationalism, geography, Welsh mythology, religious symbology, psychology and popular culture. Psychologist Adam Phillips, master of the aphorism, is a recurring figure in the novel, surprising Duxie in unexpectedly mundane locations. Writing Phillips into the narrative is just one example of the rich Welsh cultural landscape painted so beguilingly by Jones, a landscape which underpins the novel’s sprawling plot and makes tangible the sinuous notion of hiraeth – the Welsh longing for home and land.

   The rich tapestry of theories and images in Mr Cassini offers such
gems of humour and insight and nods to a self-awareness which is distinctly lacking in the novel as a whole. Duxie, for example, quotes imagined negative reviews from The Sun of his own biography Tales from Wales in one of Mr Cassini’s many under-played, and all the more impressive, sections. The combination of the heavily stylised structure (with chapters alternating between the tide coming in and going out, for example) and the endlessly spiralling layers of dream, daydream and reality thus veer from brilliance to self-destruction. While the desire to cast off the performative need to be liked may be the whole point behind Jones’s postmodern approach, it is fair to say that at times it makes for inaccessible reading. The plethora of styles and images can however be thoroughly refreshing, offering up a fundamental truth about the chaos of memory and identity within which we all operate. As Duxie himself suggests, ‘Sometimes the truth needs telling in diverse ways.’

   Jones’s and Pryce’s novels both tease out plot details, in keeping with the detective genre, yet Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth maintains a breathless pace, while Mr Cassini at times becomes entrenched in its own cleverness. It teases the reader just a fraction too long and for too predictable a payoff, making even the longawaited revelations of ‘Book Three: The Truth’ frustrating and anti-climactic. Mr Cassini is a brave and impressive novel, yet it lacks discipline and awareness of not only any sense of reader empathy but also of the self-indulgence of authorship.