And Then There Was No One Read Online Free PDF

and Moriarty locked in hand-to-hand combat. Another column of images bordered the right-hand side, consisting this time of photographic portraits of the Conan Doyle specialists who had signed up for the Festival presumably well before I myself was asked. In fact, I was so belated an invitee that my own name went unlisted, and I couldn’t help wondering whether, as is often the case with events planned long in advance, some more illustrious guest than I had dropped out at the last minute.
    Of my five fellow speakers there were three with whom I was, to varying degrees, on nodding terms.
    I knew Hugh Spaulding, a jocose, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking Dubliner, a former sportswriter on the
Irish Times,
who was the first to have been astonished by the small fortune he had made, and no sooner made had gambled away on ‘the nags’, out of a cycle of thick-ear thrillers each of which was set in a different professional sporting milieu. These thrillers all had titles so formulaic as to verge on provocation: e.g.
An Offside Murder, Death in the Scrum, Killer Mid-On, Bullseye!
and
To Live and Die on the Centre
Court
, a novel in which the No 1 Seed is poisoned, in full view of thousands of spectators, during the fourth-set tie-break of a Wimbledon final. Tennis being the sole sport of interest to me, this latter book was the only one of his I had ever read. It was, though, enough for us to converse upon when I met him, a crumpled codger, now a self-confessedly impecunious has-been, with a can of lager in one hand and a minute battery-operated fan in the other, a fan whose open plastic rotor buzzed less than an inch away from his very veiny nose, at a mutual friend’s birthday party one exceptionally warm August evening in a fairy-lit garden in Putney.
    Hugh, I suppose, wasn’t ‘my kind of person’. But, as in sex, so also in the most superficial friendships, one finds oneself on occasion inexplicably drawn to somebody who isn’t at all one’s type. In any event, I rather liked him, and his book, and looked forward to catching up with him again.
    A former acquaintance, too, was Pierre Sanary, who was down to speak on ‘The Posthumous Holmes’, which I interpretedto refer to the countless post-Doyle manifestations of the Great Detective in fiction, theatre and film, my own collection of stories perhaps included. Sanary was Swiss, widely travelled but with a home, if I’m not mistaken, in Geneva. He spoke an English so impeccably unstilted that to the English themselves it sounded haughty and condescending, as if every perfectly calibrated cadence were a rebuke to their risibly imperfect French. Stupendously erudite, an editor, publisher, anthologist, literary historian and I know not what else, he had written a series of monographs on such
petits-maîtres
of primitive pulp fiction as Jean Ray, Ernest Bramah, Sax Rohmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as a two-volume, thousand-page history of the whodunit,
Poë et Cie: Histoire du roman d’énigme de Poë au postmoderne,
* which covered all the usual suspects or, rather, all the usual detectives: Dupin, Lecoq, Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Harry Dickson, Nick Carter, Gideon Fell, etc. He was also the author of a single whodunit of his own, one I wish I had written.
    Titled simply and superbly
Fin
– the English translation,
The End,
although both literal and unavoidable, forfeits half the original’s clipped concision – it revolves around a group of American whodunit writers. One of them, we soon discover, is a serial killer, and all of them are in frantically competitive pursuit of the ‘legendary’ twist ending that wassupposedly mentioned in passing by Poe in one of his letters to Hawthorne but never used by him because he never could think of a plot to which it would constitute the logical conclusion. Needless to say, at the end of
Fin
itself, at the very moment the serial killer discovers the nature of the twist, so equally, to his own rage, is revealed