Gilbert Adair – författare

Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in its imagery, The Dreamers (now a major film by Bernardo Bertolucci) belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.

London 1946. An actress is murdered, not just on camera but in full view of a crowded film set. Only six people had an opportunity to administer the poison yet not one of them had a conceivable motive. As Evadne Mount, bestselling crime novelist, discovers, however, all six did have a motive for committing another, earlier, still unsolved murder yet, on that occasion, not one of them had the opportunity . . .

An isolated house deep in the Cotswolds. A writer's den, as dusty and gloomy as the cell of a medieval monk. Two people sit opposite each other, one of them talking, the other typing. But why, in such already sombre surroundings, does one of them wear thick dark glasses? And what, above all, has caused an unearthy shadow to fall across these two interwoven destinies?Apart from the several startling twists of its own brilliant plot, A Closed Book springs a few extra surprises on those readers who have already seen the film version. 'A page-turner par excellence.' Evening Standard'Gilbert Adair's spookily gripping novel blends an Agatha Christie-like twist with a Hitchcockian plot.' Marie Claire'This short, intellectually resourceful thriller...sparklingly clever, adroit and entertaining.' The Spectator'Gilbert Adair's novel has an almost cinematic, even radio-play, sense of suspense, but plays tricks only possible on the page...The finale is deliciously apt and unsettling.' Independent'Very readable indeed...a darkly entertaining soufflé...A Closed Book positively invites an informed second reading.' Independent on Sunday

London 1946. An actress is murdered, not just on camera but in full view of a crowded film set. Only six people had an opportunity to administer the poison yet not one of them had a conceivable motive. As Evadne Mount, bestselling crime novelist, discovers, however, all six did have a motive for committing another, earlier, still unsolved murder yet, on that occasion, not one of them had the opportunity . . .

The writer and professional controversialist Gustav Slavorigin is murdered in the small Swiss town of Meiringen during its annual Sherlock Holmes Festival, his body discovered with an arrow through the heart. With a price of ten million dollars on Slavorigin's head, almost none of the Festival's guests can be regarded as above suspicion. Except Evadne Mount, of course, the stubborn amateur sleuth and bestselling crime novelist from Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style. Neither of those two cases, however, prepared her for the jaw-dropping twists of this new investigation, which climaxes at Meiringen's principal tourist attraction, the Reichenbach Falls - the site of Holmes's fatal confrontation with his nemesis, Moriarty . . .

Gideon is a lonely, horny young Englishman who arrives in Paris to take up a teaching post in the local Berlitz, and becomes increasingly fascinated by the intoxicating atmosphere of erotic banter and bragging in the school's all-male and virtually all-gay common room. The moment has surely arrived for him, too, to overcome his own chronic timidity and actually do what he has only ever dared fantasize about. Yet Gideon has a secret - one he is prepared to share with nobody but the reader, a secret he is finally obliged to confront, with surprising results.

Boxing Day circa 1935. A snowed-in manor on the very edge of Dartmoor. A Christmas house-party. And overhead, in the attic, the dead body of Raymond Gentry, gossip columnist and blackmailer, shot through the heart. But the attic door is locked from the inside, its sole window is traversed by thick iron bars and, naturally, there is no sign of a murderer or a murder weapon.Fortunately (though, for the murderer, unfortunately), one of the guests is the formidable Evadne Mount, the bestselling author of countless classic whodunits. In fact, were she not its presiding sleuth, THE ACT OF ROGER MURGATROYD is exactly the type of whodunit she herself might have written.

Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in its imagery, The Dreamers (now a major film by Bernardo Bertolucci) belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.

Surfing the Zeitgeist is a collection of essays by Britain's preeminent post-modernist. Confronted with a world in which too much is changing too fast, the attitude of most British critics is simply to ignore the fact that today's culture is in a state of constant ebullience and continue turning out, or churning out, week after week, month after month, the kind of article, a complacent conflation of artistic impressions, that could have been written thirty, fifty or a hundred years ago. Gilbert Adair is a critic with a difference. Witty, perspicacious and in love with language, he is prepared to engage with the multifarious realities of our culture - culture in the least restricted sense of the word. He is prepared to embrace them, if not unconditionally, then at least without encumbering hinself with any twinges of nostalgia for the past's redundant credos and repertories. The essays which make up this collection - on subjects as various as postmodernism and pop music, AIDS and art movies, Tintin and the Titanic - thus constitute a uniquely stimulating record of the nineties and, like the cool, glinting surfaces of a Calder mobile, reflect the most significant fragments of our cultural agenda.

Weihnachten 1935. Ein verschneites Herrenhaus am Rande von Dartmoor in der englischen Graf­schaft Devon. Freunde des Hauses haben sich bei Colonel Roger ffolkes (sic!) zum Festessen versammelt - oben, im Dachgeschoss, liegt die Leiche von Raymond Gentry, einem Klatsch­kolumnisten und Erpresser. In seinem Herzen steckt eine Kugel. Aber die Tür zum Dachzim­ mer war von innen verschlossen, das einzige Fenster ist mit dicken Eisenstangen vergittert, und vom Täter oder seiner Waffe fehlt jede Spur. Glücklicherweise (wenngleich nicht für den Mörder) ist einer der Gäste an diesem Abend die fabelhafte Evadne Mount, erfolgreiche Au­torin zahlloser klassischer Krimis, ihre Speziali­tät: locked in mysteries. Wer also sollte geeigneter sein, den seltsamen Dachbodenmord zu lösen? Der unsympathische Scotland­-Yard­-Inspektor Trubshaw mit Schnauzbart und Pfeife? Eher un­wahrscheinlich.

Die Schauspielerin Cora Rutherford, eine alte Freundin von Evadne Mount, wird vergiftet. Nicht nur vor laufender Kamera, sondern auch vor den Augen aller am Filmset. Sechs Menschen hatten die Gelegenheit, sie zu töten, aber keiner der Tatverdächtigen hat ein Motiv. In den Verhören fällt eines auf: Alle am Set hassen den Regisseur Alastair Farjeon - fettleibig, unerträglich, insbesondere Frauen gegenüber, und so eitel, dass er in jedem seiner Filme einen Kurzauftritt haben muss. Und Miss Mount, immer in Begleitung ihres treuen Partners Eustace Trubshawe, einst Chefinspektor von Scotland Yard, stößt auf ein anderes, früheres Verbrechen. Auch das ungelöst, für diese Tat allerdings hatten alle am Filmset ein Motiv - aber eigentlich keine Gelegenheit. Ein gemeiner, genialer Mord, für dessen Aufklärung es eine geniale Ermittlerin braucht!