Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12061 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Malcolm Pryce's witty and scabrous comic thriller Aberystwyth Mon Amour is an original and diverting entry into the field of black-comedy writing--a genre which has enjoyed a long and healthy lineage, from Voltaire through Evelyn Waugh to the present day although lately it is pretty well the preserve of crime fiction. Making the unexciting Welsh town of Aberystwyth seem as fascinating and dangerous for his hardboiled 'tec as the mean streets of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles is a daunting task but it's a trick Pryce pulls off with considerable aplomb.

Throughout Aberystwyth, schoolboys are vanishing without trace, and Louie Knight, the town's only private investigator, becomes involved when he has a visit from the exotic singer Myfanwy Montez (love the name!). She is the star of Wales' most outrageous nightclub, and is keen for Louie to track down her missing cousin, known as Evans the Boot. Aided by such eccentrics as philosopher-cum-ice-cream seller Sospan, Louie finds himself encountering a plot quite as labyrinthine as any which exercised Philip Marlowe. Surely Lovespoon, Grand Wizard of the Druids and the town's most powerful citizen, had a hand in the disappearances?

Nothing is quite as it seems in Pryce's outrageous and irreverent tale, which functions as a canny thriller as much as a wry parody. A good deal of the humour comes from relocating Chandler's sun-baked California locales to a parochial Welsh town, and all the clichés are ruthlessly exploded: Louie is visited in his seedy office by his sultry female client in time-honoured fashion. But it's the language, which leaps off the page, that really marks Pryce out as a stylist of no mean skill, and his bizarre refraction of Marlowe-speak is a real delight:

By the time I reached the whelk stall the drizzle had finally made up its mind and turned into rain, driving forward hard off the sea and into my face. The booth was quiet: no-one there except a kid in charge--a pimply adolescent in a grubby white coat and a silly cardboard hat. I ordered the special and waited, as the youth kept a wary eye on me; trouble was never far away at this time of night.

Daily Telegraph
'Pryce's book promises to do for the reputation of Aberystwyth what Irvine Welsh has done for Edinburgh'

Books Quarterly
"novelist Malcom Pryce has done a brilliant job of deconstructing the private eye novel and throwing the pieces together to come up with this sublime pastiche,"

Customer Reviews

Funny Noir - deliciously black and wonderfully surreal
I was reluctant to read this book, I'll readily admit it. I'd been passing it by in bookshops for a few years, amused by the title but predisposed to see it as nothing more than silly gibberish. However, after my fiancee started reading Jasper Fforde and I followed accordingly, I decided to give this a try. It's far more subtle than Fforde, not better or worse, but different. Following the first person narrative conventions of Chandler and Hammett's excellent stories whilst simultaneously offering a ludicrously skewed view of life in a British seaside town thats rather past it's best. I was five chapters in before I realised just how good a writer Pryce is. Can't wait to read Louie Knight's further adventures!

If Raymond Chandler had lived in Wales...
The first of the Louie Knight series of wonderfully funny Chandleresque noir crime books set in Aberystwyth.

Ice cream parlours replace dive bars and information can be bought with a 50p piece in an Aberystwyth that's run by the Druids and where schoolboys are disappearing and turning up dead. Local chanteuse Myfamwy Montez gets private eye Louie Knight on the case and he ends up with a donkey's head in his bed!

Refund please
I had this book recommended to me as I am fan of the Thursday Next series and was looking for something equally original and amusing. I just about made it to Chapter 2 and then felt life was just too short to continue with it. It is not remotely amusing and there are far too many in-jokes. Don't waste your money.