Product Description

Schoolboys are disappearing all over Aberystwyth and nobody knows why. Louie Knight, the town's private investigator, soon realizes that it is going to take more than a double ripple from Sospan, the philosopher cum ice-cream seller, to help find out what is happening to these boys and whether or not Lovespoon, the Welsh teacher, Grand Wizard of the Druids and controller of the town, is more than just a sinister bully. And just who was Gwenno Guevara?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46161 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.

Review
'Spot on. This rollicking black comedy should be ludicrous but isn't. Huge fun' ARENA

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

A durable delight...
I discovered Aberystwyth Mon Amour a couple of years ago in Waterstone's bookshop in Chichester. I laughed so much reading the first page that, having made a particularly public exhibition of myself, my only recourse was to buy the bloody book. I was a postgraduate student at UCW Aberystwyth in the late 80's and Pryce's book is a wonderfully distorted portrait of that pleasant but remote university town, viewed through the prism of a 1940's roman noir. But there's a serious undercurrent too about the folly and the legacy of colonial wars, and the characters are wonderfully named: a lisping thug called Valentine, a gin-soaked dwarf called Pickel and a tart-cum-chanteuse, Myfanwy Montez. Wonderful stuff - someone should film it (Jeremy Northam as Louie Knight?). The sequels, Last Tango in Aberystwyth and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberyswyth are great too.

Original and enjoyable
Aberystwyth is not as you know (or imagine it). For a start it is run by crime lords; the druids. School boys are going missing and Myfanwy Monetez the star of the local nightclub asks the local private investigator, Louie Knight, to help find her missing cousin.

The language and imagery is great (in how many books can you find corsetry or a tea cosy as clues in solving the mystery), but yet I don't think it quite matches Jasper Fforde. However anyone who likes original quirky books such as Fforde or Pratchett will enjoy this.

Philip Pullman Was Right!
Read this book! I did, taking advice from someone rather more trustworthy than I - Philip Pullman, no less, who was asked by a child at the Hay Festival if he ever read anyone else's books, and replied earnestly, yes, he was reading a great one just now - Aberystwyth Mon Amour.

OK, coming from Mid Wales and knowing all the places helps, but even if you didn't this would be just such an enjoyable read. It combines at least three levels of brilliance: it is a breath-takingly funny spoof on Chandler, or maybe even on Mickey Spillane - it gets pleasantly trashy in places. It is also a spoof on Welsh culture, and the wealth of in-jokes there is amazing. Secondly, its very surreal and black comedy cloak a plot which, dammit, is actually quite exciting - I wanted to know whodunnit! And thirdly, there are moments of real tenderness and insight into the deeper aspects of human emotions - love, sex, war, guilt. Oh, and best of all, a totally accurate and identifiable-with perspective on bastard P.E. teachers, may they all rot in hell.

I completely loved it, and read it in just two sittings. A truly remarkable first novel.