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Cutesy Noir
Sep. 29th, 2020 08:34 pmApr 2020
Aberystwyth Mon Amour - Malcolm Pryce – Bloomsbury, 2001
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This is a book that should have worked for me but didn't. Louie Knight, Aberystwyth's premier private eye, is hired by local beauty Myfanwy Montez to investigate the death of her cousin, Evans the Boot. He is the latest in a series of schoolboys to disappear. Could their teacher, Mr Lovespoon, have something to do with it?
As you can probably tell, this book falls firmly into the sub-genre that I call cutesy noir, in which seedy investigations by a world-weary detective take place in a humorous or fantastical setting. Other examples include Terry Pratchett's Guards novels and Colin Cotterill's Killed at the Whim of a Hat. Unfortunately, for me this is a genre-meld that just doesn't work. The re-purposing of Welsh kitsch to darker purposes is an entertaining concept that would make for a good light comic fantasy (imagine what Diana Wynne Jones could have done with it), but when your plot is an investigation into the grimmer aspects of human character, the jokes are bound to fall flat. Conversely, a good noir tale relies on having compelling characters with strong reasons for what they do, but that is not really possible when any motivational plausibility or depth is undermined by whimsical world-building. The end result is a book that is too dark to be funny and too superficial to be interesting.
