Aberystwyth Mon Amour

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.

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If Raymond Chandler had lived in Wales... - Rated
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 - Rated
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.

Silly - Rated
I readt most of this book on a long train journey when I had nothing else to read or do. In any other circumstances, I would never have persevered with it. I didn't find it funny. I can;t find much wit in it at all. To my way of thinking, it just got sillier and sillier.

A durable delight... - Rated
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.

Tickled pink in Aberystwyth! - Rated
This is the funniest series of books I have read in a long time. The character's names are divine (Herod Jenkins, the PE Teacher was my favourite) and despite it being completely ridiculous, you really do get caught up in the story! It definitely helps if you're Welsh, or know Wales/Welsh people, because everything will just seem that bit funnier to you. I kept phoning my Dad (who still lives in Wales) to tell him the "laugh out loud" bits, but found them so hysterical I could hardly relay them down the phoneline for laughing - he's now borrowing my set of books and finally getting the punchlines that were lost in my fits of giggles. Malcolm Pryce deserves a medal for these - Da iawn! (Very good!)I can't wait for the next installment - "Don't cry for me Aberystwyth" - due out in Spring 2007!