Review: Last Tango in Aberystwyth (2003) by Malcolm Pryce

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I took a break from my noir studies to read another of Malcolm Pryce's well done and often amusing pastiches on the hardboiled PI genre, Last Tango in Aberystwyth. (2003). This is the second in the series, set three years after the first, Aberystwyth Mon Amor, which I wrote about here. People and events from the first book return so don't start with Last Tango in Aberystwyth.

Oh yeah, and you might see the series referred to a Aberystwyth Noir. It isn't noir.

This time Louie Knight and his 16 year old partner Calamity Jane have been hired to find Dean Morgan who teaches at the Faculty of Undertaking in Lampeter. The Dean has vanished after uncharacteristically announcing that he was taking a few days off. Then he was spotted leaving the notorious Excelsior Hotel in Aberystwyth and apparently headed for the bread-and-breakfast ghetto by the harbour., populated by ventriloquists and out-of-work clowns. Soon Louie is up to his fedora in Druid assassins, prostitutes, an out of town detective who hates private detectives, a porn star, and a conspiracy that goes far beyond a fuddy-duddy academic presumably out for more than a bit of extracurricular fun.

While Aberystwyth is a real seaside own in Wales, Pryce's version is skewed in a way worthy of Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde. He populates it with little details that make you go what! Like who knew that you could be a travelling shawl salesman or doily trader. Or that you could lose yourself in the strange congruence of a toffee-and-opium-apple den. Prostitutes are identified by their top hat and organized crime is run by the Druids and Meals-on-Wheels. Fresh faced girls from the country come to make it big in What the Butler Saw porn movies. Pryce also a darker theme running through the books —at least the two I've read so far : the effects of the war to hold onto the Wesh colony of Patagonia fought by the Welsh Foreign Legion (think the French in Indochina). If you ever wondered how a book could make ventriloquists and sinister clowns (OK this last one might not be a stretch) then Pryce is your man. He is really effective in building out his bizarro Wales and it's fun watching how he makes it work.

I think really good pastiche ican be difficult to pull off — authors can try too hard —but Pryce's Chandler-esque pastiche of Philip Marlowe is very nicely done. Even his last name, Knight, is a homage to Marlowe who is portrayed as a good and honest man who does the right things regardless of consequences. He has Marlowe's stubbornness, wry, cynical, and sardonic observations and really good wisecracks. After his client leaves, Louie muses:

I was sitting staring at the ceiling doing a rough piece of mental arithmetic — it's an exercise I frequently do with my clients and involves guessing certain building dimensions then working out the approximate size of the client's belfry and then computing the amount of bats in it. Then I put clients in order of bat population. Gretel had just gone straight into the charts a number one.

He could have just said she was nuts.

Meeting the local Catholic priest who might be more intimately involved in the case than one would expect of a man of the cloth:

'Still fighting the good fight, are we Father?' I asked cheerfully.
'Oh struggling on on, struggling on, ' he said, the words delivered with the affected soul-weariness of the man who dons the cloak of the martyr and finds he likes the fit so much he gets a matching pair of gloves.

You get what he really thinks of the good Father.

One difference in this pastiche is that Louie has a partner. Of course it wouldn't be an ordinary partner but is a 16 ​¹⁄₂ year old girl named Calamity Jane who, truth be told, embraces the hardboiled detective life more than Louie does.

So, despite the little humorous oddities, these are still hardboiled detective stories at the core and if you are a fan of the genre and like a touch of the weird you should give them a try. Yes it is hardboiled with a lighter touch but there is still meat to the stories.



Keywords: hardboiled, pastiche, Chandler-esque, crime fiction, Welsh fiction