Aberystwyth Mon Amour 
Περιγραφή προϊόντος: - 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. . --Barry Forshaw
Customer Ratings: - A lost opportunity, could have been great. I was disappointed with this book, and the series, because I had previously read the Jasper Fforde books and so found these wanting. Maybe if I had read these first......? All the ingredients are there but Pryce does not, for me, produce a tasty enough (sorry!) end product. He drifts off part way through rambling explanations and never quite gets back. He leaps from place to place and thought to thought without quite taking the reader with him. I felt that the story could have been told more convincingly in a shorter time. Also his attempts at literary humour don t work as well as Fforde s but come across as pretentious. I did try, I really wanted it to all work out, I stuck with it until halfway through the third book before I gave up - which was the first book I have failed to finish since getting 2/3rds of the way through War and Peace!
- Funny witty and clever. That about describes the book, if you like the quirky genre then defiantly give this ago. It is very easy reading, which allows the mind to wander of into another world, but not puerile fantasy. A fantastic commuter book, entertaining but not deep easy to read on the train.
- The mean streets of West Wales. The main character, a down-at-heel private eye, hangs out at the ice-cream sellers and the 24-hour whelk stall in an alternative Aberystwyth where Wales has (it seems) long been independent and has fought a colonial war in Patagonia. Nowadays the Druids run the show and Swansea is the place to get your smart suits. The local nightclub singer and femme fatale comes to his office to ask him to investigate a disappearance - which leads to the usual duplicities and multiple murders and unmaskings of mild-mannered characters as psychopaths, until the town itself is threaten by cataclysm. He s helped by his donkey-loving dad, owner of a `secret caravan , and by his enthusiastic schoolgirl assistant, and hindered by the local wiseguys, the police and his neighbour.
I didn t love this as much as many people here, I guess partly because I ll have missed the majority of the Welsh cultural and political jokes. But parodying Chandler-speak has been extensively done before and the dialogue is really lapidary by Chandler standards. And the running joke about a small seaside town being a den of vice ran out of steam for me. What an absolutely awesome title though!
- Pryce, where have you been all my life?. After spending many a summer around Aberystwyth in Borth, it was with a twang of nostalgia that this book was purchased but it s the best decision I ve made in a long time.
The witty Louie Knight exploded into my imagination as I recalled holidays on Wales west coast, only this time there wasn t any rain. Instead there was call girls, murders and rum. Lots of rum.
Knight is Aberystwyth s witty PI, his father runs the donkey walks along the beach and his main confidante s the ice cream man.
The dark underworld of Aberystwyth is controlled by the Druids, who run the roost and are intent on raising a long-last land from the ocean.
The people of Aber don t mess with these guys in their sharp Italian suits and blacked-out Maestros, but Louie Knight s different.
This tail of witty twists and turns promises to have you chuckling with glee at Louie s one-liners, while keeping you on your toes with a fantastic mystery.
Keep up the good work Pryce.
Aberystwyth Mon Amour
- Witty Mystery. The first novel, of five so far, to feature Aberystwyth s only private eye, Louis Knight, is set in a world of whelk-stalls and ice-cream stands, of vigorous fighters for temperance and sexy dancing girls, of murderous teachers and sinister Druids.
In this mean world, several school boys have gone missing, including the notorious bully Evans the Boot, and the hugely intelligent Brainbocs. But what do all these boys have in common? Finding out will pit Knight against the Druids who control the town, the teachers who terrorized his childhood, the police, who look none-too-kindly on Private Eyes, and Mrs Llantrisant, Knight s house-keeper who is determined to keep the front step clean, no matter what.
This is a witty, fast-paced tale with the odd twist in the tale, promising much for the following stories in the series.
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Aberystwyth Mon Amour (ID: 0747557861)
