It was a dark and stormy night . . .

It is hardly surprising if from time to time a contemporary novelist should attempt to write a pastiche of Agatha Christie, if only in the hope of solving the mystery of her egregious popular success and its longevity. Year after year this gentlyreared Edwardian lady produced stories of sometimes fiendish ingenuity which were seized on eagerly by a world readership with the avidity of druggies awaiting their annual fix; murder without disturbing horror, loss without pain and class-consciousness without guilt. While prestigious prize-winning novels drop out of print, Christie’s paperbacks are still ranged on bookstore shelves. Gilbert Adair sets out his intention clearly, to pay homage both to the Golden Age of the English murder mystery and to its most brilliant practitioner.

So how far has he succeeded? The title is more reminiscent of a short story by Dickens than a Christie title, but the setting is totally in character. We are in ffolkes Manor on the edge of Dartmoor on Boxing Day morning, 1935. Colonel Roger ffolkes and his wife have assembled a house party for the festive season, including Evadne Mount, a crime novelist with nine novels and three plays to her credit, her actress friend, Cora Rutherford, the local doctor and his wife, the parson and his wife, and Colonel ffolkes’s long- standing factotum, Farrar. Their comfortable if boring Christmas Eve was disturbed when Colonel ffolkes’s daughter, Selina, arrived with her boyfriend, the unfortunately named Donald Duckworth, bringing with them an uninvited and unwelcome guest, Raymond Gentry. Gentry — whose very choice of car, a Hispano-Suiza, is deplored by his fellow guests as vulgarly ostentatious — is an unmitigated cad and potential blackmailer who is clearly destined not to leave ffolkes Manor alive.