Regular readers will know that I occasionally write reviews for the Guardian and elsewhere. I will also post book reviews here from time to time…
Hazell Ward’s audacious debut opens in a self-consciously metafictional style reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, with the reader’s arrival at a Murder Mystery Party. ‘Tap lightly on the door,’ we are told. ‘They are expecting you.’
The venue is the London home of the Verreman family, scene of a still notorious murder-cum-cold case: ‘the Verreman affair’, in which professional gambler John Verreman, the 7th Earl De Verre, AKA ‘Lord Verreman’, brutally murdered the family’s nanny then attempted to kill his wife, before disappearing off the face of the Earth. If this sounds familiar, Ward’s fictional case aligns closely with the murderous circumstances associated with the 1974 disappearance of Lord Lucan, although with at least one significant difference: the fictional Verremans have only one child, David. The thirteen guests waiting with the now grown-up David in the Verreman’s large living room, are all the principal witnesses from the original (fictional) case: friends and family, coroner, blood expert, policeman, publican, etc. All of whom share names with a pantheon of legendary detective writers: Cameron McCabe, Elizabeth Mackintosh, Ronald Knox, and Nicholas Blake among them. This being a closed circle mystery, they are also – of course – suspects.
Led by David Verreman, the guests begin to piece together a familiar sequence of events: the Verremans’ separation, his financial troubles, his lying in wait in the dark for his wife but killing the nanny by mistake, his powerful friends, and so on. Initially everyone’s assumptions are confirmed – ‘Guilty!’ – but with each retelling the story starts to unravel.
The reader is first led to suppose that we are here to solve the case, but in Act 2, the ‘real’ detective appears: Max Enygma, private eye and ex-cop, who appears to have been taken prisoner by David Verreman. The Game is Murder might be inspired by a horrifying and unreachable true-crime, but as Ward reminds us, ‘Even if, heaven forbid, a novel should be based on . . . real events, the story which is captive inside the pages of the book is always fictional.’
Ward’s prose skips surefootedly between straight narrative and metafictional aside, type-written contracts, witness statements, memory games, and multiple-choice questionnaires; all punctuated by continual bickering between David Verreman and his imaginary sibling, ‘Daniel’.
Speaking at the novel’s UK launch at Wrexham Library, Ward spoke eloquently and movingly about her childhood reading, the influence of her mother’s love of detective novels, and her own longstanding interest in the history and form of the whodunnit as a literary game; an interest she had further explored while doing a creative writing MA, then PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. She also discussed the influence on her writing of Hunter S Thompson’s gonzo style, in particular its capacity for surrealism. Transport this approach to a Belgravia town house in class-ridden early-seventies Britain, and Ward’s willingness to use surreal and dreamlike imagery invokes some interesting allies. For example, David’s multiple personalities – born of his childhood trauma, and ventriloquising in turn each of the key witnesses – bring a pleasing echo of Alec Guinness’s manyfold parts in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Shades of this gently insolent vein of class-conscious British cinematic surrealism continue in Act 3, when the Belgravia basement murder scene is transformed into a courtroom, recalling the celestial trial sequences in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
Ward won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Short Story Dagger in 2023, for ‘Cast a Long Shadow’, in the eponymous anthology edited by Katherine Stansfield and Caroline Oakley (Honno, 2022). What’s additionally so enthralling about The Game is Murder is the fearlessness with which she uses her encyclopaedic knowledge of the conventions and history of detective fiction to challenge received wisdoms about the ultimate unsolved case via her own fictional proxies, with precise storytelling nous. It makes for an exhilarating, playful read: bold, propulsive, and uncanny.
With its clever pitting of reader against author and narrator, and Enygma’s mistrust of accepted accounts, Ward’s approach goes beyond Golden Age nostalgia to find a sharper edge, in places reminiscent of Marguerite Duras: ‘“What we need to discover,”’ says Enygma at one point, ‘“are the questions that were not asked.”’ In so doing, and by focusing in on her murder victim, the nanny Sally Gardner, ‘A woman who had a life as valuable as that of any titled lord or lady’, Ward’s novel carefully illuminates class and confirmation biases in the original (historical and fictional) investigations, before introducing a compelling alternative theory. Developing the notion that myths about criminal motivation gain legitimacy in inverse proportion to lack of evidence, Hazell Ward’s ingenious dénouement sees Max Enygma reach a shocking yet plausible conclusion that would satisfy any Agatha Christie fan.
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The Game is Murder, Hazell Ward. Penguin Michael Joseph, £16.99
My Irish Times review of The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (£)
My Guardian review of The Penguin Book of Oulipo edited by Philip Terry
My Guardian review of Slow Motion Ghosts by Jeff Noon
Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest (Faber, 2018)…
Piece of Paper Press & tonywhite.london 
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