Malcolm Pryce (1) (1960–)

Father Christmas has been brutally murdered and mutilated in rather a shocking way which quite upsets Mrs Dinorwic-Jones when she arrives to draw the chalk outline around the body. Someone purporting to be the Queen of Denmark contacts Aberystwyth's most famous (and only) private detectives Louie Knight and his partner Calamity Jane wanting them to find out who did it. Everybody knows Father Christmas comes from Greenland and with that being an administrative division of her country, the show more Queen doesn't want the crime to go unpunished. Because business has been a little slow and the money arrives in his account, Louie feels compelled to take the case. Calamity also takes the opportunity to test out some new techniques she's been picking up from the Pinkerton's manual she's been reading recently. The biggest clue they have is the name, Hoffmann, written in blood by the victim just before he died. It seems to point to the capture of Adolf Eichmann and one of the darkest moments of the war in Patagonia that none of the veterans want to talk about along with the exploits of Clip, the Welsh equivalent of Lassie, of which a new cut of his most famous movie, Bark of the Covenant, has just been released. Clip certainly isn't going to be talking though that may have more to do with him being stuffed and mounted in a glass case in the museum rather than general reluctance. But what's it all got to do with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?

This is the fourth book and probably darkest of the series so far. The noir-ish tropes are all present and accounted for but while the humour is still prevalent it's much blacker in nature this go around and one character's death is quite brutal and shocking. The prose is once again excellent and while the plot heads out towards the surreal it never quite reaches the boundaries of being too much. An excellent addition to the series and probably my favourite so far. show less

The conceit of setting a noir detective thriller in Aberystwyth is a very clever idea: it would be funny in any conditions and it's hilarious if you know the place a little.

Pryce does a pretty good job of keeping it up for the length of a book, although he's clearly straining the limits of inventiveness to find new jokes by the time he gets to the end, resulting in a bit of silliness. The whole thing works in a way that Jasper Fforde's stories generally don't, because, however fantastic the show more background, the characters take it seriously and have enough psychological depth to them to convince the reader to take it seriously too. show less

The notion of Raymond Chandler’s mean Los Angeles streets being translated to Aberystwyth seems far-fetched, but Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth is not the small seaside town that some of us know.

Instead, it is more like a part of a Wales from an alternative history, where the druids are a mafia-like organisation, where religion - extreme chapel - still holds sway, where women still wear stovepipe hats, and where Wales lost control of Patagonia in a disastrous colonial war in the mid-1960s. show more The plots tick over relentlessly, and the private eye, Louie Knight - like other PIs, from Philip Marlowe to Harry Moseby - is usually several steps behind the action. The body count is high and the writing often hilarious.

Instead of magical realism, this is more like magical noir. The clue may lie in the author’s biography, which may be true: Pryce, brought up in Shrewsbury and Aberystwyth, has lived and worked abroad since the early 1990s, and currently lives in Bangkok. His Wales is the parts distilled through a haze of memory.

The fourth in the series, Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth, connects Adolf Eichmann to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, without leaving the town - or at least the immediate area. The first, Aberystwyth Mon Amour, is probably the most ‘Welsh’ of the books, and culminates in a parody of the dambusters’ raid over a Welsh reservoir. And I promise that knowing this about the plot will not be a spoiler. show less

Absolute bloody genius. Funny, yes, but also gripping and at times achingly poignant. Start from the absurdist premise of an alternative-reality Hollywoodesque noir version of Abersytwyth, with Louie Knight as this sort of latter-day Welsh Sam Spade. People it with all the series’ usual characters: Sospan, the ice-cream seller; Eeyore – Louie’s dad, the donkey-ride man; Inspector Llunos; Mrs Llantrisant and the evil school games-master-turned-circus-strongman Herod Jenkins. Then weave show more around it a tale of a decades-long search for a lost macguffin that takes you from Butch and Sundance to Adolf Eichmann to Welsh Patagonia and home again ... a search as mind boggling as that for the Maltese Falcon, and ultimately as futile. And underneath it all ripple the undercurrents of loves lost: Louie’s adored Myfanwy, forever within sight but kept just out of reach by the knife-twists of fate. I must admit I had to stifle a tear or two in the final pages. show less