Yesterday’s Sunday mystery was The Book of Murder by the Argentine writer Guillermo Martinez. The Book of Murder is a very clever meditation on cause and chance, fate and will, punishment and vengeance, all told within the story of a series of murders. The novel is a labyrinthine story with possibilities at every turn, possibilities for forgiveness and redemption, or for condemnation and on-going revenge. And the biggest twist of all is the possibility that not one of these deaths was planned, but that each was just a horrible coincidence of fate, a chance and random occurrence of life extinguished.
The plot begins with a phone call from the past. The narrator takes us back to when he needed a typist to help him meet the deadline submission for a novel he’d been working on. He finds a young, mildly attractive woman but she is only available for a month because the author she usually works for — much acclaimed and more successful than our narrator — will be back soon and she must return to his novels and his dictations. Our narrator attempts to seduce her (or vice versa: the reader decides and I would say it was him), thereby setting off a chain of events that are either random deaths or planned murders of vengeance or a mixture of both. Again, it is up to the reader to decide.
Every event in this story can be traced back to an injustice, real or perceived, resulting in anger and a fervent desire for justice or for revenge. The mystery in the novel is two-fold: first, whether the events lead to wilful murder or are the deaths just a horrible coincidence; and two, if the deaths are planned and executed, who is plotting the revenge cycle and why? Having finished the book, I have no idea but I was captivated reading this bizarre mystery of a book.
This is a mind-game playing novel, with twists of reality and unreality, truths and untruths. I read it through two sittings — getting up only for food — and emerged in a kind of stupor, caught in a state of cautious disbelief and paranoia. Martinez takes his time with the story but is quick with the characters and the twists, and his parleying of the rhythm adds to the dreamlike quality of the book. This novel is strange and mysterious beyond the realms of a classic whodunit and in the end, we’re still not sure whodunit but we are satisfied nonetheless.
