Aberystwyth Mon Amour 
Product Description: - 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: - Pretty entertaining and enjoyably absurd. The joke of Aberystwyth Mon Amour is to take the cliches of private detective/film noir/1950s crime novels and end them into a tacky Welsh seaside setting. It seems pretty simple and it sounds like it would wear thin pretty quickly, but Malcolm Pryce manages to weave a very entertaining book out of it by keeping up the pace and throwing more and more absurd ideas into the mix at strategic moments, just as you think you know what s going on.
It s a book that made me smile, but I didn t find there were any laugh-out-loud moments in it the way other people have said they did. After this one I d definitely read another Malcolm Pryce book, though I don t know how much longer the novelty of the Aberystwyth can be milked for. - Wonderfully Bizarre. The first Aberystwyth book I encountered was the fourth one in the series. I decided not to read that one and bought the first book instead. I m glad I did.
Malcolm Pryce s Aberystwyth is so utterly bizarre and so unlike anything I have ever encountered, I m glad I gave myself the chance to savour each episode in order. The plot is convoluted and as far-fetched as the alter-Aberystwyth world of Pryce s imagination, but that hardly matters. The fun in the book is the noir, Chandler-esque prose set against the backdrop of a Welsh seaside tourist town. Pryce has the genre nailed perfectly--the dark, terse lines, the pervading sense of danger and decay and the hard-boiled detective with a haunted past. Classic stuff.
The only caveat is it helps to be Welsh, or know a lot about the Welsh culture. While it might be possible to enjoy the book without such background knowledge, the more you know, the more `in jokes you will get. - Interesting Oddity. I ve never been much of a fan of the noir genre, but having said that I realise I ve read most of Simenon s, Christie s and Stanley Gardner s so what do I know!!!
I knew I wasn t in for a true noir novel given the slapstick style of the cover, which incidentally, is fantastic, makes you want to take the book. Isn t that what covers are supposed to do?
A told tale of crime, murders, drinking dens, femme fatales and cool as cucumber private eyes of dubious moral fibre. And yes, the book also makes you want to give up your day job, down a macintosh and become a private eye.
However, this is no Maltese Falcon. Druids? A dwarf? Witty one liners? Folk tales?. That s more Pratchett than Hammet. It s a bit of a mix that at times works and other times leaves you wondering whether this is not a joke. But take it for what it is, and perhaps like with the Discworld novel, the more you read, the more you learn to love Louie Knight. I think I will, the next three novels are in the post... - Funny Noir - deliciously black and wonderfully surreal. I was reluctant to read this book, I ll readily admit it. I d been passing it by in bookshops for a few years, amused by the title but predisposed to see it as nothing more than silly gibberish. However, after my fiancee started reading Jasper Fforde and I followed accordingly, I decided to give this a try. It s far more subtle than Fforde, not better or worse, but different. Following the first person narrative conventions of Chandler and Hammett s excellent stories whilst simultaneously offering a ludicrously skewed view of life in a British seaside town thats rather past it s best. I was five chapters in before I realised just how good a writer Pryce is. Can t wait to read Louie Knight s further adventures!
- If Raymond Chandler had lived in Wales.... The first of the Louie Knight series of wonderfully funny Chandleresque noir crime books set in Aberystwyth.
Ice cream parlours replace dive bars and information can be bought with a 50p piece in an Aberystwyth that s run by the Druids and where schoolboys are disappearing and turning up dead. Local chanteuse Myfamwy Montez gets private eye Louie Knight on the case and he ends up with a donkey s head in his bed!
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Aberystwyth Mon Amour (ID: 0747557861)
