Gilbert Adair

London, 1946: An actress is murdered, not just on camera but in full view of a crowded film set. Only six people had an opportunity to administer the poison yet not one of them had a conceivable motive. As Evadne Mount, bestselling crime novelist, discovers, however, all six did have a motive for committing another, earlier, still unsolved murder yet, on that occasion, not one of them had the opportunity..

Gideon is a lonely, horny young Englishman who arrives in Paris to take up a teaching post in the local Berlitz, and becomes increasingly fascinated by the intoxicating atmosphere of erotic banter and bragging in the schools all-male and virtually all-gay common room. The moment has surely arrived for him, too, to overcome his own chronic timidity and actually do what he has only ever dared fantasize about. Yet Gideon has a secret - one he is prepared to share with nobody but the reader, a secret he is finally obliged to confront, with surprising results.

Surfing the Zeitgeist is a collection of essays by Britains preeminent post-modernist. Confronted with a world in which too much is changing too fast, the attitude of most British critics is simply to ignore the fact that todays culture is in a state of constant ebullience and continue turning out, or churning out, week after week, month after month, the kind of article, a complacent conflation of artistic impressions, that could have been written thirty, fifty or a hundred years ago. Gilbert Adair is a critic with a difference. Witty, perspicacious and in love with language, he is prepared to engage with the multifarious realities of our culture - culture in the least restricted sense of the word. He is prepared to embrace them, if not unconditionally, then at least without encumbering hinself with any twinges of nostalgia for the pasts redundant credos and repertories. The essays which make up this collection - on subjects as various as postmodernism and pop music, AIDS and art movies, Tintin and the Titanic - thus constitute a uniquely stimulating record of the nineties and, like the cool, glinting surfaces of a Calder mobile, reflect the most significant fragments of our cultural agenda.

Boxing Day circa 1935. A snowed-in manor on the very edge of Dartmoor. A Christmas house-party. And overhead, in the attic, the dead body of Raymond Gentry, gossip columnist and blackmailer, shot through the heart. But the attic door is locked from the inside, its sole window is traversed by thick iron bars and, naturally, there is no sign of a murderer or a murder weapon. Fortunately (though, for the murderer, unfortunately), one of the guests is the formidable Evadne Mount, the bestselling author of countless classic whodunits. In fact, were she not its presiding sleuth, THE ACT OF ROGER MURGATROYD is exactly the type of whodunit she herself might have written.

A wonderfully funny yet tender evocation of the hedonistic 1980s. A young gay British man comes to 1980s Paris to teach English and to taste the erotic life that has eluded him in Britain. He suddenly finds himself in the midst of a sexual free-for-all beyond his wildest dreams - and then the AIDS epidemic hits. A beautiful, profane and witty novel from one of the masters of the form. ''''It stands with Hemingway or Fitzgerald''s depictions of the Jazz Age as a cool yet passionate testament to an age now vanished.'' Scotland on Sunday; ''This is a disturbing, brave and very well written book.'' Spectator; ''A stylistic tour de force... it is life, not death that this novel affirms.'' Sunday Times; ''Adair is a writer of undoubted class and has the gift of sharp portraiture needed to make a picaresque novel sing.'' Sunday Telegraph''

London 1946. An actress is murdered, not just on camera but in full view of a crowded film set. Only six people had an opportunity to administer the poison yet not one of them had a conceivable motive. As Evadne Mount, bestselling crime novelist, discovers, however, all six did have a motive for committing another, earlier, still unsolved murder yet, on that occasion, not one of them had the opportunity . . .

Boxing Day circa 1935. A snowed-in manor on the very edge of Dartmoor. A Christmas house-party. And overhead, in the attic, the dead body of Raymond Gentry, gossip columnist and blackmailer, shot through the heart. But the attic door is locked from the inside, its sole window is traversed by thick iron bars and, naturally, there is no sign of a murderer or a murder weapon.Fortunately (though, for the murderer, unfortunately), one of the guests is the formidable Evadne Mount, the bestselling author of countless classic whodunits. In fact, were she not its presiding sleuth, THE ACT OF ROGER MURGATROYD is exactly the type of whodunit she herself might have written.

The writer and professional controversialist Gustav Slavorigin is murdered in the small Swiss town of Meiringen during its annual Sherlock Holmes Festival, his body discovered with an arrow through the heart. With a price of ten million dollars on Slavorigins head, almost none of the Festivals guests can be regarded as above suspicion. Except Evadne Mount, of course, the stubborn amateur sleuth and bestselling crime novelist from Gilbert Adairs The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style. Neither of those two cases, however, prepared her for the jaw-dropping twists of this new investigation, which climaxes at Meiringens principal tourist attraction, the Reichenbach Falls - the site of Holmess fatal confrontation with his nemesis, Moriarty . . .

Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinematheque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.Denied their nightly fix when the French government suddenly orders the Cinematheques closure, Theo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in its imagery, The Dreamers (now a major film by Bernardo Bertolucci) belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.

An isolated house deep in the Cotswolds. A writers den, as dusty and gloomy as the cell of a medieval monk. Two people sit opposite each other, one of them talking, the other typing. But why, in such already sombre surroundings, does one of them wear thick dark glasses? And what, above all, has caused an unearthy shadow to fall across these two interwoven destinies?Apart from the several startling twists of its own brilliant plot, A Closed Book springs a few extra surprises on those readers who have already seen the film version. A page-turner par excellence.Evening StandardGilbert Adairs spookily gripping novel blends an Agatha Christie-like twist with a Hitchcockian plot.Marie ClaireThis short, intellectually resourceful thriller...sparklingly clever, adroit and entertaining.The SpectatorGilbert Adairs novel has an almost cinematic, even radio-play, sense of suspense, but plays tricks only possible on the page...The finale is deliciously apt and unsettling. IndependentVery readable indeed...a darkly entertaining souffle...A Closed Book positively invites an informed second reading.Independent on Sunday

Paris, mayo del 68. Los mellizos Isabelle y Théo se quedan solos en París cuando su padre, poeta, se retira a su casa de campo. Libres de la tutela de los adultos, los hermanos ponen en práctica una serie de juegos eroticos cada vez mas atrevidos. Entre ellos, la novedad se agota pronto, y deciden invitar a su apartamento a un joven americano de sexualidad ambigua. Juntos, en su refugio, pueden hacer lo que deseen con quien deseen y con la frecuencia que quieran. Un privilegio que desemboca en nuevas y extremas fantasias.