And Then There Was No One полностью

To Agatha Christie,

the undisputed queen of crime fiction

‘My only pyjama hat! You should have taken the other turn to the lunatic asylum.’

‘If I have made mistake, the apologize is terrific. But if this is not the lunatic asylum what are you doing here, my esteemed friend?’

FRANK RICHARDS, Billy Bunter’s Double

As I peered, stripped naked and traversed by opaline rays, into another, far deeper mirror, I saw the whole vista of my Russian books and was satisfied and even thrilled by what I saw: Tamara, my first novel (1925): a girl at sunrise in the mist of an orchard. A grandmaster betrayed in Pawn Takes Queen. Plenilune, a moonburst of verse. Camera Lucida, the spy’s mocking eye among the meek blind. The Red Top Hat of decapitation in a country of total injustice. And my best in the series: young poet writes prose on a Dare.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Look at the Harlequins!

Note: Confronted with the eternally vexed question of footnotes versus endnotes, I have opted for the former. If footnotes resemble the subtitles of a foreign-language film, the repeated recourse to endnotes may be compared to obliging the spectator of that film to dash out of the auditorium every ten minutes to consult a bilingual phrase-book. Neither is entirely satisfactory, but I know which, as a reader, I prefer. G. A.

Gustav Slavorigin (born July 4, 1955, died September 11, 2011) was murdered in the small Swiss town of Meiringen on the third day of its Sherlock Holmes Festival. That much is in the public domain. Nor, I imagine, will it come as news to my readers that it was in Meiringen’s museum of Sherlockiana that his body was found by the festival’s organisers, alarmed at his prolonged absence from a formal reception of which he was the guest of honour. As everybody also knows, he had an arrow through his heart.

Even before the peculiar circumstances of his death enhaloed his name with a morbid new aura, he had of course been the object of fierce speculation by Britain’s and the world’s media, and if there are readers out there discouraged by the prospect of having the sensational if stale details of ‘the Slavorigin affair’ rehearsed yet again my advice is to ignore this Prologue and proceed at once to page 23, where Chapter One awaits them. I am alive to the danger of redundancy. But I do feel that, if what I am about to relate is to be adequately contextualised, it will be necessary, at the risk of boring a reader or two, to narrate not only the private history but the public prehistory of those events which drew to their dreadful climax in the Bernese Oberland. Short as this tour d’horizon will be, I still wish to apologise in advance, as Pascal did in one of his letters, for not having taken the time to make it shorter.

Slavorigin was actually born in Sofia, capital of Communist Bulgaria. (An unfunny joke which none the less pursued him throughout his adult life was that, although he impressed strangers meeting him for the first time as being as quintessentially English as the Prince of Wales, he was in reality, ho ho, of ‘Slav origin’.*) His banker father, however, was sufficiently well-off and, more to the point, sufficiently well-connected to emigrate out of that unhappy land if and when he pleased. Hence Gustav himself became a Londoner at the age of four and, except for his student years, remained one until his death. His gap year, incidentally, and much to the amusement of the braying upper-class lefties who comprised his set, he spent ‘roughing it’, I recall him quipping, as the pampered guest of family acquaintances in Amagansett, Long Island.