The Ending Writes Itself - Evelyn Clarke ***(*)

By Brian Clegg

V. E. Schwab and Cat Clarke (two of them as ‘Evelyn Clarke’ follows in the old tradition of crime writing duos using a single name) give us a very writerly tale: a handful of midlist authors are taken to a remote Scottish island with the challenge of completing the final book of the deceased world’s best-known crime writer.

Despite the apparently Agatha Christie like setting, putting strangers together on an isolated island (which surely could be the only reason for Stephen King likening this to Christie’s work as it bears no resemblance), this is a very American crime story, which really threw me as there is nothing to indicate that almost all the characters are Americans in a Scottish location (and frankly I much prefer UK murder mysteries). Oddly this is most jarring when everyone starts looking for Tylenol.

There are some neat ideas here – the would-be millionaire writers are from a mix of styles allowing for a certain amount of genre stereotyping (though there’s probably an element of truth in them), everyone is not who they seem, and almost inevitably things begin to deteriorate catastrophically.

I’m not a great fan of the style – each chapter is written from the point of view of a different character, which leads to way too much inner monologue – but Clarke is (are?) having great fun exploring all the pain, insecurity and dashed hope of being a midlist author who never makes it to the Sunday Times list, or wins a major award.

One thing that struck me as odd was that the characters who are also a pair writing under a single name use a male name and the man’s photo on the cover because male authors get better reviews. If this is really true, it surely is a US thing, as here in the UK I think it’s fair to say that despite a few men making it, most of the really big name mystery writers (from Allingham and Christie to the present day) are women and never needed to hide behind a pseudonym.

Not a bad book, but in a week when I’ve been consuming a whole pile of murder mysteries, it didn’t really engage me as the others did.

You can buy The Ending Writes Itself from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com or Bookshop.org.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.