52 LISTENER MARCH 10 2018
BOOKS&CULTURE
by DANYL MCLAUCHLANT
here’s a story about the first
film adaptation of The Big Sleep,
Raymond Chandler’s famously
complicated, groundbreaking mys-
tery. Midway through filming, Humphrey
Bogart and Howard Hawks got into an
argument about one of the many deaths.
Did the chauffeur commit suicide or was
he murdered? They checked with the
screenwriter, who thought it was murder
but wasn’t sure, so they telegrammed the
author, who replied, “Damned if I know.”
There are more than seven deaths in
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle,
Stuart Turton’s time-travelling, body-
hopping murder mystery: there are
beatings, shootings, stabbings, drownings,abductions, disappearances, suicides,
murders-disguised-as-suicides and suicides-
disguised-as-murders. This is the most
complicated mystery novel I’ve ever read.
It begins with the narrator waking up,
mid-stride, with total amnesia. He’s in the
woods. It’s pouring with rain. He remem-
bers only a name: Anna. He
sees a woman being chased,
then hears a gunshot. He
stumbles through the woods
and comes across a crum-
bling English country house:
Blackheath. He pounds on
the door and is admitted by a
disfigured butler. The house is
filled with mysterious servants
and sinister guests. The guests
have been invited to attend
a masked ball, which is being
thrown by the Hardcastle
family to commemorate one of their chil-
dren, murdered there 19 years earlier.
A masked man appears and warns there
will be another murder that night: the
beautiful Evelyn Hardcastle. To escape
Blackheath, the amnesiac narrator must
identify the killer. If he fails – or is murdered
by his unknown rivals, who also seek to
solve the mystery and escape – he will wake
up again in someone else’s body and relive
the day. He has eight days and eight differ-
ent hosts. If he fails to solve the murder, he
loses his memory and goes back to the start.T
he narrator’s predicament creates
some interesting strategic possibili-
ties. If you’re cornered in a darkened
hall with no weapon to defend yourself
against an oncoming assassin, you could,
for example, resolve that a future host
would come to the hall earlier in the day
and hide a shotgun behind
a nearby curtain, then draw
back the curtain to reveal it.
But what if an even later host
resolves to retrieve the gun
and shoot the assassin before
he traps the earlier host in
the hall? You can see how
things get messy.
Turton avoids get-
ting too bogged down in
paradoxes or metaphysics. He
doesn’t have words to spare
for anything other than his
dense, intricate plot. This isn’t a profound
book: it is overwritten and the characters
are paper-thin, but you can’t help but
admire its ambition.
Does it all make sense, though? Do all
the murders, riddles and clues – hidden
chess pieces, cryptic whispers, pages
torn from diaries – encountered by the
many hosts across their eight timelines
add up to a coherent whole? Damned if
I know. l
THE SEVEN DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE,
by Stuart Turton (Raven Books, $27)Murders,
he wrote
An amnesiac narrator
goes into a creepy
mansion, but will he
live to tell his tale?
CHARLOTTE GRAHAM
Stuart Turton: doesn’t
have words to spare for
anything other than his
dense, intricate plot.BOOKS