Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play and Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Suite 11

Crime fiction has strict-ish genre conventions, with distinctive expectations for police procedurals, noir-type thrillers, and domestic cozies. In one new novel, a debut author from Ireland has fun–with a serious intent–exploring how mystery conventions can offer reassuring certainty, in the wake of a sudden and unexpected death. And in another, an internationally acclaimed crime writer offers a sequel to a novel she published a decade ago, featuring a travel journalist who is now a mother of two small children keen to get her career on track.

Louise Hegarty’s first book is a literary novel about death and grief. Hegarty draws on Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Hastings, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson, and other famous mystery fiction pairings of detectives accompanied by a more obtuse sidekick. Her title hearkens back to the idea that the crime novel should give readers “fair play,” a sporting chance to solve the case alongside the detective.

It isn’t really a mystery novel, although its opening chapters do feel like a meta-fictional mystery, whose author has an impressive command of the evolution of the crime fiction genre. Hegarty incorporates into her text the various “rules” for crime fiction created by Golden Age writers, with an emphasis on those devised by S.S. Van Dine. Fair Play involves a group of friends, in their late twenties and early thirties, who gather for an annual event. Their New Year’s Eve murder mystery party is combined with a birthday celebration, for the hostess Abigail’s older brother Benjamin.

They are a somewhat varied group. There’s Benjamin’s former fiancee and close friend, a childhood pal who’s a bit of a leech, a self-centred college mate and his recent girlfriend. Most surprising is the attractive work colleague whom Benjamin invites despite not seeming to know her very well, unless they’re concealing a romantic relationship, as some of the other guests suspect. All affluent, healthy, and cheerful, they’re stunned when Benjamin turns up dead the morning after their gathering. The party itself was crafted by Abigail, and was notably uneventful.

This is where Hegarty departs from the script of the meta-mystery: alternating chapters explore the present-day Abigail’s experience of grief and loss, and a parallel setting with similar characters who share names with Benjamin’s friends. In the historically earlier setting, Abigail and her brother are the co-owners of an estate, rather than the short-term renters of an AirBnB. A famous consulting detective arrives on the scene to solve the case.

Hegarty has provided helpful context about how she shaped her novel to reflect Golden Age mystery conventions, as well as modern and sometimes meta-fictional works like The Singing Detective and The Last of Sheila. Her sleuth, Auguste Bell, frequently comments on how this crime is a classic locked-room mystery. But he also refers to events that will take place or be revealed later, identifying the specific chapter in which they will appear. [SPOILERS FOLLOW] The last part of the novel has multiple chapters where Bell gathers the suspects, identifies the culprit and the means by which the crime was committed . . . and then changes his mind.

In the contemporary time-frame, Abigail navigates the aftermath of her brother’s death, which was determined to be suicide. She speaks to his friends and colleagues, seeking clues to his state of mind. She grapples with the horror of being in thrall to a terrible tragedy while the people around her continue their daily lives. Hegarty captures the loneliness of grief, the way in which it creates a bubble around the person who is mourning an unbearable loss. The person who is nonetheless expected, after a brief interval, to resume living as if the loss could be set aside for the comfort of others.

I have less to say about Ruth Ware’s novel, which has generally garnered stronger reviews than Hegarty’s, but which I found less interesting and successful. Ware returns to the central characters of The Woman in Cabin 10, and it does help to have read the first book before tackling The Woman in Suite 11.

Laura or “Lo” Blackstock is a mostly stay-at-home mother of two young boys. In the wake of the events described in The Woman in Cabin 10 (when, as a travel writer on a bespoke luxury cruise, she witnessed a woman being thrown overboard and encountered a conspiracy of silence), she wrote a popular memoir. But her career has otherwise been languishing while that of her husband Judah, a staff writer at The New York Times, has been thriving. When an invitation arrives out of the blue for Lo to travel to Switzerland and experience a new luxury hotel, Judah encourages her to accept.

Once she’s arrived, Lo is stunned to encounter several people she met aboard the cruise a few years earlier. Why have they been assembled in one place? Unfortunately, the answer to this question proves wildly improbable. So does much of the rest of the book. Lo’s obliviousness to danger and her earnest desire to help get her into a great deal of trouble, from which she is eventually untangled, in part due to well-timed but unlikely interventions.

If you won’t get a summer holiday, and would like to enjoy the vicarious pleasures of first-class air travel and artisanal pastries and coffee served up with a view of Lake Geneva, this is a pleasant way to pass the time. Ware is fairly adept with pacing, even if the first part of the novel lags more than is usual. There is suspense; there are thrills, of a sort. But the protagonist and first-person narrator would benefit from learning about the genre conventions of the suspense thriller, so she could keep herself out of mortal peril.