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    Aberystwyth Mon Amour
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    Aberystwyth Mon Amour
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    Aberystwyth Mon Amour
    Ebook274 pages4 hours

    Aberystwyth Mon Amour

    By Malcolm Pryce

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Schoolboys are disappearing all over Aberystwyth and nobody knows why. Louie Knight, the town's private investigator, soon realises that it is going to take more than a double ripple from Sospan, the philosopher cum ice-cream seller, to help find out what is happening to these boys and whether or not Lovespoon, the Welsh teacher, Grand Wizard of the Druids and controller of the town, is more than just a sinister bully. And just who was Gwenno Guevara?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 6, 2010
    ISBN9781408809044
    Unavailable
    Aberystwyth Mon Amour
    Author

    Malcolm Pryce

    Malcolm Pryce was born in the UK and has spent much of his life working and travelling abroad. He has been, at various times, a BMW assembly-line worker, a hotel washer-up, a deck hand on a yacht sailing the South Seas, an advertising copywriter and the world's worst aluminium salesman. In 1998 he gave up his day job and booked a passage on a banana boat bound for South America in order to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour. He spent the next seven years living in Bangkok, where he wrote three more novels in the series, Last Tango in Aberystwyth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth and Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth. In 2007 he moved back to the UK and now lives in Oxford, where he wrote From Aberystwyth with Love, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still, and, most recently, The Case of the Hail Mary Celeste. malcolmpryce.com / @exogamist

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    Reviews for Aberystwyth Mon Amour

    3.5/5

    238 ratings23 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I enjoy offbeat, quirky British humour, but Malcolm Pryce is no Pratchett or Douglas Adams. In the end, it was a bit of a curate's egg.
    • 4/5
      I read this a long time ago - and finally re-read it. And, its better than I remember. Tight writing, that takes the stereotypes of the gritty noir mystery genre, and than totally turns around 90 degrees and takes a new direction. The characters are exactly what you expect, but more so. It is is wonderfully... refreshing. There are no cardboard characters in this story, although it stays true to the genre. Its a bit like reading a comic book - everything is bigger than life. One thing - it is quite a dark story. The Aberystwyth of this story is dark, sad, and corrupt (run by evil druids, no less). The author manages to keep the city on the side of interesting rather than depressing. And, the story is fun. We have druids, witches, truant kids, boy geniuses, lounge singers who want to sing opera, ice cream joints, and tea cozies, not to mention militant missionaries. The story shouldn't work. But it does. And you should go and read it.One thing, the book is written for a UK audience, and possibly even Welsh - there are names and words I didn't know, and for the first four chapters or so, I kept having to stop reading to look up words that I didn't know. This is not a criticism- its the nature of reading a book set in a place that has its own language quirks.
    • 4/5
      Re-reading this because I have just been to an Aberystwyth university open day. Rained ALL day but was very enjoyable. I didn't manage to get an ice cream on the promenade, didn't manage to get a reader's ticket at the library and didn't see any donkeys.......
      The book sustains the world weary tone all the way through and is very entertaining. I don't know how he managed to match the real town so well with his parallel world - but he did.
    • 3/5
      I really, really wanted to like Aberystwyth Mon Amour. Somehow, though, I'm not sure I really did. I thought it was very inventive and pretty funny. I loved the horror of a realisation that someone was, wait for it... English, for example. It's funny, but it's also true, in a way. The idea of someone who seems like a quintessential part of Welsh culture turning out to be English -- I can imagine that really happening, really being a betrayal, although not on such a dramatic scale.

      The plot is patently ridiculous, but that's pretty much the point. It's fun and easy enough to read, but the prose is hardly worthy of being compared to Raymond Chandler's (yeah, I have a real thing about people being compared to Chandler; I have the same thing about all female singer-songwriters being compared to Joni Mitchell). The atmosphere obviously isn't very Chandler-esque, and really it's just the whole idea of a private detective that links the two -- that and the references to all private detectives drinking whiskey, etc.

      The ridiculousness kept me off kilter. I just went with the flow and didn't try working things out. So I didn't get the satisfaction of being right, or the pleasant shock of being wrong, either.
    • 3/5
      An interesting addition to the detective genre. Louie Knight is a private detective called in by local singer Myfanwy Montez to investigate the disappearance of her cousin, Evans the Boot. The Aberystwyth of the title is a mean town, infest with Druids, the Bronzinis are the local crime lords, and then there's the Ladies of T Sweet Jesus League. Surreal, funny and sometimes very moving, but yet I'm not excited about this series and I don't quite know why.
    • 4/5
      Entertaining detective novel. Louie Knight is the detective and the story is set in Aberystwyth, Wales. Having recently visited I was spurred on to add the book to my collection!I found it humourous and quite well written. The characters were amusing although sometimes the story didn't always flow as well as it should have. Anyway, it was a quick, fun read and I'll probably read more books by Pryce in this series in the near future.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating, and enjoyable, melange of Raymond Chandler and Dylan Thomas, with a streak of Tom Sharpe throughout. The bare bones of Aberystwyth are there but it is overlaid with a rich and fanastic mythology of its own. Some of the comic writing is superb.
    • 3/5
      I found this a rather disappointing book. It was recommended (all right, by Amazon) as something that fans of Jasper Fforde would find amusing, but it has neither the invention nor the deftness of touch that make Fforde's unlikely world view so enjoyable.It is an hommage (spoof?) of the 'private eye' genre, unexpectedly (except for those who have read the title) set in Aberystwyth. Where Chandler's laconic one liners are fresh and illuminating, Pryce's are limp and, by the end of the book, annoying. The plot is quite good, but the characters unengaging.I wanted to like it, but found myself unable.
    • 5/5
      "Aberystwyth Mon Amour' is a a spoof of a hard-boiled Philip Marlow-type detective story, set in the mean streets of Aberystwyth. I really enjoyed it, but I suspect that it is especially amusing if you know Aber (as I do, having been to university there).It was shelved with the detective stories in the bookshop, but would belong on the detective/humour/alternative history shelf if shops had such a category.
    • 4/5
      The conceit of setting a noir detective thriller in Aberystwyth is a very clever idea: it would be funny in any conditions and it's hilarious if you know the place a little. Pryce does a pretty good job of keeping it up for the length of a book, although he's clearly straining the limits of inventiveness to find new jokes by the time he gets to the end, resulting in a bit of silliness. The whole thing works in a way that Jasper Fforde's stories generally don't, because, however fantastic the background, the characters take it seriously and have enough psychological depth to them to convince the reader to take it seriously too.
    • 4/5
      Doing for Aberystwyth what Robert Rankin and Jasper Fforde do for Brentford and Swindon, you'll enjoy this if you like that sort of slightly-surrreal parallel-reality humorous fiction. 'Far-fetched fiction', as I believe Rankin calls it. The plot actually works (rather than being just a flimsy framework for hanging gags off), and one of the reveals at the climax (location of a hidden document) is as clever as anything in a serious detective novel (plus the clue was there earlier, so you won't feel cheated if you're the sort who likes to try and work these things out ahead of the characters).
    • 1/5
      This had a promising start, but unfortunately went nowhere fast. The style became dull after a couple of chapters, and the characters were such caricatures that you couldn't care about any of them. Young boys being murdered is supposed to be shocking - but this was 'so what'. My book group couldn't even be bothered to finish the book.
    • 5/5
      The first in a series of books about the private detective, Louie Knight, and set in Aberystwyth (no surprise there!). Really hilarious and I don't think you have to be Welsh to appreciate the humour.
    • 4/5
      Reminded me of the 'Thursday Next' books – a similar skewed version of reality – but neither as imaginative nor as amusing.
    • 4/5
      This is a highly amusing and fun read. Nothing tremendously profound, but just a good fun read. I got the book during a 2-week trip to Aberystwyth, so it's really fun to read it knowing my way around Aberystwyth.
    • 4/5
      This novel is written in the 'noir' style: expect PI investigations, dames, murder, 'cawl' and mayhem. Also, a lot of references are made about the town of Aberystwyth and Wales; a town that, if you've been there, will be unforgettable. The novel is witty, the humour is dark and it reads like a pulp from the 50s. Highly recommended if you want to start on the genre in the UK.
    • 4/5
      The notion of Raymond Chandler’s mean Los Angeles streets being translated to Aberystwyth seems far-fetched, but Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth is not the small seaside town that some of us know.Instead, it is more like a part of a Wales from an alternative history, where the druids are a mafia-like organisation, where religion - extreme chapel - still holds sway, where women still wear stovepipe hats, and where Wales lost control of Patagonia in a disastrous colonial war in the mid-1960s. The plots tick over relentlessly, and the private eye, Louie Knight - like other PIs, from Philip Marlowe to Harry Moseby - is usually several steps behind the action. The body count is high and the writing often hilarious.Instead of magical realism, this is more like magical noir. The clue may lie in the author’s biography, which may be true: Pryce, brought up in Shrewsbury and Aberystwyth, has lived and worked abroad since the early 1990s, and currently lives in Bangkok. His Wales is the parts distilled through a haze of memory.The fourth in the series, Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth, connects Adolf Eichmann to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, without leaving the town - or at least the immediate area. The first, Aberystwyth Mon Amour, is probably the most ‘Welsh’ of the books, and culminates in a parody of the dambusters’ raid over a Welsh reservoir. And I promise that knowing this about the plot will not be a spoiler.
    • 3/5
      I guess it's telling that I mainly tagged this relating to Aberystwyth. I'd been recommended it by a couple of people who knew that I've spent a few weeks there. Yes, it is amusing to see places that you recognise imortalised in books but that was about all I got from this one. The style was a bit hackneyed I thought, very similar to Robert Rankin, which is ambitious and it didn't quite come off. I found some of the asides and plot devices a bit pointless (although I realise that's a play on the detective genre). What I like about Rankin is that the characters are all so well drawn - you know people like these characters and it's interesting to see how they'd react to unusual circumstances. With Rankin, because the characters are so strong and believable, so down to earth, you're willing to believe just about anything the plot has to throw at you. In this one I don't think the characters quite made it so the author was constantly diverting the plot to explain events or reactions in the context of the place or people. If the author had had a bit more faith in the descriptions of the locality or people then maybe things wouldn't have needed so much explanation - which I found quite distracting. That said it wasn't bad in parts and made me laugh out loud towards the end. I think this is a début novel so I might, just might give the second book a try. Maybe. If I'm in a really good mood.
    • 1/5
      think this is one of those books people will either love or hate.To be fair I don't enjoy this type of american noir(ish) genre and only decided to try it after another Welsh bookcrossing member recommended it.I found the plot totally unbelievable and the humour repetative.
    • 3/5
      Although this was a relatively quick read (at a little under 250 books it's quite short compared to a lot I've read recently) it's not really to my taste. It's a story of a slightly alternate Aberystwyth where Wales is independent and has fought in a war. I had recently read about Patagonia and it's relationship with Wales and the Welsh.This is a story about a detective, actually the only detective in Aberystwyth and a case he's brought into by Myfanwy Montez, there are schoolboys dying, the Druid Mafia are implicated and the past and present are coming together to form an interesting whole.It tries hard and it shows, I could see where the author was coming up with "interesting" and "unusual" and adding them into the story. It really didn't make me want to search out more in the series, although the mystery itself wasn't too bad.
    • 3/5
      A definite recommendation to anyone who knows Aberystwyth. Even though the books are enjoyable, I wouldn't be surprised if those who don't know the town found them to be of little consequence.
    • 3/5
      Freakish book! Noirish literature about a small seaside resort in Wales. Strange goings on and even stranger characters. Generally very good, but the ending sucked.
    • 3/5
      Risqué, but quite funny, especially for those who have spent some years in Aberystwyth and know all the characters in the book.