Last Tango in Aberystwyth.
Aberystwyth's favourite detective is back! Louie Knight and sidekick Calamity
Jane investigate the disappearance of the Professor of Undertaking. Written by
Malcolm Pryce (see notes below) and adapted for radio by Peter G Morgan.
Malcolm Pryce delivers a hilariously surrealist take on a Chandleresque private
eye in a land of druids and whelk-stalls, while John Williams goes for a
synthesis of thriller and literary fiction, teeming with dangerous Cardiff
low-lifes and some complex riffs on notions of identity.
Last Tango in Aberystwyth mines the same vein of black humour as its
predecessor, Aberystwyth Mon Amour. (Pryce's invocation of art-film directors
only adds to the bizarre juxtapositions). In this book, we meet again the
wise-cracking Louie Knight, whose trench-coated manner on the mean streets of
Wales last time made for a very funny book which also functioned as an
ingenious mystery. In its successor, we encounter quite as many off-the-wall
characters (does Wales have this many eccentrics?), as Louie becomes involved
in Aberystwyth's "What the Butler Saw" film industry.
Academic Dean Morgan checks into a hotel and is mistaken for a druid killer.
His life takes an even more unfortunate turn when he falls for the porn star
Judy Juice. It's up to Louie, the town's only private eye, to uncover an
unlikely cocktail of corruption and concupiscence.
Recorded using Polderbits Sound Recorder and Editor. Broadcast originally by
BBC Radio Wales.
With his quirky series of surreal crime fiction, Malcolm Pryce has taken the
noir detective novel and placed it, and his private eye Louie Knight, in
Aberystwyth.
Born in Shrewsbury in 1960, Malcolm Pryce grew up and was educated in
Aberystwyth. He read German at Warwick and Freiburg universities, graduating in
1984.
Pryce has enjoyed a varying career interspersed with many different occupations
in numerous locations. He has, at one time or another, been employed as a
dishwasher in a hotel, a deckhand, has worked in sales at an aluminium factory
(wholly unsuccessfully, he admits), and has been an assembly line worker for a
car manufacturer.
The early 1990s saw Pryce embark on a career in advertising in London, and
later in Singapore after he left Britain to travel in the Far East. He left
Singapore in 1998 and, bound for South America, began writing his first novel
Aberystwyth Mon Amour.
The novel, and series that was to follow, combine fantasy and black humour in a
Welsh world of noir, a vague pastiche of Raymond Chandler and his private eye
Philip Marlowe but altogether more weirdly wonderful.
Replies
Dear Rick -
Again thanks so much for the offerings. These series are great and I truly thank you.
Bob
Thanks!
Bump