Read And Then There Was No One for Free Online

all knew would follow were at the mercy of a buffoon of a politician the like of whom not even the United States, never a nation famous for voting its intellectuals into power, had known.
    For a moment the table was silent. Then Meredith suddenly screeched at me:
    ‘You little shit!’
    ‘
What
did you say?’ I managed to stammer out.
    ‘Who fucking gave you the right to insult our President?’
    Our
President? George Bush? Would I be caught dead calling Tony Blair ‘our Prime Minister’? And this from a self-styled radical left-winger.
    ‘But all I said was –’
    ‘Oh, can it!’ she spat at me. ‘I don’t have to listen to such Eurotrash garbage!’ Pulling a hundred-franc note from her purse, she tossed it onto the chequered tablecloth – ‘That’ll cover what I had!’ – stood up and stalked alone out of the restaurant.
    If everyone present was as startled as I was by her behaviour, one of her compatriots did coldly chide me for having been flippant, which was simply not true, about an event of such magnitude, and actually went so far as to propose the eccentric theory that, the instant those planes ploughed into the Twin Towers, George Bush, ex-drunk, ex-deserter, ex-all-round-loser, had been alchemically transmuted into the Platonic essence of Presidential resolve. Whatever, the meal never recovered from Meredith’s
coup de théâtre.
Just fifteen minutes later, we all quietly and sheepishly trooped out of the restaurant without dessert or coffee.
    Several years, of course, had elapsed since the Towers crumbled to dust, and one had to suppose that, like so many liberal Americans who had put their critical faculties on hold, Meredith had since had time and cause to qualify heronce unreflecting support for the cross-eyed cretin in the White House. But what mystified me was why she had not only been invited to but had herself agreed to attend what promised to be a frivolous Conan Doyle bash. Then, glancing at her minuscule bibliography, I learned from it that she had recently published a ‘much-acclaimed’ book-length essay titled
From Shylock to Sherlock
and subtitled ‘Judaism, Patriarchy and the Forensic Imagination’. Ah.
    The fourth speaker listed was G. Autry, a name calculated to stimulate critical inquisitiveness, like ‘B. Traven’. Nobody knew what the G. stood for, if anything. He had hardly ever been photographed (on the Festival’s flyer his photo had been replaced by a generic black silhouette against a plain white background), in recent years he had certainly never posed for a camera, and all he let be known about himself was that he was
not
related to Gene Autry, a once well-known singing cowboy whose horse would regularly rear up on its hind legs like that of a Spanish monarch in an equestrian portrait by Velasquez while he himself spun a lazy lasso above his head as though blowing a smoke ring. I had naturally never met him – who had? – but I had tried to read one of his novels, a sadistic thriller in the James Ellroy mode set in the racist Arkansas of the fifties. I laid it down again unfinished when the praeternatural vividness of its violence started to haunt my dreams.
    Oddly enough, Autry’s work had always had a pulpy reputation until Sanary, of all people, published an eccentricdefence of it with the amusing title
G. est un Autry.
† It was that essay which had prompted me to give his fiction a go. But I had, I repeat, so hated the novel in question that I only half-read it and, again, I couldn’t imagine why such a grouchy recluse would make one of his extremely rare public appearances at an insignificant Sherlock Holmes Festival in the Swiss Alps.
    Fifth and last – or, rather, first – was Umberto Eco, no less. But when I noted the parenthesis
(unconfirmed)
after his name, I just knew he wouldn’t turn up. And I was about to fold up the attachment and pay for my coffee when I remarked, so discreetly boxed-off from the body of the text as to suggest that the