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festival’s organisers were consciously playing hard-to-get with the reader, the two words, in the smallest of block capitals, MYSTERY GUEST. Underneath them I read as follows: ‘The Meiringen Sherlock Holmes Festival is proud to announce the presence of a Mystery Guest, one whose identity, like those of so many murderers in mystery novels, will be revealed to you all in the library, that of our famous Kunsthalle. Do not attempt to guess in advance who he or she will be. You will certainly be proved wrong!’
    This sounded to me as though it might be fun, but the potential for disappointment was of course also great.
    * Published in Britain, considerably abridged, as
Poe & Co: A History of the Mystery Novel from Poe to Po-Mo
(Carcanet, 2003).
    † A mischievous parody of the near-homonymous
‘Je est un autre’
(‘I is an other’), Rimbaud’s seminal poetic manifesto of the schizophrenic bifurcation of personality.

Chapter Three
    In the early morning grisaille of September 10, just as I was irritably about to ring up the local minicab firm to remind it of my existence, I was collected outside my flat and driven off to the hell-on-earth that is Heathrow.
    There I queued for nearly half an hour among a crowd of vacationers at a British Airways Economy check-in counter, only to learn to my fury, for my e-ticket was irresponsibly mum on the matter and I had assumed that the Festival, like most of its kind, would cut corners where its less than A-list guests were concerned, that I had after all been booked into Business Class. Two long hours later, I was finally aboard the plane, waiting for it to taxi out to the runway. Beside me, occupying a single seat, cutely belted in by a single seatbelt, were a pair of cherubic little boys (their parents sat across the aisle), just out of babyhood, identical twins identically dressed, chattering their heads off in American accents – Mid-West was my guess – as though compensating for all those months when neither of them could talk. It was distracting,and continued to be distracting during the flight itself – as always on plane journeys, I’d brought with me a computerised chess set and was forced, in order to give myself a decent chance in spite of the racket, to lower the machine’s own level of skill a notch or two, with the result that its game instantly went off – but I really didn’t mind. The chatter of my two little neighbours was so adorable that, had I not feared arousing parental suspicion, I would have joined in.
    At Zurich a jewel-bright sky dazzled the airport’s multiple glass façades. I was met by the Festival’s director, Thomas Düttmann, in his late twenties, hence quite a bit younger than I had expected, preppily bow-tied and tousle-haired, with (like a lot of total strangers, I tend to find) one physical idiosyncrasy that took some getting used to: in his case, a nervous tic in the left eye whose beat accelerated in tandem with what I would later discover were intermittent fits and fevers of excitability. He shook my hand and relieved me of my suddenly inadequate-looking sole piece of luggage, a battered metal valise. At his side stood Hugh Spaulding, who had arrived twenty minutes earlier from Gatwick and struck me as even veinier and more crumpled than I remembered him. He sported (the appropriate verb) a bookmaker’s checked, three-piece, almost parodically Irish tweed suit and a tie patterned with miniature huntsmen hallooing every which way, more than half of them upside-down. Over his right shoulder was slung a drab fawn mac, and a pair ofbulging overnight bags sat at his feet. He remembered me too, greeting me with a beery ‘Hello, Gil, long time no see.’ He was smoking, and I accepted a cigarette from him, my first in the four hours of the trip. Then we climbed into a waiting Mercedes, Hugh and I together in the roomy back, Düttmann in the front seat next to the driver, and set out on what was to be the spectacularly scenic route to