Louise Hegarty Shares Her Various Inspirations for Her Mystery Novel ‘Fair Play’
My novel Fair Play begins on New Year’s Eve 2022. A group of friends have gathered at a house in the Irish countryside to celebrate their friend Benjamin’s birthday and to ring in the New Year. They spend the night eating, drinking and playing a murder mystery game devised by Benjamin’s sister Abigail. The next morning, everyone awakes – except Benjamin. Abigail then suddenly finds herself starring in a murder mystery of her own while she tries desperately to uncover the facts around her brother’s death.
The title of the book comes from the fair play doctrine, one of the defining principles of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction – the period between the publication of Agatha Christie’s debut and Dorothy L Sayers’ retirement from crime fiction. ‘Fair play’ was the concept that the reader should have, as TS Eliot put it, “a sporting chance to solve the mystery”. Detective novels of that age, and their authors, were concerned with a fairness that could never exist in the real world. Everything is very simple in a whodunnit: people are either good or bad, there are no coincidences or deaths that defy explanation. All mysteries can and will be solved. And everything feels safer in a detective novel – even when people are being murdered all around you – because the rules keep you tightly grasped. There is always a solution, a reveal, a simple narrative that helps everything make sense. But of course, real life isn’t like that.
It’s difficult to fully know where ideas come from. Sometimes they can be instantaneous – a flash of inspiration – but a lot of the time it is the culmination of ideas and thoughts and events over the space of a number of years (or indeed, a lifetime). I have always been a fan of detective novels and though I never imagined writing one, it is a genre that I understand. In researching the novel, I of course turned to classic examples like The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie for inspiration. I also looked to books like The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts – whose detective displays a playful awareness of the detective genre and his own role in it – and The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr – in particular for Chapter 15 and its famous ‘Looked Room Lecture’ which is referenced in Fair Play.
In terms of playing with genre tropes and narratives, I took inspiration from the television show The Singing Detective and the 1973 film The Last of Sheila. I also re-read Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames: a wonderful homage to PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves books that plays with familiar characters in a modern setting.
When developing the part of the novel that deals with grief, I looked to Season 5, Episode 16 (“The Body”) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the way that genre fiction deals with death – even in genres where deaths are plentiful. I also thought a lot about the Japanese architect Toyo Ito and the White U house he built for his widowed sister and his young daughters to provide them with a place to be together and grieve, and which acted like a giant concrete hug for the family. In 1997, once the family had all moved out, Ito had the house demolished on the basis that it had done its job. In grief, we can find ourselves retreating from the wider world. Some of this is a necessity – duvet days to relax and rest – but grieving also means moving towards a routine and some hope of normalcy.
In Fair Play, in the wake of her brother’s death, Abigail is looking for answers – or indeed clues – that will help everything make sense. The murder mystery provides her with a familiar pathway amidst the unpredictability of real life and also much-needed comfort in her time of grief. In a detective novel, we know that as each chapter goes by, we are getting closer and closer to a conclusion – to the answer we have been searching for. Or at least that is what Abigail is hoping.
About the Author
Louise Hegarty’s stories have appeared in Banshee, The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review and have been featured on BBC Radio 4.
She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize and recently her story ‘Now, Voyager’ was produced as part of A City and A Garden, a new state-of-the-art sonic experience commissioned by Sounds from a Safe Harbour in association with Body & Soul and presented as part of Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh.
A group of friends gather at an Airbnb on New Year’s Eve. It is Benjamin’s birthday, and his sister Abigail is throwing him a jazz-age Murder Mystery themed party. As the night plays out, champagne is drunk, hors d’oeuvres consumed, and relationships forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses the wrong person; someone else’s heart is broken.
In the morning, all of them wake up–except Benjamin.
As Abigail attempts to wrap her mind around her brother’s death, an eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin’s killer. In this mansion, suddenly complete with a butler, gardener and housekeeper, everyone is a suspect, and nothing is quite as it seems.
Will the culprit be revealed? And how can Abigail, now alone, piece herself back together in the wake of this loss?
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