BURIED ABOVE GROUND

After a dozen authorized pastiches featuring Albert Campion in his autumn years, Ripley attacks the conventions of golden age whodunits in a much more metafictional way.

Kicking off his tale with the announcement that “this is not a conventional crime novel, rather a novel about writing crime novels,” Ripley invites readers into the world of mediocre mystery writer Duncan Torrens through the eyes of Roland Wilkes, who edited his final 10 novels after Edward Jesser, the founding publisher of Boothby & Briggs, indicated that he couldn’t stand Torrens’ increasingly undistinguished fiction but couldn’t bear to cut the reclusive, uncomplaining author loose. Roly recalls his surprisingly productive relationship with Alan Hibbert, who wrote for many years under the Torrens byline without ever tipping off most of his neighbors in the Hertfordshire village of Dunkley. Their relationship lasted until B&B was acquired by a Scandinavian conglomerate that fired Roly and refused to publish the latest Torrens title. But the bottom doesn’t really fall out of Roly’s world until mystery podcaster Jacon-with-a-“C” Archer, who’s been hired by rival publisher Spencer Crow to investigate the possibility of reprinting the Torrens oeuvre on the cheap, tries to pump Roly, now a public librarian, for information about the virtually forgotten author. The kaleidoscopic revelations that follow, delivered with deadpan wit, are likely to confirm readers’ most paranoid fears about the worlds of publishing, authorship, business, and domestic relations. Ripley punctuates his story with two dozen clearly marked references to mystery writers famous and obscure that his appendix elucidates. Aficionados are likely to recognize even more that he never explains.

Ripley’s best book: a wickedly funny sendup of the clichés behind all those classic mysteries and their successors.