(The) Eight(h) Detectives, by Alex Pavesi

Seven detective stories and a meta-detective story, inconsistently titled as Eight Detectives or The Eighth Detective

My gosh this was so incredibly bad, just the worst prose I've read in a professional book in living memory. Whole new categories of bad writing, like if you saw a normal person playing in a professional sports game and were suddenly like "oh right, even the worst professional players are actually really competent in ways that that we don't normally notice."

I quit on this (prize-winning!!!!) book really early, but I googled to see what other people thought of it, and fortunately other people had already catalogued their revulsion in ways that save me time here:

To be honest, none of the sample stories struck me as having any merit at all (nor even the consolatory quality of conciseness), and I found it very difficult to summon any empathy for, or even interest in, the characters.

Was very disappointed. The individual stories at the heart of this book were mostly unpleasant, and none of them were clever. Most of the mysteries taking place in the framing story were hinted at so clearly that only one of the final reveals was in any way surprising. This book was trying to be intricate, but ended up a mess. Even the title failed to scan

and finally this, which summed up my feelings delightfully:

The awfulness of the writing is hard to understate. I felt as if the author was attempting some kind of Bulwer Lytton type parody (but without the humor). After all, what is one to make of writing like the following (almost every page has examples like these):

"As they stepped side by side through the doorway, their combined shape contracted, like a hand forming a fist or a throat in the act of swallowing."

"… their bobbing heads a mosaic of precocious haircuts." (a teacher describing the girls she is chaperoning on a field trip)

"He was looking at a bird that was sitting on a statue - a woman holding a vessel of water - carved from smooth white stone that looked as solid as chocolate."

"Eric Laurent [a detective] had stroked his beard.`That is most intriguing,’ he’d said."

Give The Eighth Detective a try only if you are a big fan of bad writing.

The frame story is around a mathematician who had created a typology of murder mysterious and all their "permutations". Admittedly I only got through half of one of the "conversation" chapters where the mathematician describes his work before deleting the audiobook off my phone for fear of contaminating the other books on it, but in that brief time I did have the thought that the author probably knew nothing at all about maths. So I was surprised to find online that he has a PhD in mathematics, which only goes to show... something, or nothing, I don't know.

This led me to an interview where Pavesi was asked:

You have now joined a notable list of mathematicians that are also known for their fiction writing, including Lewis Carroll and Bertrand Russell.

I'm fairly sure that's just outright wrong, thta Russell did not write fiction, but..... does anyone know what this could possibly be referring to? That is something I'm dying to read...