The Oxford Murders

In between reading Guillermo Martinez's novel The Oxford Murders (published by Penguin in 2005, translated by Sonia Soto) and watching Alex de la Iglesia's film version (2008) I read John Lancester's essay "The Case of Agatha Christie" in The London Review of Books.  I mention this because the book and the film (which follows the book fairly closely) are rather anti-Christie, i.e., they emphasize randomness rather than logic.  A graduate student narrates the book, as he tries to figure out a series of murders based on codes the murderer left in notes. He is helped by aging philosopher Arthur Seldom, who considers the universe random, suggesting that the clues in the notes do not make an orderly series, in the same way that an SAT question asking for the next in a series could have many possible answers, depending on how complicated one wants to make it.

The film subtly supports the random theory of the universe as cinematographer Kiko de la Rica follows one person and then abruptly shifts to someone else and then someone else again, none of whom seem to be relevant to the plot, the wide-screen image showing Seldom and students randomly intersecting. There is much discussion of Wittgenstein, Fermat, Godel and various other philosophers and mathematicians who have tried to make sense of a seemingly random world in which there is disagreement on whether we have somehow discovered maths (as the British call it) or invented it.  I especially liked the low-key manner in which de la Iglesia (and to a lesser extent Martinez) use Scrabble and squash in the plot, games which involve different ratios of logic and chance.