Alex Pavesi's 'Ink Ribbon Red' - A Fresh Take on the English Country House Murder Mystery

In Ink Ribbon Red, crime novel writer, Alex Pavesi, presents his latest mystery thriller about a group of friends who trek to a remote location in the English countryside for a murder mystery birthday weekend. The host, Anatol, has invited his friends to join him for his 30th birthday and wants them to partake in a game he invented called Motive Method Death. To play, each guest draws two names and then are tasked with creating a story in which one person murders the other. The goal of the game is to make the murders as believable as possible. To enhance the mystery, Pavesi explained what he did to puzzle his readers so that it would be difficult for them to distinguish between what was real and what was part of the game. “Interspersed throughout the narrative you have these murders which are attempting to be plausible and as a reader you don’t know if that’s because they’re produced as part of this game the characters are playing or if they’re actually happening, and to achieve this convincingly, I had to tell the whole book nonchronologically, so that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious from the surrounding context whether a murder had happened or not… as you’re looking at it, it’s all jumbled up, it’s very hard to tell what is an actual part of the… final puzzle and what is one of these additional pieces that don’t quite fit… what this one does… is have some question for the reader about whether they’re reading, any individual chapter, whether it’s one of the stories or whether it’s part of the main narrative.”

For Pavesi, setting a crime novel in the recent past gives his books certain advantages. Reflecting on why he set Ink Ribbon Red in 1999, he remarked, “With this particular book because there is this persistent question over what is real and what is not, I wanted to aid the writing of that by having the whole book feel slightly unreal, slightly dreamlike and I felt like it achieved that more successfully if I set the book in the past because for me… the past always feels slightly less real than the present. Thinking back to the 90’s when the book is set, you look at things like pay phones and… often with crime novels you have this problem with things like mobile phones interfering with plot… so what I ended up doing was setting it in the most recent past I could think of that would still count as definitively the past, so I settled on 1999 as being symbolic of that because it was the last millennium…”

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