A few years back, there was a Jeopardy champion who proved to be a controversial figure in the quizzing community. His main offense? He and his friends weren’t very amiable bar trivia participants. They didn’t order many drinks or any food, they didn’t interact with the other teams, they were rude to staff, disputed any ruling they deemed questionable, and, of course, they won every single week.
Bar trivia, or pub quiz as our friends across the pond would prefer it, can be either a leisurely pastime or a cutthroat competition, depending on the venue and the contestants. When everyone is on the same page there usually isn’t an issue. But when there’s a clash, look out.
That’s the premise of Janice Hallett’s The Killer Question, a murder mystery centered around the pub quiz at a sleepy English country establishment. Once again, Hallett is using the modern-day equivalent of the epistolary format to tell the story. The Killer Question is framed as an email conversation about a possible Netflix documentary adaptation of a supposedly notorious true crime case. The bulk of the novel is comprised around excerpts from the police file on the case: text messages, emails, and transcriptions of recorded conversations and interviews with the people involved.
The plot kicks off when the normally sleepy weekly quiz at The Case is Altered, a dilapidated pub recently purchased and refurbished by retired cops Sue and Malcolm Eastwood, is disturbed by two newcomer teams. The first, a group of notorious cheats, is quickly chased out by Malcolm, but the second, a seemingly unbeatable trivia machine named The Shadow Knights that wins week after week, throws the atmosphere at The Case off-balance. Things only get worse at the bar when the body of one of the alleged cheaters surfaces in a local waterway, apparently murdered on the night he and his friends were kicked out of the bar.
Hallett likes to use the format to reveal character. In Sue and Mal’s texts with each other, we see that he is confrontational, while she is conciliatory. When other teams accuse The Shadow Knights of cheating, Mal insists on tackling the problem head on, while Sue tries to befriend their captain to see if the team can be trusted. Chris Thorogood, captain of the perpetual runners-up to the Knights, is revealed in his emails to Sue and Mal and in his group texts with his teammates to be a man clinging desperately to his small notoriety as a local quiz champion in order to avoid facing his personal and career disappointments. Hallett has some fun with the team group chats, poking gentle fun at self-serious old-timers, vegan cyclists, and gen z-ers too addicted to internet speak to make any sense to their older teammates.
The format has some limitations and drawbacks, however. For verisimilitude, Hallett often includes non-sequiturs and irrelevancies in the group chats and emails, but these can really slow down the pace and frustrate the reader who is, after all, trying to find out who committed a murder. Plus, the revelations at the end of the mystery necessarily render so much of the material preceding it utterly irrelevant, making it harder to maintain the premise that this is an actual police file.
Another huge chunk of The Killer Question consists of police reports involving a kidnapping case from five years ago, when the Eastwoods were still on the police force. As will not surprise anyone who has ever read a mystery novel before, the kidnapping case winds up being connected to the murder at the pub, albeit in a way that I don’t think anyone could see coming. That’s not particularly a compliment. If I had one main complaint (no real spoilers ahead) it’s that the resolution of the mystery is so convoluted and preposterous as to be downright silly. It brings into question whether Hallett really played fair with the reader.
As a big fan of trivia, I was intrigued and excited by the premise of The Killer Question, but ultimately, like a stale beer from an unchanged keg, it left a bad taste in my mouth.