Anderson-Wheeler Claire. The Gatsby Gambit. Penguin Random House New York 2025. F; 4/25.

This new murder mystery is based on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, similarly to but more directly than the way A Thousand Acres by Smiley and The Hours by Cunningham use classic literature works as a blueprint. Most of the leading Gatsby characters appear but others including a sister Greta, police, and household staff are add-on modern inventions.

Greta returns from finishing school in Switzerland having been groomed and protected by her older brother Jay, to find original characters Tom Buchanan and his wife Daisy as well as Nick Carraway socializing and having some rifle target-practice on the Gatsby mansion grounds. We are told:

Tom believed himself to be king of the jungle, and Greta supposed he made others believe that, too. He exuded power, and if you were on the right side of it, power made people feel safe. Daisy had probably been on the right side of it when she married him. Whether she still was or not, Greta couldn’t say.

As the plot develops we watch Greta’s coming-of-age and developing practicality. She seems to make a form of Pascal’s Wager:

… (offering) up a prayer from time to time to a vague, amorphous God inside her head. She reasoned that if she hoped to receive the benefit of His doubt, it behooved her to afford Him the same.

Of course there is a grisly death, looking like a suicide which Greta doubts, and our suspicions switch back and forth among the various principal characters and a few others (except Greta) while details come to light and her curious amateur private eye focuses and matures.

Anderson-Wheeler assumes and helps us appreciate the social ambience of wealthy New England in the 1920s. There’s nonstop Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous for us who enjoy that type of thing. The whodunit dénouement is skilfully obscure and revealed, and Greta and other new faces are lively and dramatic. Our author also gives us enough social and philosophical commentary in both the old and new characters, and there is love interest and upstairs-downstairs intrigue, to maintain pace and keep us guessing.

This is a good – but I don’t think a really top-notch – murder mystery. The interest for me is kind of nostalgic. As a long-ago fan of Fitzgerald it’s how seamlessly the whodunit formula fits on top of and into his most famous story.

8.1/7.8