Live Your Life and also Mine: the OXFORD MURDERS

the OXFORD MURDERS

The Oxford Murders

by Guillermo Martínez
208pp, Abacus, £9.99

What is the next number in the sequence 2, 4, 8, 16 ... ? There is an obvious way to continue the series, which is the one most people will think of. But there is also a perfectly logical explanation for why 31 is just as legitimate. Wittgenstein's Finite Rule Paradox implies that any finite sequence of numbers can be a continued in a variety of different ways - some natural, others unexpected and surprising but equally valid.

In The Oxford Murders, mathematical symbols are the key to a mysterious sequence of murders. Each new death is accompanied by a different mathematical shape, starting with the circle. This purest of mathematical forms heralds the death of Mrs Eagleton, landlady to a young south American mathematician who narrates the story. It seems that the serial killer can be stopped only if someone can crack the next symbol in the sequence. The maths graduate is joined by the leading Oxford logician Arthur Seldom on the quest to crack the cryptic clues.

The trouble is that even if they think they've got the next symbol, there is always Wittgenstein's worrying paradox lurking in the background. Perhaps there is an alternative, more surprising twist to the sequence. After all, the perfect crime isn't one that remains unsolved, but one where the wrong person is fingered.

The mix of mathematics and murder mystery makes for a powerful cocktail. The Oxford Murders is not the first thriller to combine the two, but it is one of the first to do it successfully. There are many similarities between cracking a crime and trying to prove a mathematical theorem. Quite often the mathematical world is scattered with a sequence of clues, and the art of the mathematician is to try to piece together a coherent and logical argument to explain the evidence. For example, prime numbers such as 17 and 19 seem to be very randomly scattered throughout the universe of numbers. Mathematicians have spent 2,000 years searching for the thing responsible for the strange behaviour of the primes; they want to know whodunit.

In the 1930s the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel threw a spanner into the mathematical works. Not every true statement can be proved to be true. Suddenly there is the possibility that some mathematical crime scenes cannot be solved and will for ever remain beyond the bounds of human reasoning. Gödel's incompleteness theorem is another theme cleverly woven in to the plot of The Oxford Murders.

THE MOVIE

The Oxford Murders is one of a very rare type of movie, I'm not even sure what you would call it. Intellectual Thriller, or maybe Nerd Mystery. Whatever the category, it's one of those thrillers where the leads are so intelligent and inquisitive that they often fly into uncontrollable excitement because of some new bit of mathematical code that just popped into their minds.

It starts out with a great hook – a professor is telling a story to his class about a man who, in the midst of a heated battle, sat down amidst all of the gunfire around him and wrote feverishly in his notebook, because he absolutely had to write down what was in his mind at that very moment. What was so important that he would risk his life?

Much of the first part of the movie is a philosophical discourse which asks us generic existential clichés like Can we know the truth? And how do we really know anything? Elijah Wood stars as Martin, a young American so eager to achieve the answers to these questions that he travels to England with the sole purpose of picking the brain of a Professor Seldom (whose name sounds like it belongs in a Harry Potter story), the man who was giving the lecture at the beginning of the movie.

You see, Martin believes that if we uncover the secret meaning of numbers, we'll know the secret meaning of reality. I'm going to just come right out and say that the movie pretty much lost me at this point. I'm not sure how the meaning of numbers is connected to the meaning of reality, or if the meaning of reality means the meaning of life or just the true nature of our surroundings, and most importantly, I didn't know there was a secret meaning of numbers.

Regardless, questions like these soon become of the utmost importance, as a series of murders begin happening that seem to be driven by an intellectual motive. At this point you'll notice that every character's behavior and background is designed to make them a suspect, and the movie literally turns into a game of Clue. During their investigations, Seldom and Martin actually discuss the similarities to Clue and how best to solve the mystery using that format.