Murders that don't add up

When Argentinean author Guillermo Mart nez wrote The Oxford Murders, he combined a murder mystery with mathematical principles. The result was a best-selling novel that won the prestigious Planeta Prize, was translated into 14 languages and then became a film starring Elijah Wood and John Hurt.

Warmly received

While the book was quite warmly received, the film became a mystery in its own right. Upon its release in 2008 it attracted a slew of bad reviews and even on its DVD release, the film, with top-notch stars (Wood played Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and veteran Hurt has played in a scores of fine films including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), was slammed by critics and ignored by the public.

Author Mart nez has mixed feelings about this and, on Tuesday night, after he gave a lecture at the Cultural Section of Consulate General of Spain in Shanghai, he talked to the Global Times about the difficulties of writing a story involving mathematics and the difficulties of making a film.

Mart nez is on his first visit to China, visiting Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing to lecture and take part in the Bookworm International Literary Festival in Beijing.

His novels have all provoked different reactions from his readers. "Especially so with the mathematical theorems I write about in The Oxford Murders like Wittgenstein's Finite Rule Paradox, Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, G?del's Theorem and Fermat's Last Theorem. Some readers think these are easy and not worth mentioning, but others think they are too complicated and skip the explanations when they read. A few have said it was like reading a pile of mathematical theorems.

"Every mathematical theory I write about is described in my personal literary style. But I believe that any literary work is really finished by its readers everyone has their own view of the work. Authors can do nothing about this, and we don't need to."

Adapted

When his story was adapted for film, the plot remained the same. But Mart nez could see immediate problems. "The hero is an energetic, outgoing young man with an open mind. He is not just a math dork burying himself in formulas and theorems at home. He is a pretty normal person," the author said.

Other critics could see more problems with the film. View London described it as "a badly acted, poorly written thriller that is both disappointing and tedious" and other viewers said the plot was "painful to watch with Wood and Hurt spouting incomprehensible gibberish at each other for almost two hours."

Nine out of 10 critics on the Rotten Tomatoes website panned the film and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) gives it a 6.1 popularity score.

Mart nez told the Global Times that although he was not involved closely with the film, as the original author, he was inevitably questioned about it. The bad reviews of the film however have not depressed him. "I think many people tried to find and read the novel after they saw the film. The fact is that sales of my novel increased a lot after the movie was released.

"I try not to comment a lot about the film. I know filmmaking is challenging and, unlike a literary creation, a film is a much bigger project which needs different skills from a large number of people."

He seems undeterred about the experience. Mart nez has just finished writing a film script adapted from another of his novels, The Book Of Murder, which also involves principles of chance and calculation and said this was not easy work.

However, he insisted that he doesn't want readers to fix a label on his approach to writing. "I have written several mysteries, and I also used to be a mathematician, but I am not a mystery writer, or a mathematical writer I am just a writer. Hemingway wrote about fishing rods and fishing in his works you don't call him a 'fishing writer' do you?"