Everyone wants to know who killed Gladwell the Parodist. Everyone, that is, except Jim Tate, alias Antinous, who is far more interested in the unpublished novels Ralph Gladwell is rumoured to have left behind. The brilliant Parodist, despiser of the modern novel, whose wit could skewer any writer living or dead, could have been murdered by any one of his many victims. But who was Gladwell really, and what true face lay behind his sardonic mask? In this brisk whydunnit, the feints and fallacies of human nature are peeled back, page by page, to reveal the rage, desperation, love and vulnerability out of which literature is made...