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Comedy writer Nev Fountain, who writes for the iconic British satire magazine PRIVATE EYE, has found a winsome concept. THE FAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is a provocative title. Fans, by definition, make it their business to know everything about their media franchise of choice. It's not possible for a fan to know too much about STAR WARS, STAR TREK, or DR WHO. Also, if you're not a fan and you're stuck in a room with one, that fan probably seems to know too much. Or at least to reveal too much.
Knowing too much about the VIXENS FROM THE VOID 1980s BBC cult television show – an obvious nod to all three franchises mentioned above - is not the problem that VIXENS superfan Wolf Tyler has. At the start of THE FAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, he's interviewing a mystery guest on the VIXENS fan podcast that he broadcasts from the shed in his back garden in Brighton. No, Tyler knows something about nefarious happenings on the VIXENS set, and not fictional nefarious happenings in the Void of Outer Space. Below the jerry-rigged soundproofed ceiling of the shed, he's murdered. Wolf's friend Kit Pelham, a fellow superfan and jaded media journalist, must solve his murder. To do that, she collaborates with longtime friends and fellow fans to reconvene the 40-year-old show's former cast and crew and interview them, something her job and fame allows her to do innocuously. In short, she's the fan world's Hercules Poirot under cover.
This conceit might sound hackneyed but it works because for Fountain, solving the mystery is a less urgent objective than making fun of all the ways in which fandoms geek out about their chosen material and block out everything else that matters. His pointed satire leaves room for appreciation of superfans' attention to detail, which Fountain rightly recognizes is the same kind of supersensitivity that empowers sleuths like Poirot.
The novel is full of little comic jewels, from a friend of Kit's who acts a bit like SCOOBY DOO's Shaggy and is nicknamed Binfire, to the total meaning of the Brighton Pavilion being its momentary use as a VIXENS location, to a character's rage at not the recent murder but the "appalling inaccuracies on IMDB." In the end, Fountain loves fans and shares that love. To geek out with him, and his stand-in Kit, you'll want to know who committed the atrocity in the shed and why.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, September 2024
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