Mr Mee (Picador, 2000; Dedalus Books, 2014) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, his third set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century (following Pfitz and D'Alembert's Principle).

It has three alternating story-lines: one featuring a pair of 18th-century French copyists, and two with modern protagonists - elderly Scottish book collector Mr Mee and university lecturer Dr Petrie.

[2] The lecturer Dr Petrie thinks Ferrand and Minard never existed, comparing Rousseau's Confessions to Proust's In Search of Lost Time - something that appears to be a memoir but is really a novel.

The first chapter of the novel includes a version of the Monty Hall problem, presented as a letter from Rosier to D'Alembert about a hostage whose life depends upon choosing which cup a ring is hidden under.

Booker Prize judge Roy Foster wrote in the Financial Times: "We ended with a shortlist to be proud of, and a magnificent winner in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, but I still think regretfully of a few that got away (some only just)... Andrew Crumey's Mr Mee is wildly expansive and generally light-hearted: it weaves together the story of an octogenarian Scottish scholar discovering sex through the internet, with an 18th-century French whodunnit about a lost philosophe encyclopaedia and a dying academic's obsession with one of his students.

The French element is a triumph in itself, but each story is reported in a perfectly manipulated voice, the deadpan humour never wavers, the cross-references thicken intriguingly, and in the end all the tangled threads resolve into a beautifully executed pattern which is oddly moving.

Ervin wrote: "Borges lurks in the shadows of Mr Mee, and he becomes the reader's Virgil, an essential guide through an abyss of literary references, allusions and constructs.

Although his name remains unuttered through the vast majority of the book, other historical figures do turn up as characters, minor plot functionaries and tongue-in-cheek jokes on the part of the author.

Ian Jack later wrote, "That meant the published list included three names we'd previously ruled out - three writers who, after a little flurry of phone calls between the judges, moved up in our ranking from "Quite Good" to "Best".

In other texts, however, including Gray's Poor Things, Crumey's Mr Mee, and A. L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad, each of which embeds Gothic elements in another genre or mode, the trope exceeds these limitations and allows for a greater reflection on the relationship between language and experience.