"You picked a nice sort of playmate."- Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon (1941, Film)
Hooper "Hoop" Talioferro (pronounced
Tolliver) is running an art gallery in Paris after having spent time in the
Belgium Congo, where he provided assistance to a medical missionary in the
clearing of several crimes (c.f. The Devil in the Bush, 1945), but the
delivery of a two letters will be giving him a taste of the Gallic criminal.
Matthew Head's Murder at the Flea Club
(1955) begins with Hoop honoring a request from the first letter to drop in on
a friend of an old friend, Audrey Bellen, who does not leave a favorably
impression him, however, promises to take her daughter Marie Louise out for the
evening. The second letter came from Dr. Mary Finney, medical missionary and
amateur snoop, informing him that she's briefly in Paris as a guest of the Sûreté.
They make an appointment for the
following day at The Flea Club, a semi-public nightclub of which Hoop is a
member with access to the cellar room where an archeologist, Professor Johnson,
digs for the foundation of Ste. Geneviève de Fli – remnants of a chapel dating
back to the 9th century. The entire floor is being dug up, section by section,
which gives a nice touch to a night-club cellar filled with an odd mixture of
guests ranging from gigolos to expatriates, but one of the excavation pits
contains something that it shouldn't: the night-club singer, "Nicole," half
buried under sand with her head caved in.
Murder at the Flea Club is not a linear narrative. Instead of telling the events from start
to finish, Hoop feds the reader and Mary Finney bits and pieces until the final
portion of the story. There's an Had-I-But-Known'ish tone in the opening as
Hoop tells that both letters will involve him in a murder at the club and its
solution with everything else largely consisting of filling up the gap of
events leading up the murder, connecting the Bellen's with the denizens of the
Fleas and fleshing out the characters – whom all seem to have one-on-one
alibis. So yes. This is a very character-driven mystery novel and as you can
probably deduce from this over written, but already dwindling, review, is that
they usually leave me with less to say than the ones that are a bit heavier on
the plot. And if the first mention of the victim's dying message is made after
the 100-page mark, characterization might have gotten in the way of the plot
just a little bit.
Having said that, I loved how Head
wrapped-up the story. Mary Finney has planned a dinner with all of the suspects
for a classic dénouement, but Monsieur Duplin is sure they already know
the identity of Nicole's killer and prevented anyone from attending – in order
to compare notes with Finney and test her acumen. This is why I think Rival
Detectives are grossly underrated! They're great vehicles to deliver false
solutions, twists and surprises – even in a minor way like here.
All in all, not a bad read that tried to
retain a good plot in the face of heavy characterization, and there's a nice
little twist given in the explanation, but it were mainly the opening and
closing chapters that did it for me.
Thanks for the plug!
ReplyDeleteRival detectives are something I absolutely love, and luckily not very rare in manga. The trope does work better when it's actually a detective who might outsmart the 'main' detective, or else the character might turn into a (smart) joke character (i.e. Simon Brimmer).
Detective Academy Q had a nice premise there, because Q Class was presented as the better, but less inexperienced class, so they could realistically lose to the more experienced A Class (but in the end, they won practically all confrontations...)
You can write a lengthy post on the many different types of rival detectives alone.
DeleteThere are professional rival detectives who'll try to beat the detective to the solution (Akechi from The Kindaichi Case Files) and the antagonistic rival who'll also try to frustrate the detective (James Sterling from Leverage is a combination of both).
You have friendly rivals like Ellery Queen's Simon Brimmer, Heji Hattori (a.k.a. Harley Hartwell) from Detective Conan (a.k.a. Case Closed) and Judge Ooka's coadjutor Judge Kujou, but the crossover rivalries are probably the best (one of Patrick Quentin's series detectives trying to catch another series characters for a murder in Black Widow is great).
Rival detectives in English mysteries seem to mainly exist in pastiches. There's not a detective in the public domain that Sherlock Holmes hasn't worked with.