Peter Verstegen was a Dutch editor, translator and writer who, under the pseudonym "Ton Vervoort," penned a regrettably short-lived, classically-styled detective series during the 1960s starring Inspector Floris Jansen – a dandy, well-educated Amsterdam policeman. Inspector Floris Jansen appeared in six novels from 1962 to 1965. The first five titles were published as Meulenhoff-pockets and Vervoort wrote them purely to make some money. Meulenhoff-pocket were printed in an edition of 12000 copies, which netted Vervoort a nickel per sold copy, but they are cheaply produced, mass market pockets. You can tell. Not all of my copies have aged gracefully and one is struggling for dear life to keep itself together. That makes the sixth and final Floris Jansen novel a different story all together.
Murder on Tour is as busy as the previous novels with as many moving parts, but more tightly focused on the problem at hand without any sudden, unexpected shifts or leaps in the narrative style. However, Vervoort still experimented with the possibilities in which a detective story can be told. Murder on Tour is very much a reflection of the period in which it was written.
One of the villains of the piece said it best when confronting Floris Jansen, it's "not elegant that you as a policeman meddle in a spy case, that is really reprehensible." Jansen's sober reply, "I'm here to solve crimes and especially murders" regardless of who committed the crimes or why. That brief exchange towards the end pretty much sums up the entire plot, cops vs. spies. So an early police procedural that unfolds like a 1960s Cold War thriller. But did it work? Let's find out!
Jean Tasman is a famous and celebrated Dutch violinist, "the devil's artist on four strings," who has played all over the world from the United States to the Soviet Union. Tasman has two violins, a Stradivarius and a Guarnerius. The latter is considered to be "the best violin in the world" and "less than ten of these existed," which Tasman had recently inherited from his former teacher, Otto Bruch – preferring now to play on the Guarnerius del Gesù. Recently, Tasman has begun to notice some unsavory figures taking an interest in him and his violins. Someone who badly spoke Dutch offered two-hundred thousand gulden to buy his violin, but declined the offer. He comes across a suspicious-looking situation while driving home and decides to step on the gas to get away as quickly as possible. There's an attempted burglary while his wife and 12-year-old son, Erwin, were home. Finally, Erwin is taken from his bed and the kidnappers left a note pinned to the bedroom curtains of the open window, "your son is well taken care of." Inspector Floris Jansen is placed in charge of the investigation and, before too long, a ransom note is delivered. The kidnappers explain they had to resort to a rougher method, because the burglary was botched and ensure their son is doing well ("he's happy to miss school"), but the gist of the letter is that Tasman has to give up his violin. But which one? And why?
What first appeared as the possible handiwork of an unscrupulous, deep-pocketed collector, contorts into something far more deadly as people get shot left and right. Floris Jansen becomes sure there's a lot more to the kidnapping than an avarice collector when changes upon an American newspaper article, "WHO KILLED SERGEJ TURCEWICZ?" A Yugoslavian diplomat who had been found stabbed in the elevator of a luxurious New York apartment building and uttered with his last breaths the words, "Nucs, Migs, Violin" and repeated several times the Serbian word for danger. Just before he was murdered, Sergej Turcewicz attended a party that was thrown in honor of Jean Tasman!
If you have read my previous reviews of obscure, long out-of-print Dutch detective novels, you know the difficulty of finding anything relevant written about them on the internet. Usually, there's little more than a short biography of the author and list of titles with publication dates. I fared better in digging up background information on the Floris Jansen series and found some interesting interviews with Vervoort, in which he admitted were dashed off "terribly fast" and acknowledged they "unfortunately bear the marks of it." I mentioned in my previous reviews Vervoort has a very loose, airy and sometimes satirical style of storytelling and characterization that makes you doubt it will be able to deliver a classically-styled detective tale, but careless style often belayed the clever plots hidden underneath – e.g. Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963). Vervoort never discussed any of his novels individually. Just roughly how he wrote the books and what he got out of it. So no idea how Murder on Tour was conceived or how and why he decided on the changes, but the writing process must have been a little different than the previous five.
Vervoort tried to find a way to link the detective story to the spy-thriller as Floris Jansen employed the technical resources of the police to counter and find, what would turn out to be, the spies. Such as trying to find bugging devices and finding the telephone in the Tasman house is tapped and there occasional glimpses of Jansen past as a Great Detective. Jansen immediately deduces from which newspapers the words on the kidnap note and ransom letters were cut, but the most earnest attempt is a hidden-object puzzle concerning hidden microfilms. A beloved subplot and short story device of writers aligned to the Van Dine-Queen School. And, no, the microfilms were not hidden in there. Give my compatriot some credit. Unfortunately, Murder on Tour ended up being a spy-thriller and not a detective story or, ideally, a well-balanced hybrid. That means that the whole story falls a little flat come the ending as the reader has had no chance to anticipate what's revealed. You can easily guess what kind of horror is involved, but how it was going to take shape would have been the greatest crime in all of human history. While absolutely horrifying, it also made me crack a smile. I always considered the spy genre the domain of American and British writers. So having a Dutchman coming to America's rescue and save the day in the end elevated the ending just a little bit. Not enough not to be a disappointing ending to the series, but still appreciated Vervoort allowed Floris Jansen to bow out by preventing, what would have been, one of the gravest crime against humanity. Thank you, Agent Orange!
I'm left in two minds about Murder on Tour. It's undeniably the best written and characterized entry in the series, but perhaps departure too radically from its traditionally-plotted predecessors as the plot here is no patch on those previous mystery novels. So maybe Vervoort's biggest mistake here was not writing it as a non-series, standalone spy-thriller as the presence of Floris Jansen gives the reader certain expectations and hopes the story simply can't live up to. I half-expected a twist was coming that would reveal the troubled Jean Tasman as the kidnapper, which would have misdirected both the police and spies. But whenever has a detective novel or short story ever done anything noteworthy with a kidnapping angle? Not even Vervoort broke with that long-standing tradition. So, to cut a long story short, not the kind of conclusion most readers would expect from a retro-GAD series nor the ending it deserved. Fortunately, there's still Vervoort science-fiction mystery and several short stories to track down.
A note for the curious: I'm beginning to entertain the possibility that there's a lost novel in the series. Maybe even two. I found Vervoort giving conflicting answers to the number of detective novels he wrote. The number ranges between 8 and 10 novels. Vervoort wrote a dossier novel, De zaak Stevens (The Stevens Case, 1967/68), and the science-fiction mystery De zuivelduivel (The Dairy Devil, 1975) in addition to the six Floris Jansen titles. So eight novels, in total, appears to fit, but the eight to ten novels always seemed to refer to the Jansen series with one article mentioning Vervoort "originally planned to write a hundred" – stopping just short of ten detective novels. So, considering how quickly he wrote them at the time, is it really impossible that one, maybe two, manuscripts remained unpublished? Meulenhoff could have turned them down, because they thought it was more of the same and simply had their fill. Not because they were badly written or poorly plotted. If you look at the publication dates, there's enough room for one or two manuscripts to be returned to Vervoort's drawer. First one was published in 1962, the next two in 1963, the fourth in 1964 and the last two in 1965. So my money is that there was a seventh novel intended to be published in '64, but, for some unknown reason, the manuscript was rejected. Now I can't stop thinking about the plot of that hypothetical, now long-lost Floris Jansen novel or what its title could have been. Moord onder vertalers (Murder Among Translators)? Moord onder schakers (Murder Among Chess Players)? Moord onder de stervende (Murder Among the Dying)? Moord onder water (Murder Under Water)?
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