Death on Bastille Day (1981) by Pierre Siniac

Pierre-Mitsos Zakariadis was a French crime writer who authored over forty novels and short story collections, "stories with surprising and paradoxical endings," who debuted with Illégitime défense (Illegal Defense, 1958) – published as by "Pierre Signac." Success came in the early 1980s when he won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for two collections of short stories and a novel. More importantly, he produced an impossible crime novel around this time that would go on the collect a five-star rating from Roland Lacourbe in 1001 chambre closed (1001 Locked Rooms, 1997). That novel was translated and published earlier this year by John Pugmire and Locked Room International.

Un Assassin, ça va, ça vient (A Murderer Comes and Goes, 1981), published as "Pierre Siniac," appeared in English under two different titles complete with their own covers. Death on Bastille Day is the ebook edition and Bilocation the print version.

John Pugmire writes in the introduction Death on Bastille Day is "one of only three works in detective fiction featuring what the French call bilocation." A phenomenon better known in the rest of the world as the doppelgänger central to the plots of Noël Vindry's Le double alibi (The Double Alibi, 1934) and Helen McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), but there are more examples of the cast-iron alibi being presented as a quasi-impossible situation of bilocation. This year, I reviewed Norman Berrow's quadruple locked room mystery, The Bishop's Sword (1948), in which a prisoner appears at the bedside of a magistrate who ordered his detainment – while the guards at the police station swear the man was lying comfortably in his cell. Anthony Boucher's Nine Times Nine (1940) arguably had one of the better takes on the problem with a man who could not only be in two places at the same time, but vanished from a locked and watched room. Herbert Adam's The Spectre in Brown (1953) reputedly took a similar approach as Nine Times Nine and there are some miscellaneous examples like Brian Flynn's The Orange Axe (1931), Paul Halter's La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door, 1987) and the always underappreciated Jonathan Creek episode Time Waits for Norman (1998). I'm sure there are more out there.

So the problem of the doppelgänger, or bilocation, is not as rare as all that in detective fiction, but rarely explored to its full potential. Siniac tried to make up for lost time and missed opportunities with the novella-length Death on Bastille Day that begins as one of the smuttiest impossible crime stories on record.

One of the two main characters of the story is somewhat of an old playboy, Camille Feuillard, who "sold his five failing public baths in the suburbs," in 1969, "to mount smutty spectacles" with a traveling theatrical company called the Paris-Porno – attracting "a shady crowd" wherever they went. But even in France, "Feuillard had been obliged to scrub the lewd pictures from the sides of the heavy vehicles in the caravan." The other main character is one of Feuillard's many ex-girlfriends, Lise Dolari, whose health has recently taken a sharp decline. She looks to be on the verge of dying. Something the astrologers and clairvoyants she consults confirm, but things get weirder. Lise sees a vision of her own, gruesome death at the hands of Feuillard inside a dark, isolated house ("firing three bullets into her head and hanging her from a hook"). A vision sinister that came to pass several days later as a witness heard Lise's screams coming from exactly that house, "no, Camille, no," before seeing her getting shot and strung. The killer escapes the scene, but is identified as Feuillard. There is, however, one problem: the murder happened on the night of July 14th, Bastille Day, when everyone was out dancing and enjoying the fireworks. At the time, Feuillard was observed by several amused and reliable witnesses passionately dancing in the streets of Paris with a redhead. So how could he have been seen dancing in Place de la Bastille while simultaneously shooting and hanging his ex-girlfriend many kilometres away?

A double impossibility. The true rarity of the impossible crime genre, predictive dreams or visions, complemented with the contradiction between the strong evidence against Feuillard and his rock solid alibi. So the enviable task of cracking this conundrum falls on the shoulders of Inspector Rolande Kiéwicz.

Inspector Kiéwicz came very close to be the only stand up character in the story, "you and your damned scruples," but decided to throw in his lot with a disgraced private detective turned insurance agent. Gilbert Givrette offers to take a crack at Feuillard's alibi in return for his private eye license. Givrette is not going to do some brilliant detective work to demolish the alibi, but intends to "get Feuillard to talk" and "obtain a confession." However, the Givrette employs would plunged a lesser, weaker plotted detective story to the ranks of third-rate tripe. It begins innocently enough as Givrette gets Feuillard drunk and confesses to the murder on tape. But not how he managed to be in two different places at the same time. And "recordings, of whatever kind, are worthless legally." Nor does it prove anything. So he maneuvers Feuillard towards a befriended surgeon to remove a cyst from his stomach and have him confess while under anesthetic, but again, it's not enough to build a case on. What's the next step on the escalation ladder? Givrette has two thugs abduct, tie-up and gag Feuillard to perform a spot of "narco-analysis" by pumping with pentothal sodium – popularly known as truth serum. Why not? After all, "the Nazis used the technique, as did the Soviet Union under Stalin” and “Beria, Mao, the CIA, the KGB, et cetera, made great strides in improving it." Sure, its use here is arguably more horrifying than that time the District Attorney in Anthony Abbot's About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930) waved around a syringe of truth serum as he third-degrees an innocent man on the way to the electric chair. Sure, there possibly were some side effects with the previous attempts taking its cumulative toll, but who am I to argue with such a wide, varied list of authoritative voices on the subject. If the Nazis say it works, it probably works.

So, yeah, the opening chapters and so-called "investigative" parts hardly suggest a classically-styled mystery novel in the tradition of the French-language Golden Age detective writers, but appearances in this case were very deceiving. Siniac came through in the end and delivered an extremely clever explanation how a man can appear in two different places at the same time neatly tied to the death vision and other incidents. Not until then can you see how snugly Death on Bastille Day fits in the lineage of the France detective story going back to the experimental Stanislas-André Steeman and his Golden Age followers to the plain realism of Georges Simenon and the seediness of Martin Meroy.

Normally, I would not go as far as calling it an outright masterpiece as it has drawbacks, but this time, I agree with Lacourbe pinning a five-star rating on it. Death on Bastille Day is one of the best and effective demonstrations why having a good plot is as important as fleshing out characters and setting. A detective story without a plot and some awareness of what came before is like building a house on sand. If you strip Death on Bastille Day of the dirty P-word, all you have at best is a smutty genre curiosity not worthy of being called pulp or bother preserving. Let alone translate it into another language. It has a stiff dose of the dirty P-word. The excellently positioned and executed plot formed a solid foundation for everything else to stand and perform on, which is why it has so far stood the test of time for over forty years. Giving it enough time to get noticed, translated and discovered by non-French speaking mystery fans. Recommended with the caveat that you should not expect something along the lines of John Dickson Carr or Paul Halter. Death on Bastille Day is the kind of impossible crime/unbreakable alibi story that will be best appreciated by fans of Christopher Bush and Roger Ormerod.

A note for the curious: Pugmire's introduction mentions Death on Bastille Day is Siniac's only impossible crime novel, however, "99 Novels for a Locked Room Library" on "A Locked Room Library" lists another, Le mystère de la sombre zone (The Dark Zone Mystery, 1999). I'm rather curious now about that title, because Pugmire's introduction notes Siniac died under rather sad circumstances in 2002 ("his neighbours only noticed his absence a month later, because of the foul odour emanating from his flat. When firemen broke the door down, they found his body in an advanced state of decomposition"). I now want to know what kind of locked room mystery Siniac wrote several years before his death that garnered enough votes to make Lacourbe's list of 99 novels.