The Double Death of Frédéric Belot (1932) by Claude Aveline

Evgen Avstine was a French editor, poet, publisher and writer born to Russian-Jewish parents who wrote everything from non-fiction, poetry, novels, radio dramas, screenplays and stage plays – published under his penname "Claude Aveline." The detective novel was not overlooked by Aveline. While not a prolific mystery novelist, Aveline delivered a celebrated, often reprinted classic of the French detective novel with La double mort de Frédéric Belot (The Double Death of Frédéric Belot, 1932). A novel that has been cited as a major inspiration for Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

The Double Death of Frédéric Belot was not only translated into English by Ann Lindsay and published in 1940, but the translation was reprinted three times over the following decades. After the last reprint from 1974, Aveline and The Double Death of Frédéric Belot appear to have been largely forgotten outside of the Francophone world. I decided to finally take a look at this reputed French masterpiece, because Pushkin Vertigo pushed back the release Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939) from this month to April 2027.

That and I just thought it funny to pick Aveline's The Double Death of Frédéric Belot as a substitute for Boileau's Six Crimes Without a Murderer. It's (somewhat) on theme!

Chief Inspector Frédéric Belot is considered by the Special Branch "as the finest inspector ever," praised for his "exceptional intuition" bordering on second sight, whose colleagues often call out in unison, "this is a job for Belot," when baffled by a puzzling or even dangerous case – personally directing raids on gangs ("...sworn to have his scalp"). Frédéric Belot is not the detective of The Double Death of Frédéric Belot for a very obvious reason. That part goes to his subordinate and godson, Inspector Simon Rivière, who discovers a dying Belot in his apartment on Rue de Crimée. Shot through the head and chest with his revolver lying nearby. Rivière gets a double shock when he finds the dead body of another man in an adjoining room, shot through the chest, who's the spitting image of Frédéric Belot. Right down to a revolver lying next to the body ("two Belots... one dead, the other dying"). So... what the hell?

First of all, the bizarre situation of the dying policeman and the body of his double in the next room earned the book a mention in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but I have to disagree. The Double Death of Frédéric Belot is not a locked room murder or any kind of impossible crime. However, the premise and the resulting problems and complication reminded me more than once of Christopher Bush's work from the 1930s. A bizarre, double murder closely-linked in time or place was a favored plot-device of Bush at the time and got a lot of mileage out of it. Bush had already published Dead Man Twice (1930) and Dancing Death (1931), but returned to it frequently until the 1940s with novels like The Case of the April Fools (1933), The Case of the Bonfire Body (1936), The Case of the Hanging Rope (1937) and The Case of the Tudor Queen (1938). That, too, is an unfair comparison as the whole story and plot has nothing to do with breaking down alibis, locked doors or even identities.

 

 

The Double Death of Frédéric Belot is written like a typical, 1930s detective novel complete with floor plans relevant to the plot, but underneath that traditional exterior is a character-driven crime novel concerned with two questions: what happened and why? So not the customary who or the always popular how. That makes it hard for me to properly judge it, because I couldn't disagree more with John Norris who stated in his 2021 review The Double Death of Frédéric Belot that "real people always make for more intriguing mysteries than locked rooms and invisible killers." John obviously needs to reread The Three Coffins (1935), but I can't deny that this character-driven, almost modern crime novel is a well-written, captivating read. My only complaint, plotwise, is that answer to the most fascinating aspect of the story (who's the double, what was his role and why) is simply told to Rivère in Part 4 ("The Chief's Story").

Other than that, I'm not blind for how The Double Death of Frédéric Belot became a crime classic in France or why it's English translation was reprinted in the 1960s and '70s. It's simply a good crime novel with a truly fantastic, no-gimmicks needed premise, but, on a whole, I'm perhaps not the right person to fully appreciate it. I'm more of Herbert & Wyl's La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932) kind of guy.

Note for the curious: I didn't know where to squeeze this into the review, but I mentioned The Double Death of Frédéric Belot was a major inspiration for Boileau and Narcejac. Aveline himself seems to have been inspired by S.A. Steeman's La nuit du 12 au 13 (The Night of the 12th-13th, 1931) in which the detective is also taken out of the story following a bizarre shooting with two victims. It should be noted that writers have playing with this idea for years (e.g. Alan Thomas' The Death of Laurence Vining, 1928).