Barbara Cleverly, Folly du Jour (Soho Constable, 2008)
I have been a faithful fan of the Joe Sandilands murder mystery series since I found the first two titles, The Last Kashmiri Rose and Ragtime in Simla, in a remaindered book catalog several years ago. In fact, my review of this series reminds me that old Joe provided my introduction to the whole genre of serial murder mysteries. That in itself is worthy of note!
I happened to be browsing the Soho Constable Web site while I was looking for the most recent title of the Jack Haldean series. There I discovered that this publisher acquired Joe Sandilands after the unfortunate demise of Carroll & Graf -- and released an installment that I had not yet read! Because it had already been on the market for a year, I couldn't convince the publicist to send us a review copy, but I easily found and bought a copy of the hard cover edition from an on-line vendor. It came to the top of my fiction pile a week ago, and I breezed through it in just a few hours.
Because I have already written at considerable length about the series and its title character, I will focus this review on this particular title. As it would suggest, Folly du Jour is set in Paris, where Joe is representing the Metropolitan Police at the second conference of heads of Interpol in late May 1927. While there, he finds himself called upon to assist the Paris Police Judiciare in solving a murder case that unfortunately involves his old friend from India, Sir George Jardine.
In addition to Sir George, two other characters from earlier titles make significant appearances in Folly du Jour. The alluring Alice Conyers, whom Joe and Sir George both knew in Simla, reprises her role as a ruthless criminal implicated in the murder that starts the action in this novel. Inspector Jean-Philippe Bonnefoye collaborates with Joe in this novel, as he did in Tug of War. On more than on occasion, Joe also has reason to summon the memory of his adopted niece Dorcas, who appeared in both The Bee's Kiss and Tug of War. However, she is not actually present in Folly du Jour.
In Folly du Jour, Cleverly provides precious little background on Joe, which I imagine would challenge a reader new to the series. I also noticed that Joe has become just a bit cruder than I remember him being in the earlier novels. For example, at the start of a truly jaw-clenching description of the flight from London to Paris (remember, it's 1927 so this is not exactly a common occurrence), she has Joe refer to Croyden Aerodrome as the "Arsehole of the Universe" (31). In an evening visit to the morgue with the widow of one of the deceased, Joe notes that the electric lights have the effect of "shining a torch in the face of an old whore" (135).
Also noteworthy in this installment is Cleverly's introduction of historical events and persons, something I recall with great appreciation from the Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne series. The murder that drives the action in this novel takes place at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on the night that Charles Lindbergh lands in Paris after his historic trans-Atlantic flight. Famous American performing artist Josephine Baker interrupts the performance to announce this event to the audience. This happens to be the same night that Joe's plane lands in Paris, and in fact Joe provides cover for the crowd-shy pilot after he deplanes. Toward the end of the novel, when Joe and Jean Philippe are close to solving the mystery, they encounter Georges Simenon (at this point a crime reporter but later the author of the Inspector Maigret series) at the theatre (he and Josephine were apparently an item) and involve him in the resolution of the case.
I should also note that the pathologist working on this case is an avid fan of the famous French murder mystery series Fantomas. Relatively early in the novel, Joe sees a billboard advertising a performance of the film version of one of the titles and expresses his passionate dislike for the unstoppable bad guy for whom the entire series is named. As a consequence of the numerous unflattering references to this series I encountered in Folly du Jour, I relinquished a review copy of the first Fantomas novel that had been sitting in my fiction pile for a while. It definitely did not sound like my cup of tea!
Folly du Jour, on the other hand, worked just fine for me. I found it highly entertaining in all the right ways.
