Arturo Pérez-Reverte is one of Spain’s most successful authors, specialising in the historical novel, with his series on Captain Alatriste being amongst his most popular. I got into him from the film adaptations of his early works. EL MAESTRO DE ESGRIMA/ THE FENCING MASTER (Pedro Olea, 1992); UNCOVERED (Jim McBride, 1994; based on THE FLANDERS PANEL); THE NINTH GATE (Roman Polanski, 1999; based on THE CLUB DUMAS). His latest, EL PROBLEMA FINAL, is a mystery that works on at least three levels: an easy-to-read page-turner of a detective novel; a connoisseur’s playful interrogation of the genre’s main tropes; and an imaginative and variegated appreciation of classic Hollywood cinema.

The setting and structure are pure Agatha Christie. A group of people stuck in a little island off Corfu in 1960 are confronted with a murder: Edith Mander, recently jilted and now a paid companion to Vesper Dundas, a rich widow, is found dead in her room, which is locked from the inside. Did she hang herself or was she murdered? After, Karabin, the Doctor who examined her corpse is also found dead, there is no longer any question, But who did it and why? Was it Hans Klemmer, a former Nazi? Raquel Ausslander, the Auschwitz survivor? Spiros, the handsome Greek waiter, perhaps too irresistible to the guests? Pietro Malerba, the ruthless and rich movie producer? Or Nerjat Farjallah, the ageing opera diva quickly being dislodged from the top of her particular pyramid by Maria Callas? A storm has disrupted transport and the Greek Police will take several days to get there. Can the crime be solved? Will murders continue to accumulate? Is there someone to investigate?

Sadly neither Poirot nor Fu Manchu are amongst the guests. Indeed, there is no detective of any kind. However, there is a simulation of a detective that might be more real to the guests/suspects than any real detective.  Hopalong Basil, the famous Hollywood Star, his career now on the slide but living comfortably in Cap d’Antibes in the South of France, is still world famous for playing Sherlock Holmes in a long series of popular Hollywood films (for Hopalong Basil read Basil Rathbone in every particular). Moreover, in Paco Foxá, a writer of pulpy but popular thrillers written to order, he’s found his Watson. So the narrative proceeds on the words that Arthur Conan Doyle puts into Sherlock Holmes’ mouth in THE FINAL PROBLEM: ‘As you very well know Watson, nobody knows the world of crime better than I.’ And since no one knows the works of Conan Doyle or Sherlock’s methods than the actor who played him in so many films, the movie detective is accepted as a more than acceptable substitute for the real thing.

The conversations between Basil and Foxá allow Reverte to call up a history of the genre from Poe to Gaston Leroux, Thomas de Quincey, Ellery Queen, Philo Vance, Simenon, Christie, Graham Greene and many others. It also allows him to intertextually call up all Holmes stories including the Sidney Paget illustrations for Holmes in THE STRAND MAGAZINE; and more importantly in the debates between Basil and Foxá on ‘what would Sherlock Holmes do?’ or ‘what are the conventions of a closed-room murder’ or the like, Pérez-Reverte proves himself a scholar of the genre.

 

So he tells us: ‘When a novel is well-constructed according to the rules of its genre, it’s almost impossible that the reader discover the guilty one before the detective.

Except when the reader knows the rules and knows how to

interpret the tricks of the narrative before the narrator reveals the enigma.

 

‘In a classic detective novel, there’ always three classic mysteries, who is guilty, how they did it and why. The who and why tend to be less important as in the true novel-problem, what interests the author and the intelligent reader most is the how.

 

To solve the crime, ‘one has to construct a hypothesis in relation to the facts, as incoherent as they may appear, and to explain them. Afterwards, one has to find proof in all the possible combination of facts; and if it’s revealed to be incorrect, move on to another hypothesis .

 

That a crime appears impossible to clarify doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an explanation. Every situation has it because otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

 

‘The assassin is the creator of a work’

 

What then of the detective?

 

‘The detective is the critic’.

 

 

Reverte quotes SS Van Dine on what is unacceptable in a detective novel: a catalogue of twenty rules for crime writing, forbidding the use of invented poisons, butlers or chauffeurs as assassins, twins, and blaming the Chinese.

 

There are other questions: What happens when the assassin is so stupid as to befuddle the detective? What happens when the assassin IS the detective.

 

At one point Basil admits, ‘I’ve lacked the mixture of reality and imagination that constitutes the fundament of my art’

 

‘In a mystery story it’s not a case of illuminating the reader but of blinding him. To succeed in that they focus more on finding the how than the who. That is why the author must avoid that the reader detect the traps; and if after a while they find the traps or intuit them, they accumulate false corridors one after the other, signals that make them avoid going back to compare and reflect.

 

 

An author of detective novels introduces mysteries within mysteries. He knows how to plan a strategy so that the reader is fascinated and stimulated enough to keep on reading; and also knows how to blind whilst hearing and cast a spell over what they see.

 

The conflict in a detective novel is not between the assassin and the detective but between the writer and reader. An overly analytic reader is always a danger to a writer.

EL PROBLEMA FINAL is an interrogation of the genre, cognizant of the tropes but playing with them, that sets up a double contest, one between the detective and the murderer; and another between reader and writer.

 

For me a great deal of the enjoyment was to see Pérez-Reverte’s familiarity and love of cinema and actors; Basil’s world is that of Basil Rathbone, he brings up the West End of the mid-thirties, the Hollywood of Gary Cooper and David Niven and Errol Flynn; the films of Erich von Stroheim and Michael Curtiz; the Thin Man films; he knows what characters wear for dinner in a Gregory La Cava movie. So this novel is like a Sherlock Holmes story, with an Agatha Christie structure but an elegant detective — Philo Vance as played by Basil Rathbone – in a dream-like Photoplay world that sets up a series of particular challenges to the reader: how well does the reader knows the genre? Can the reader detect the lineage of the particular plot and its narration; are the twists in the narration admissible within genre conventions or are they false corridors and McGuffins? Pérez-Revert doesn’t cheat, but he does play; and it is a very enjoyable game indeed.

 

José Arroyo