Sigmund Salvatorio, the son of a Buenos Aires cobbler, is devoted to jigsaw puzzles, leading him naturally to an interest in detective work. He answers an advertisement placed by Renato Craig, the co-founder of the legendary Twelve Detectives (and the only one, at this stage, without an assistant). Salvatorio, and twenty other young hopefuls, are gradually schooled in the art of detection. And when the brightest and best of their group is murdered by the suspect they are pursuing in what becomes “Craig’s Last Case”, Salvatorio alone sticks out the grim course: a lesson on “the Method” which is also “the incandescence of corruption”.
Craig declines into illness. On his behalf, Salvatorio attends the first ever gathering of all Twelve Detectives, at the World’s Fair in Paris, 1889, where Craig’s friend Victor Arzaky is attempting to gather display-case items to show off the detectives’ talents – a microscope, a revolver and sundry gadgets. But the detectives, and their acolytes, are cagey, jealous and mutually suspicious, and when a series of murders takes place, any illusion of noble common purpose dissolves.
In this smooth translation of El Enigma de Paris, which was first published in 2007, we enter a world of exotic stereotypes, familiar from comic-book detective stories of old, but set in an era on the brink of effective forensic science. The suspects are members of sects and cults, or theatre performers: as, in a way, are those who pursue them. Gustave Eiffel, whose almost-completed tower is the focus of much villainy, says, of the fanatics who are threatening him, “They, with their feverish minds, are the only ones who have understood us. We are in a war of symbolism”. The same could be said by the detectives.
Beneath the cartoonish romps and the occasional windy discussions about the art of detection, a more pathos-laden subtext emerges: the displacement of magic by science, of brotherhood by bureaucracy. The cerebral games and gentlemanly derring-do will soon be overtaken by the violence, effort and organization of the police procedural. As the Japanese detective Sakawa says, “I like the empty cases: they say more about us than all the instruments we could fill them with”. The exciting tales of the great detectives are merely words and wonderment, the stuff of unreliable reportage; a diminished and sadder reality is offered by the brute facts and the tangible evidence.