I read this today on one of the messageboards I frequent:
I just finished reading a book called ‘El Enigma de Paris‘ (don’t think you guys will have much trouble translating that) by Pablo de Santis.
I don’t know if it will ever be translated to English, but if you ever see it at the bookstore, it’s pretty good.
The twelve best detectives of the late 19th century gather in Paris for the world fair; from the German super detective who battles crime with mechanical toys of his own invention to the Japanese zen detective who fights a secret organization that drives people to commit suicide through carefully elaborated poems or subtle movements of a fan, and might possibly only exist inside the detective’s mind. It’s hard not to compare it to Grant Morrison’s Club of Heroes story from Batman, since the whole fun starts when one of the detectives is murdered and it’s most probably also based on ‘And then there were none’. Although, the style is more Borges than Morrison.
It’s also very similar to Jasper Fforde’s nursery crime novels, since it is very playful with the genre’s tropes, but not in a comical way this time
Wait let me repeat that one bit: the Japanese zen detective who fights a secret organization that drives people to commit suicide through carefully elaborated poems or subtle movements of a fan, and might possibly only exist inside the detective’s mind!
Learning to read Spanish just in order to see if the execution of that lives up to the amount of awesome the description inspires in my mind would probably be overdoing it… I guess. But if I ever see a translation of that book kicking around…
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