The Mystery of the Lost Cézanne.
By M.L. Longworth. Penguin. $15.
A murder mystery in which
the murder is almost beside the point – or, in this case, in which the murders,
plural, seem scarcely central to the narrative – this fifth of M.L. Longworth’s
series featuring examining magistrate Antoine Verlaque and his law-professor
girlfriend, Marine Bonnet, proceeds at the same comfortable, familiar pace as
earlier series entries. Like its predecessors, The Mystery of the Lost Cézanne is a book into which a
reader immerses himself or herself gently and gingerly, as if into a bath whose
water is perhaps a touch too hot at first but will surely feel delicious once
one is surrounded by it for a time.
The immersion here is into a
very French world, specifically one centered on Provence and its artists – Cézanne above all, but also Cézanne’s friends and contemporaries:
Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Zola. Longworth is equally comfortable in French and
English, having even written a bilingual essay collection, but the sensibility
of this novel and its predecessors is distinctly that of France, and readers need
to understand that to get the books’ full flavor. Indeed, flavor is much of
what The Mystery of the Lost Cézanne
is about, containing as it does loving descriptions of various meals and their
ingredients, a variety of wines, and the pleasures of cigars and cigar clubs.
Ah yes, the murders. Well,
there must be some plot mover beyond that of the relationship between Verlaque
and Bonnet, after all (although elements of that relationship are in their way
every bit as important in this book as is the criminal investigation). It seems
that someone may have found a previously unknown painting by Cézanne, a portrait of an unknown
Aixoise with whom he had an affair in 1885 (the affair really did happen,
although Longworth invents the specifics). The discoverer of the
maybe-authentic painting is soon dispatched, and when Verlaque arrives on the
scene shortly after the killing, he finds an American art expert standing over
the man’s body. This instant suspect – who thus, by the usual standards of
murder mysteries, cannot possibly be guilty – is the stunningly attractive
Rebecca Schultz, who describes herself as “a black Jewish woman who had worked
all her life to finally get a white Anglo-Saxon man’s job,” and explains her
failure to call the police immediately by telling an investigator that if “you
were caught trespassing and entering where there had just been a murder, you,
too, would have thought twice before deciding to phone for help instead of
running straight out the door.”
Ah, but Schultz is not quite
as innocent as she seems, or not quite as innocent as she ought to seem in
light of how guilty she seems – this sort of twist is a Longworth specialty and
part of the charm of The Mystery of the
Lost Cézanne. A further twist here is the killing of the person who
apparently killed the discoverer of the possible Cézanne; but this is more of a necessary plot element, to keep the
story going somewhere, than a reason to sink comfortably into the novel. A
better reason is the subtlety with which Longworth continually pauses in the
narrative to deepen readers’ relationships with the central characters:
Verlaque “smiled, thinking of the conversation with the Alsatian shop owner, thankful
that he could have interesting chats such as the one they had just had, with
people he didn’t know intimately.”
Another good reason for
staying with the slow unraveling of the mystery is to experience some unalloyed
Francophilia. Readers must be prepared for unexplained references to the TGV
(France’s high-speed train); a chapter entitled “Dedans/Dehors” (which is
simply “inside/outside,” but sounds so much better in French); a reference to
“gendarmes and police [who] work together” that will puzzle readers unfamiliar
with the French law-enforcement system; repeated instances of the bise, that quintessentially French “air
kiss” greeting; and several wry comments on what it means to drive a Renault
Kangoo (a Google Image search helps). The best reason of all for full
involvement here, though, is to watch and be privy to the increasingly
intricate and altogether believable relationship of the
almost-but-not-quite-world-weary Verlaque and the intelligent, attractive,
successful – yet in some ways unsure of herself and her hopes and desires – Bonnet.
The determined lack of visceral detail about the murders, the murder scenes and
the minds of criminals is matched by an equally determined level of attention
to the ins and outs of the intertwined lives of Verlaque and Bonnet, and the
way in which those lives, plural, are slowly but surely becoming a life,
singular. This is, in the end, the greatest attraction of this pleasant (yes,
pleasant) murder mystery: this is a novel for those less interested in
“whodunit” than in why it was done, what wines were drunk with which freshly
prepared meals while it was being investigated, and what thoughts the principal
characters had while discussing the whole situation with thoroughly Gallic
aplomb.
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