Commissioner Maubritane answers a plea for help, and finds himself plunged into a nightmare. Pierre Sertat tells Maubritane of a mysterious intruder who keeps breaking into his house – but despite Maubritane’s precautions, Sertat is shot and wounded and the visitor escapes. When more members of the Sertat family are attacked – all in locked rooms or by unseen assailants – Maubritane is driven to the brink of madness. As a last resort, he calls on M. Allou for answers.
The first part of this novel is a good build up to the crimes, with a dash of atmosphere – covert meetings in the fog, seedy bars, nighttime attacks. The problems are enticingly insoluble, and escalate in impossibility. First there are the night-time intrusions into the apparently locked Sertat home. Then comes an attack from an unseen attacker on an enclosed road, and then two stabbings in locked rooms. It’s believable that the main investigator, Maubritane, would be driven to abandon his post and ask M. Allou for help.
We first follow M. Allou in Paris, where he is trying to avoid news of the horrible crimes in Arles, since he doesn’t want to get involved. Eventually he asks his maid about it and she tells him only that the crimes are the work of the devil…
When Allou’s subordinate Maubritane appears and has no better explanation, expectations are well and truly set. Vindry depicts Maubritane as being competent, but with a hint of hubris that will bring about his downfall. He’s a likeable protagonist; we’re let into his thought process at several points when he questions a suspect, and witness him trying different approaches to questioning, in order to try and worm out more information. The fact that, more often than not, he fails, makes him sympathetic. Actually, Maubritane’s apparent competence is one of the book’s most significant (unintentional) tricks – it makes you overlook that his actions often defy common sense.
Speaking of common sense, unfortunately the solution really lacks it. I can believe in one character having the specific personality traits required to make the plot go, but that every character behaves in that exact same way passes far beyond belief. Possibly if the book had this behaviour as a theme it was exploring, I could accept it, but Through the Walls really does present the reader with a pure puzzle. Such things as theme and characterization are not part of its remit – and those are the only things that could have made the solution convincing or interesting. It’s not exactly a fount of clever clues either – the solutions are instead reached because all other possibilities are excluded, some on fairly shaky grounds.
The translation also includes some bonuses – translations of essays that Vindry wrote about the detective genre. He’s good at coming up with metaphors to divide the various types of crime fiction works. Of his own branch of the genre he says “The logic is unreal, or rather, surreal. The master of fact and not its slave.” I could certainly see that at play here, but based on the results, I think I prefer something different from my mysteries…
Though I’d describe this story as simply “unreal” rather than “surreal”. Actual surreality would be much more fun to read.
In the end all I can say is that this puzzle novel is short and smoothly written, but that its solutions do not live up to the hype the narrative builds up around them. There are other translated Vindry books out there, but based on this it would take some convincing to get me to try another.
Other opinions:
Beneath the Stains of Time
The Grandest Game in The World (contains spoilers!)
The Invisible Event
Mysteries Ahoy!
For actual surreality, read Harry Stephen Keeler!