PIGNON SCORBION & THE BARBERSHOP DETECTIVES

Bleiweiss’ first novel is actually a cycle of stories starring a new police inspector who comes to the town of Haxford in 1910 and quickly impresses the locals.

The first case for the eponymous sleuth is that of William Bentine, an even more recent arrival whose mother, tavern singer Mary Alice Bentine, told him that he was the natural son of Mortimer Gromley, who retired after making a pile in linen sales. Gromley indignantly denies the charge, and his wife, Cora, turns out to be an unexpectedly supportive witness. So Scorbion, assisted by his old friend Calvin Brown and the other employees of Brown’s barbershop, must question everyone involved and determine who’s telling the truth and who’s not. The second case revolves around the Hopkins Traveling Circus, whose employees come under suspicion in the death of Victor Hutchfield, the woodworker who’d crafted a king-sized pair of stilts for pint-sized Freddy Rumple, an aspiring stilt walker who’d commissioned the extra-long stilts in the hope of setting himself apart from all the other stilt walkers in England. The third and most elaborate case begins with the disappearance of farmer George Barlan’s hog and proceeds to the slaughter of Barlan himself. Throughout it all, Scorbion, an obvious parody of Hercule Poirot, comes across as a comically obsessive dandy who interrogates his way thoroughly and methodically through a series of mysteries as lacking in inspiration as he is in brilliance. Bleiweiss seems to have mastered every convention of golden age detective stories except the ones that made them great.

Routine puzzles solved by a detective who can’t hold a candle to Hercule Poirot. Quel dommage!