The Paris Enigma

The Paris Enigma, Argentine Pablo De Santis’s new novel, reads like a mash-up of 21st-century American best-sellers. The crime thriller, set against the backdrop of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, evokes both The Devil in the White City (murder! world’s fairs! modernity!) and The Da Vinci Code (secret societies; encrypted works of art and literature).

Bored with his daily life in Buenos Aires as a humble shoemaker’s son, Sigmundo Salvatrio escapes by burying himself in crime magazines. When Renato Craig, Argentina’s premier sleuth and a founding member of the elite international collective known as the Twelve Detectives, opens an academy, Sigmundo jumps at the chance to enroll. A series of sinister events leads Craig to send Salvatrio as his representative to the Twelve’s inaugural meeting at Paris’s World’s Fair. Shadowed by their faithful acolytes, who are equal parts assistant and scribe, the other 11 detectives gather for the first time to wax philosophical about their work.

Their musings on the art of detecting provide many of the book’s most memorable passages. Meanwhile, De Santis delivers some necessary fast-paced action. The detectives’ self-indulgent symposium is violently interrupted by the murder of one of their own. Sigmundo is asked to help investigate the murder, and soon encounters firsthand the detective rivalries and disturbing crime worlds that he once only read about.

Still, De Santis’s translated prose falls into some unfortunate snares: unironically schlocky writing (“I was going to say something, but she brought her fingers to my lips. She knew how to ask for silence.”), flat characters and an unexhilarating expository denouement. Though entertaining, The Paris Enigma fails to rise above the crime genre’s less desirable tropes.