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This is the ninth time that Antonia and Hugh Payne, those modern-day residents of London, find themselves investigating a puzzling crime of the sort that enraptured readers eighty or ninety years ago at the height of the Golden Age of detective mysteries. The result is a dazzling juggling act in which the conventions of the genre are respected while the artifice is on full display. But something new is added this time around, something that was hinted at but not explored in the previous novel in the series. That is the literal presence of motiveless malignity, of evil for its own sake, unexplained by passion or greed.
We begin in the interior monologue of the sinister valet, Bedaux, who, anachronistically, is trailing behind his employer, Charles Eresby, on an aimless walk through the streets of a nicer part of London. Charlie has just been jilted by the beautiful blonde Olga Klimt. He is so distraught that he collapses outside the enchantingly named Sylvie & Bruno Nursery School where Antonia Payne has brought her grandson on his first day. Before the day is out, the somewhat dazed Charlie will find himself acquiescing to an exchange of murders scheme proposed by the headmistress of the school as a way of ridding herself of an overbearing aunt.
When an actual murder does take place, Charlie is horrified. Is he now expected to fulfil his part in what he does not even agree was a bargain? Raichev conjures up Highsmith's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN; he does not belabour the parallels. The headmistress is no Bruno Anthony; it is Bedaux, the creepy valet, who is the evil presence.
What follows is a tricky plot involving mistaken identity, numerous suspects, and an appropriate helping of red herrings. In fact, just the sort of novel that Antonia Payne writes and just the sort that Bedaux detests: "I don't like whodunits," he muses. "The artificiality and various contrivances of such stories irritate me. What I relish are crime stories in which you know who the culprit is from the very start and where the action is one long, unpredictable, frequently demented loop that keeps you on the edge of your seat and where all focus is on the villain." He would not like THE KILLING OF OLGA KLIMT.
This is a novel that provides all of the pleasures of the traditional mystery while insistently reminding the reader of the glaring defect of that particular approach to crime. In those, the criminal was always explicable, spurred on by greed, jealousy, resentment, or some other identifiable compulsion. At worst, the murderer was simply mad, but it was a madness that had its roots in one of these other definable motivations. The presumption was a reasonable world, briefly unsettled by a terrible crime whose balance was restored as the murderer is brought to book by the intelligent detective. What we were only rarely invited to remember is that the murderer, carried off to jail and trial, would in a matter of weeks be dangling from the end of the hangman's rope. It is a circumstance that might cast a shadow over whatever innocent intellectual pleasure we might take in a crime well solved.
While capital punishment no longer awaits the British murderer, Raichev, by situating his series in modern London and by including numerous reflections on the art of fictional murder, provides a brilliantly post-modern take on a mode of crime fiction that still offers enormous pleasure to a large number of readers.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2015
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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