Six Were Present

Six little Soldier Boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five

"And Then There Were None"

Today: an English review of a French novel translated to German. 

On a May day, the people on the streets are surprised by screams coming from above. A woman stands near the window of a flat above, yelling for help. The people below recognize her as Simone Vigneray, standing near the kitchen and it's clear some assaillant has barged into the Vigneray's flat. The Vigneray couple is in danger, and people run up to the flat, but find it locked. They call for the concierge to open it, while they hear shots and other sounds going on on the other side of the door, but when they finally manage to open the door and enter the flat, they find Marcel Vigneray lying dead on the floor, Simone nearly dead in the kitchen... but no sign of the murderer. The kitchen window was still watched by others, and while there's a back door leading to a staircase for the servants, that door is locked from the inside. Private detective André Brunel (and his friend the narrator) is on the case, as well as Roland Charasse, Marcel's cousin and a famous criminal lawyer. But it doesn't take long for more impossible crimes to follow: not only did the unseen assailant managed to escape the locked Vigneray apartment, not long after, the maid is also found murdered in her own room in the servants quarter of the flat block, but the police checked her room earlier, found it empty and posted an officer in the hallway, and yet the second time they visited the room, they found her dead on the floor! The investigators desperately try to stop the invisible killer from striking more, but they will strike six times in Pierre Boileau's 1939 novel Six crimes sans assassin ("Six Crimes Without a Killer"). And because I forgot most of the French I learned at school, I read the German edition Sechsmal Tödlich ("Deadly Six Times") translated by Ernst Sander.

I have to admit I am nearly ignorant when it comes to French mystery fiction. Some months back I read comic adaptations of the work of Stanislas-André Steeman, who is Belgian but wrote in French, but beyond that, it's basically just Lupin... The name Pierre Boileau is one I had seen often however, and connected to that were of course references to Six crimes sans assassin, which I'd guess is his most famous work when it comes to fair-play mystery fiction? The premise of six impossible crimes sounds interesting at least, so when I heard there was a German translation (which I can read infinitely quicker than French), I immediately got on the case.

To begin with the conclusion right away however, I don't think that the book is really a must read if you're only interested in the book as an impossible crime story, especially in 2024. While yes, the book is full of impossible crimes (locked room murders), with a rather surprising amount considering the short page count, it can't be denied that basically all the tricks in this book are very outdated for a modern reader. The tricks we see here for the locked rooms, are basically the "base form" of familiar locked room murders, and you will not only likely have seen many, many variants on these ideas, you're also likely to have seen more original and captivating iterations of what is done here. I can't even imagine that in 1939, the locked room mysteries in Six crimes sans assassin were genuinely shocking or original, and while some authors can weave a more complex web out of basic tricks by having various situations interact in surprising ways or for example using clue synergy to intertwine basic tricks into a stronger whole, Boileau doesn't really manage to accomplish that in this novel, with most of the situations feeling like distinct, discrete events: which is also a reason why the book feels very simple, as it's jsut event after event after event. I have seen the novel be praised for how fair the book is, but while the book is fair, I do have trouble seeing the 'fairness' of this book being in any way outstanding. It is fair in the way I normally expect a puzzle plot/honkaku mystery novel to be, as in, that is the bare minimum I expect of such a novel. There are no clues that are particular clever or audacious, so on the whole, the book just feels... it's there. 

(And while some murders André Brunel really couldn't do anything about, there are also some murders that really makes you question how effective Brunel is as a detective, or at least, if he was more interested in protecting a possible witness, he probably should take different actions because some deaths were totally avoidable)

What the book can be lauded for, is the amazing pace the story moves at. One page in, and we hear Simone Vigneray scream for help, and from that point on, the story keeps on moving and moving. There's nearly no rest, and Boileau keeps pushing his characters to the next murder, but again, this also prevents each crime scene from really developing, as everything is "what you see is what you get" and more often than not, you can already make a very, very close intuitive guess about what happened even before the scene is over, precisely because everything is dressed so simply, But on the other hand, you really are never bored, and the murderer gets rather busy as they have a lot to do before the end of the book! There's also some melodrama, which despite my very, very limited contact with French mystery fiction I'm going to call a trope of the genre because it does remind me a lot of the melodrama in the Lupin novels, but it never interferes with the story of detection, and in some ways, it does tie back nicely to the mystery plot, though the melodrama does seem to also push the murderer in some ways that seem a bit dramatic at certain points in time (like, the third and fourth crimes seem... rather excessive at that point in time still...).

So I wasn't really a fan of Six crimes sans assassin, which is a shame as you do hear a lot about it when it comes to classic French mystery fiction. Some more work of Boileau is available in German and it certainly reads easily away, so I might try another of them in the future. In the meantime, let's just pretend Poirot is French mystery fiction!