Product Description

Paris is in mourning. At the firework display marking the Dauphin s marriage to Marie Antoinette, hundreds of people have been injured or crushed to death. Yet not all the victims died accidentally... The tragic incident on Place Louis XV yields a new case for Commissioner Le Floch when a strangled woman is found amongst the other corpses. The investigation takes him to the home of a furrier on Rue Royale where he must deal not just with its curious residents but also face the terrifying forces of the supernatural.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22965 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-01
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Jean-François Parot’s The Phantom of Rue Royale is further proof (if proof were needed) that his splendid series of historical crime novels featuring Commissioner Nicolas Le Floch is one of the most cherishable phenomena on the current crime fiction scene (particularly when sympathetically translated, as this latest novel is by Howard Curtis).

Paris has been thrown into mourning after a fireworks display for the Dauphin’s marriage to Marie Antoinette has been disastrously mismanaged, and a conflagration has led to panicking crowds and carnage. Hundreds of people have been injured in the mêlée, and many have been crushed to death. Watching the conflagration (at first, from a distance) is the youthful Commissioner le Floch, who has already calculated that things have been badly planned, and attempts (in vain) to aid the victims of the catastrophe. But one of the deaths on that fateful evening has nothing to do with the fireworks: a young woman has been found strangled amongst the many other corpses. Nicolas is given the assignment of tracking down just how the young woman died, but he has, in fact, another agenda -- one that involves nothing less than corruption and skulduggery in the upper echelons of state power.

All of this is handled with the assurance that we have come to expect from Jean-François Parot after the delights of such books as The Châtelet Apprentice and The Man with The Lead Stomach, and Nicolas is a highly unusual protagonist; it's a refreshing touch that he has an element of self-importance – an element that is being constantly undercut by the grim reality of the situations he finds himself in. We know of course, how adroit Parot is at the handling of historical detail, but there will are those who will find that the supernatural element which assumes such importance in the later stages of the book is less convincingly handled. Nevertheless, The Phantom of Rue Royale is not to be missed. --Barry Forshaw

About the Author
Jean-François Parot is a diplomat and historian. The Nicholas Le Floch mysteries have been published to much acclaim in France.

Customer Reviews

Plodding, dislocated and dull
After the other excellent reviews here I was really looking forward to a fun but intelligent read set in C18th Paris: what a disappointment! This is the third in a series of historical mysteries and perhaps it would have made more sense if I had read the earlier two (which have very different reviews here on Amazon), but even so, the author should still give the back story for new readers. In fact, it wasn't until page 281 of a 347 page novel that we even find out that the protagonist is 30.

Nicholas Floch is supposed to be utterly charming, but I never felt that I witnessed that for myself, and apart from a brief interlude with a beautiful courtesan he never really came to life at all, and was just `the investigator'. Similarly, the other characters were no more than names, they were never filled out. While I find clumsy description irritating (e.g. authors who follow the introduction of every character with a mini `he was a man of middle years with a crooked smile and red hair' or whatever) here there was no description at all. There's a character list at the start of the book and when I went back to it I was shocked to realise that people who seemed to be practically senile within the text had actually been flagged as being in their 40s.

The murder mystery itself gets bogged down in all kinds of irrelevancies, and is no more than a fragile thread holding the `plot' (such as there is) together. We never find out anything more about the character of the murder victim, or much about her family. There's little gradual revelation of clues and the solution to the actual murder is left very vague. The idea of various people disguising themselves as a native Indian and getting away with it in C18th Paris is utterly ludicrous.
There's also a huge fuss made about a servant girl being possessed and having to be exorcised which, while colourful, is completely irrelevant to anything and just hangs there.

The writing is very distant, I was always conscious of reading a book and was never drawn into the story myself (though this could perhaps be a function of the translation). I doggedly finished this book in the hope that it would pick up but sadly it didn't. Plodding, stolid and dull with a dislocated narrative, this is very disappointing.

Quai des Brumes
Detectives placed in a historical context have always been popular; I recommend Robert van Gulick's Judge Dee series set in China. They permit the reader to enjoy a tantalising crime mystery and to have a brief visit into another era and to compare and contrast how we do things now.

In this case the crime is set in the Paris (pre-Hausmann of course) of Louis XV. The hero - Nicolas Le Floch - has a murder and a demonic possession to solve within the context of the policing arrangements of the Ancien Regime. The historical detail is considerable but ultimately I found it got in the way of the plot. The litany of street names, which demonstrate the different appearance of old Paris can pall after a while and the crime's solution seemed almost an after-thought to a demonstration of the administrative arrangements of the Bourbon state. However, I experience much the same feeling when reading the Aubrey/Maturin novels with their (to me) unnecessary bits of period colour and these books are massively popular. I remain a member of the Hornblower Liberation Front.

Not quite up my Rue
It's tricky to tell, when a book has been translated from the original, whether you are disappointed with the writing or the translation. The synopsis says that this one is sympathetically translated so I's have to say it's both. I found that the language got in the way of the story. You've got a tale told in archaic, old fashioned terms and speech delivered as if it's spoken by a Frenchman who is confident in his fluent English, but who has never learned that we phrase our sentences in a different order from his native language.
I love a good mystery so I had to keep reading to see what happened, but I found that the flow of the story was constantly interupted. It was like walking through the cobbled streets of Le Marais in high heels; you'd just get some speed up and it knocked you off balance again. Not keen on the whole possession episode either. Maybe you'll feel that it adds to the atmosphere, perhaps it helps to immerse you in its pre-revolutionary positioning. For me it felt like a false extravagance, just a bit of an act, a good impersonation but not quite convincing. Sorry.
PS Edited to add that the translator doesn't know that "perle" is French for both bead and pearl. He constantly writes about a black obsidian pearl instead of a black obsidian bead. There is no such thing as an obsidian pearl. Doesn't the man own a decent dictionary? Drove me up the wall by the end of the book!