{"id":7963,"date":"2019-07-31T10:58:01","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T14:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=7963"},"modified":"2019-07-31T10:58:01","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T14:58:01","slug":"skulduggery-in-the-latin-quarter-by-david-benjamin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/31\/skulduggery-in-the-latin-quarter-by-david-benjamin\/","title":{"rendered":"“Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter” by David Benjamin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Kid Books, April 2019. Copyright 2018 by David Benjamin.<\/a><\/p>\n

If you have read any of Benjamin’s other novels – in particular, Three’s a Crowd<\/em><\/a> which is also a mystery and is also (partially) set in Paris – you will be struck by his growth as an author. While the characters in Three’s a Crowd<\/em> are comic caricatures, the characters in Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter<\/em> are very fully formed, complex and distinct. And there is a bunch of them. The plot involves the theft of an extremely valuable T.S. Lawrence manuscript and the efforts of a rag-tag group of book aficionados – and a stripper – to recover it. This seemingly simple larceny spirals into a deadly multi-country chase involving not one but several underworld characters. The body count grows as the plot develops. I lost count, but this is by far Benjamin’s most bloody book.<\/p>\n

And it has several surprises. The first is that the main protagonist is not Chester Quinn, the guy who runs an English-language bookstore in the Latin Quarter from which the manuscript is purloined, but Circe Evans, a legendary stripper from a legendary strip joint, Le Crazy Horse Saloon<\/a>. It turns out that this stripper is the granddaughter of Homer Evans<\/a>, a legendary Parisian detective. Now I need to note that the Crazy Horse is a real strip joint but Homer Evans is a fictional character. Mixing real and imaginary is an interesting literary choice but it is an easy one to swallow.<\/p>\n

The rest of the rag-tag posse consists of a painter, another stripper, another bookseller, and a colorful superhero with a cape and a sword (really) who chooses to use the moniker “Bodkin the Bold.” He serves as the jester of the group, up to the point where he decapitates one of the bad guys with his blade. Body count.<\/p>\n

The author clearly loves both Paris and the English language. He gives the reader a full tour of both. If you don’t like loving descriptions of real Parisian streets and haunts, along with some famous landmarks, this book may not be for you. Similarly, if you don’t like learning a bunch of words that your have never, ever seen or heard before, this book is not for you. I would advise keeping a dictionary handy. Some of the 10-cent words that I culled from the last quarter of the book: postprandial<\/a>, ecdysiast<\/a>, hyrax<\/a>, proscenium<\/a>, macguffin<\/a>. There were dozens of these. I thought I knew the language, but this book proved otherwise.<\/p>\n

Early on, the sheer volume of characters made reading difficult as I had to keep stopping to mentally keep the cast ordered in my mind. The bad guys were very shadowy – to the point where the police didn’t believe that they existed. That was also a bit hard to swallow. Why would this rag-tag group be aware of these nefarious characters and the police weren’t? There is also an attempt on Quinn’s life that I found hard to swallow. But all of these flaws were forgotten in the rather glorious (and, yes, bloody) finale which I found surprisingly satisfying. The final chapter contains the final surprise, which I won’t reveal, but everything is (mostly) tied up pretty tightly.<\/p>\n

Overall I found this to be an exceptionally well-crafted novel, one that left me admiring the author’s skill. It wasn’t easy reading throughout, but it was satisfying.<\/p>\n

7.5 out of 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Kid Books, April 2019. Copyright 2018 by David Benjamin. If you have read any of Benjamin’s other novels – in particular, Three’s a Crowd which is also a mystery and is also (partially) set in Paris – you will be struck by his growth as an author. While the characters in Three’s a Crowd … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-24r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7963"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7968,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7963\/revisions\/7968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}