This first English translation of The Secret of the Pointed Tower (1937) by Pierre Véry was a cause of great excitement when announced, and I regret only that the complexity of the multi-limbed TBR has delayed me this long in getting to it.

The tower of the title was, at the time of publication, the headquarters of the French police in Paris, and remains, so I understand from the notes herein, a Paris landmark to this day. Its ‘secret’, then, doesn’t really play into this collection of short stories in any way, except…well, we might as well get into that straight away.

After a framing device in which we’re told how Véry found these stories in the tower of the title — a presumably secret stash of old cases from police history — we’re off with ‘Urbin’s Chin’, in which a burglar finds himself in the unenviable position of being accused of a murder in the house he was merely robbing. A nice turn of phrase or two here sets up Mead’s translation well…

The police who interrogated me were not the surly kind. If they hit me at all, I got the feeling it was merely a formality. A way of honoring an old tradition.

…and it’s interesting to see that sort of anti-detection we’ve come to expect from French authors of this era, with a telling phrase telling not because of what it communicates but because of what it inverts. Not what I was expecting, but an interesting opening ploy.

‘Police Technique’ is one of those setups — a murder in a location where the only other person present swears they are innocent — that make sense only if the people involved know they’re in a story that requires a surprise ending. Again, there’s a sort of anti-detection here, with the obvious suspect unwilling to account for their whereabouts at the time of the death, but more problematic is…well, spoilers, but it’s a repeated refrain, one that doesn’t work, and one that I find faintly annoying.

Also, this being a dying message story, it’s to be wondered if some substitution has been made in carrying it into English, because — as with ‘Murder in Cognac’ (1999) by Paul Halter — what we’re told sounds similar in English does not, to my limited understanding, sound similar in French. I’m willing to believe that I’m the once at fault here, but it’s also a little frustrating when translated stories rely on mishearing something, since it’s rarely going to transpose that miscommunication into a second language.

Okay, so ‘The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke’ made me realise that we’re not coming to Véry for his plotting. Instead, there’s a sort of Chestertonian fable quality to his writing where, instead of telling paradoxes, what we’re supposed to seek is almost an inversion of the expected manner of logical thought. Certainly that would explain what went before, and what happens here.

It took me a little while to spot this, because Véry is actually quite good at introducing what should be fairly robust Golden Age ideas — here, that the identity of a missing woman can be accomplished only due to a long-sighted man who could not see her clearly and a partially deaf man who could not hear her. G.K. Chesterton would have a field day with this, whereas Véry is toiling in a different field. It’s good, and entertainingly told, but the principles herein should unearth something far more intricate.

Once you’ve recalibrated to Véry’s intent with this collection, the eventual direction of ‘The Tale of a Tartlet’, in which absurd contrivance sees a cyanide-laced pastry somewhere at large in a small French town, will not be terribly surprising. What is interesting is the — apparently unfounded, the endnotes tell us — scientific principle that guides us to the conclusion, which would have been far better after about a quarter of the pages used herein. It feels like Véry was going for a sort of realism approach in trying to communicate the spread of panic in the town, but I found it unfocussed and frustrating to read.

‘The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov’ sees our eponymous dipsomaniac Russian…

Sell that coat of yours, the vodka had told him. Sell your suitcase, too, and your spare linen. Then come back to me.

…wandering through a nightmarish Paris night in search of deliverance. There’s little to surprise here, but Zapyrov’s haunted, hallucinogenic flight reminded me of long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by James Thompson, and for bringing that masterpiece to mind this comes recommended.

Ubiquitous in these days of email, ‘The Spanish Prisoner’ is a scheme which sees you receive a missive which promises fathomless riches if you’d just be willing to pay a small fee to access some offshore bank accounts. It’s pleasing not just to see a pre-email version of it play out here, but also to see the foresight with which Véry’s characters view such open-handed chicanery:

“The Spanish Prisoner has been around for over a century. In another century, I’m sure it will still be going strong. It’s as reliable as human stupidity.”

This is a fun, pleasingly amoral little tale with a nifty sting in the caboose. Hard not to enjoy.

I was utterly charmed by ‘The 700,000 Pink Radishes’, in which a publisher receives a letter out of the blue informing him that his order for said quantity of vegetables is ready to be fulfilled. What develops from here is playful and absurd in the best possible way, lacking only in that Véry’s revelation of the explanation behind it is a little clunky…but still, however, loads of fun. Reminded me of The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont [ss] (1906) by Robert Barr, and would slide effortlessly into that hugely enjoyable collection.

I would have been tempted to retitle ‘Soupe du Pape’ as ‘The Day of the Peas’ — the expression itself being used in this off-kilter tale of an unusual discovery in a parcel of peas. The central pairing of contrasting brothers César and Oscar Bladout — a police detective and a dreamy layabout, respectively — is enjoyably wrangled, and Mead’s translation does a good job of keeping the lightness of this intact so that the generally joyous absurdity of the whole thing is felt very smartly in English.

I had previously read John Pugmire’s translation of ‘The Mystery of the Green Room’ in the British Library’s Foreign Bodies [ss] (2017) collection, and it’s appropriate that this is now the second work I’ve read in two translations because the first is The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) by Gaston Leroux, and that’s quite roundly spoiled herein, so caveat emptor or something.

This story of a thief who does not enter a room where he must surely know there are valuable jewels to be stolen remains a breezy and enjoyable read, and is even more of one in the context of some of Véry’s other writing. It would be interesting to compare Mead and Pugmire’s translations, too, an easier task over this shorter distance than a whole novel, but that’s an undertaking to be considered for another time.

More a vignette than a story, ‘The Killer’ is a brief piece about an escaped murderer and the distractions he seeks for a few hours having escaped from gaol. It’s difficult to dislike, but also too brief to really comment on in any meaningful way.

Finally, ‘A Lesson in Crime’, which posits a future in which the detective fiction classics form the basis of all studies in school. I suppose this is vaguely satirical, but it sits at odds with the other contents herein and, while the final point is possibly ironic in its intent, the whole thing — thankfully only a few pages — doesn’t really add up to much.

So, a Top 5:

1. ‘The 700,000 Pink Radishes’
2. ‘The Mystery of the Green Room’
3. ‘The Spanish Prisoner’
4. ‘Soupe du Pape’
5. ‘The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov’

I’m grateful to Crippen & Landru for reprinting this, because there’s always something interesting about the French crime fiction from this era, and Véry is no exception. That an entire school grew up just a few miles from England that sought to dismiss conventional investigation at the same time as the English were almost fetishising detection is endlessly fascinating to me, and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of GAD-era French writing for this exact reason.

As an undertaking, this is a little odd: I don’t see the purpose of the framing device, for instance, because it’s not as if all the stories are police reports or similar, and, given that one takes place in the future, how could it be found in the Parisian police headquarters on a rainy night? Some authors have adopted framing devices well — the only one that springs to mind in the present instance is Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell novels — but it seems to be done here almost because Véry is trying to distance himself from the creation of these and nothing more. Hardly an encouraging prospect.

Without context, then, Véry’s stories might seem somewhat difficult to engage with, but having read the likes of Gaston Boca, Alex Gensoul, Charles Grenier, Michel Herbert, Marcel Lanteaume, Noel Vindry, and Eugene Wyl — all due to the efforts of the aforementioned John Pugmire — I feel like I’ve been given an education in this era of genre writing that becomes more fascinating with every page I read. So kudos to C&L and particular thanks to Tom Mead for his highly-readable translation — should they wish to collaborate on such a project again, I am absolutely here for it.