The Paris Enigma by Pablo de Santis

As Detectives Convene, a Towering Mystery

By VICTORINO MATUS

The Paris Enigma
By Pablo De Santis
Harper, 244 pages, $24.95

Exactly how were crimes solved before the advent of computerized fingerprint analysis, DNA testing and everything else available to Gil Grissom on "CSI"? As Pablo De Santis reminds us in his luminous thriller, "The Paris Enigma," criminal investigators a century ago had to rely almost entirely on mere mental acuity and reasoning skills.

Corbis

The Eiffel Tower during its construction in Paris in the late 1880s

Set in 1889, the novel is narrated by Sigmundo Salvatrio, the inexperienced assistant to Argentina's leading detective, Renato Craig. Salvatrio has been sent to Paris on the eve of the World's Fair to take his boss's place at the first gathering of the Twelve Detectives -- the best and the brightest from around the world. In the shadow of the nearly completed Eiffel Tower these men plan to share with one another their knowledge and experience and compare philosophies on crime-solving. The atmosphere turns anything but collegial, though, after one of their own is murdered.

Salvatrio is thrust into the center of the investigation when lead detective Viktor Arzaky, a member of the Twelve, recruits him as his assistant. In no time, the Argentine learns that there is a dark side to the City of Light: Salvatrio encounters Parisian absinthe and opium dens, then discovers a secret society virulently opposed to Gustave Eiffel's monumental structure. "Positivism, the desire to understand everything, to explain everything, is the modern disease," warns one of the conspirators. "The tower, from which one can see the whole city, and the World's Fair, which wants to display everything that exists, are nothing less than the symbols of a world without secrets."

Apparently this is a bad thing -- but how far will the fanatics go to prevent progress? Meanwhile, the closer Salvatrio comes to solving the crime, the more he understands about his own profession: its obsession with "locked room" cases and perfect enigmas, as opposed to less interesting crimes of passion, or as Arzaky explains, "the endless gray list of all those who kill for love, for jealousy, out of blindness." Salvatrio also begins to see more clearly the strong hierarchical divide between detectives' assistants and their superiors: He is viewed dimly by the other acolytes for daring to think that one day he could become a detective himself.

More disconcerting for Salvatrio, however, is the revelation that detectives can suffer from an "infection," as one investigator describes it, "the attraction to crime. The temptation to cross the line. We're all tempted sometimes." Soon more bodies are discovered, and the realization finally dawns on the detectives that a serial killer may be on the loose.

Winner of the first Premio Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa prize (an award, as you might suspect, for Latin American literature), "The Paris Enigma" is a tightly spun thriller and a quick read, thanks to the able translation by Mara Lethem. Mr. De Santis effortlessly incorporates important historical events (the building of the tower and the World's Fair) into his narrative, as well as capturing the turn-of-the-century uneasiness over the emergence of the machine age. And while the reader may have an idea of the suspect's identity well before the mystery is solved, it's the motive that will keep the guessing lively until the end -- when a solution emerges that would defy DNA testing or fingerprint analysis.

Mr. Matus is assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.