Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this locked-room mystery set in 1960, a washed-up actor puts his on-camera detective skills to the test when a suspicious death shatters the quiet peace for a group of strangers staying at an isolated Greek island resort. Perfect for fans of Knives Out, Benjamin Stevenson, and Anthony Horowitz.

June, 1960. Rough weather at sea leaves a group of strangers stranded on the idyllic Greek island of Utakos, all guests of the only local hotel. Nothing could show more prepare them for what happens next: Edith Mander, a quiet British tourist, is found dead inside a beach cabana. What appears at first glance to be a clear suicide reveals possible signs of foul play to Ormond Basil, an out-of-work but still well-known actor who in his glory days portrayed the most celebrated detective of all time. Accustomed to seeing him display Sherlock Holmes' amazing powers of deduction on the big screen, the other guests believe that the actor is the best equipped to uncover the truth.

But when a second body is discovered, there is not a doubt in Basil's mind: a murderer walks among them. What's more, the killer is staging each crime as a performance, leaving complex clues that bear an eerie resemblance to those found in the pages of Conan Doyle stories. This is a criminal who knows every trick in the book and is playing a deadly literary game. As the storm rages, Basil must become the genius detective he has only pretended to be.

This clever, whip-smart, locked-room mystery from internationally bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a love letter to golden-age detective novels. The Final Problem delights in exploring the tension between an investigator and his suspects, as well as a writer and his reader, delivering a revelatory twist that will shock even the sharpest of mystery fans.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is an old-fashioned expression for the story at the heart of this book: "hoist with his own petard." It's meant to convey the sense that there are unfortunate consequences to making yourself the object of your own expertise.Imagine being famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, then investigating a real crime.

Despite being long past the fame. Despite having no training. It's feeding his need for the adrenaline rush of fame, it's reinforcing his bruised ego's sense that he couldn't have been *just* a guy playing a part, speaking lines scripted for him and looking fabulous on camera. He's an actor, sure, but he found that character inside himself. All of this, the mash-up of knowing self-analysis and willing self-delusion, is where this locked-room mystery shines. I knew from the moment "Ormond" (legally and distinctively different from another famous actor or two who played Sherlock Holmes as a career) was introduced that he would be conducting an investigation. It seemed to me his dithering about doing it, in circumstances that could plausibly be used to justify the act in fiction (though in fact nothing like this would result in anything like what happens here), went on too long; what I didn't care for about that was the long, whiny self-evaluation it elicited.

What happens after we get going is a fun locked-room mystery like Dame Agatha so enjoyed creating (many times I thought of Ten Little Indians to give it the period-appropriate title). I'm glad that I wasn't coming to the read expecting more than an entertaining read. After our overlong dithering came our period-appropriate-name dropping, a fourth wall break or twenty, many call outs to literary lights of yesterday and today, and some fairly heavy-handed moralizing during The Big Reveal, all conspired to extinguish the fifth star. Even chunks of the fourth. The truth is the verve and the bravado of the performance of writing was enough to sweeten me back up to a full four stars.

It's not profound. It's nit brilliant. It's good fun, it's got tons of cleverness as its foundations, it's told in stylish sentences. By glory, that is enough...a gracious plenty...in the world of 2026. show less

It’s 1960 and Ormand Basil, an aging film star who is past his prime, is vacationing on a Greek Island when a violent storm out at sea cuts the small group of tourists off from the world. Soon, one of them is found hanging in a hut, apparently a suicide. But the woman’s companion is convinced her friend would not kill herself, and the actor, who most famously played Sherlock Holmes in a series of films years ago, notices discrepancies that point toward murder.

The police are unable to show more make it to the island, so the small group turns to Basil (as in Rathbone) to investigate. He quickly gains a Watson, a Catalan author of pulp fiction, both of them deeply familiar with the Holmes cannon, turning to it for inspiration. Perhaps to no reader’s surprise, the guests begin to fall dead as the pair tease out clues and consider possible suspects.

This is a clever bit of metafictional storytelling that deliberately plays with classic mystery tropes, with the conversations between Basil and his sidekick referring to many Sherlock Holmes stories, all unfolding within an Agatha Christie scenario. It may not work for those who simply want to read an old-school locked-room mystery and may find the playful literary elements a distraction from the story, or for those who are expecting a novel more like the author’s previous books. But mystery aficionados who enjoy pondering how crime fiction works on its readers will find the tongue-in-cheek interplay of the story with its antecedents quite a lot of clever fun.

Reposted from Crime Fiction Review - https://crimefictionreview.com/the-final-problem-by-arturo-perez-reverte/ show less

“The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die.”

If the old publishing axiom is true, that the opening sentence can make or break a novel, then Arturo Perez-Reverte has nothing to worry about.

Long before The Da Vinci Code made cryptic mysteries popular, the Spanish author was mining the arcane to tremendous acclaim. Combining the historical passion of Umberto Eco with the intricate mystery sensibilities of Dashiell Hammett, readers were assured of byzantine mysteries of both show more captivating style and astonishing substance.

A painting of a chess match may solve a hundred-years old murder in The Flanders Panel. A long-sought-after missing chapter of The Three Musketeers leads to devil worship in The Club Dumas (later made into the supremely disappointing film The Ninth Gate).

Based on these past efforts, fans may be slightly frustrated with his latest, The Queen of the South. Abandoning his usual reliance on secret texts and ancient conspiracies, Perez-Reverte instead substitutes crime for mystery, venturing into James Ellroy territory with a tale of drug smugglers and codes of honour.

Yet while, on the surface, it seems a more sedate affair, Perez-Reverte is simply incapable of writing a bad novel. Exhaustively researched and penned in riveting prose (masterfully translated by Andrew Hurley), The Queen of the South quickly becomes a mystery of character, and an incisive glimpse at a world all the more terrifying for its realism.

‘The Queen’ is Teresa Mendoza, a Mexican from Sinaloa, where “dying violently was dying a natural death.” Evolving from unassuming moll into an enigmatic leader whose detached focus on her situation “was virtually mathematical, so unemotional it chilled the heart,” Teresa builds a Spanish criminal empire of power and cunning, while remaining a figure of intrigue to the nation.

Perez-Reverte marries the story of Mendoza’s rise with a journalist’s investigation into her past, resulting in a Citizen Kane-styled mixture of personal reminiscences and expert foreshadowing. Think Orson Welles’ classic by way of Brian DePalma’s Scarface, with a soupcon of The Count of Monte Cristo for exotic flavour.

As always, Perez-Reverte brings his worlds into being with unparalleled vigour. Teresa’s life, filled with possible treachery and unlikely allies, alive with music that venerates the criminal, is animated in a manner few can match. It is a place of hideous plausibility, where a remark such as “I’ll have his skin peeled off him in strips” is par for the course, and “overconfidence kills more people than bullets.”

Teresa herself is one of Perez-Reverte’s finest creations, a deeply complicated woman whose hidden depths of strength are unlimited. Much like Brazilian author Paulo Coelho’s recent novel Eleven Minutes, The Queen is a portrait of a woman finding the centre of her self. Unlike Coelho’s exercise in superficiality, fortunately, Perez-Reverte never lets the story become a treatise on female empowerment, making sure both story and character are integral to each other.

Even for such a pre-eminent master, The Queen of the South is superlative. At once a marvellous character study and a fast-paced criminal thriller, this is Perez-Reverte at his best. show less

In June 1960, Ormond Basil, a retired Hollywood actor best known for playing Sherlock Holmes on screen, is retired and living in Greece. A trip to the island of Utakos to eat at a famous restaurant and discuss a new film project with some friends is abruptly extended when a storm leaves them stranded. During the storm, a British tourist, Edith Mander, is killed. Despite Basil's protestations that he only played a detective, he's egged on by fans to try and uncover the killer. Basil is very show more obviously based on Basil Rathbone, and Pérez-Reverte takes the opportunity to name-drop many of Rathbone's contemporaries along with some salacious Hollywood gossip (if we are to believe the slightly fatuous and self-important Ormond, every Hollywood beauty in the 1960s traipsed in and out of his bed at some point). It is sometimes funny, sometimes a bit tedious and excessive.

Pérez-Reverte is attempting a very meta murder mystery: Ormond repeatedly points out that he is only an actor, not an actual detective, but an adoring fan and mystery novel writer, who takes on the role of Watson, insists that he has imbibed enough of the performance to put on a good show. The title itself is a conscious reference to Conan Doyle's last Holmes mystery, and through the book the character constantly quote canon, and Ormond's fictional film adaptations. Ormond is a self-aware jackass, blithely dismissing someone as "not bad for an Englishwoman” while noting his own less than perfect visage, wrinkled with time, which makes him pleasurably irritating to read. Pérez-Reverte is constantly teetering between smug and self-referential on the one hand, and conscious wink-wink mockery on the other. I think overall he lands on a fun story, with a pleasurable if not entirely unforeseeable twist. I enjoyed it. show less