Claude Izner is the pseudonym of two sisters who write entertaining crime novels set in the bookshops, garrets, backstreets and cafes of fin de siecle Paris.

Their hero, Victor Legris, is a Left Bank bookseller and aesthete who has in his orbit such crime fiction staples as a wide-eyed assistant from the provinces, a taciturn oriental mentor and a mysterious but nubile Russian lover. TPLM starts when a former paramour’s maid arrives at the bookshop in a panic and asks Legris to find her mistress who has gone missing at Pere Lachaise cemetery. Initially Legris is a reluctant amateur sleuth but when the maid turns up dead in a canal he has no choice but to investigate. Twists and turns ensue.

TPLM is set in perhaps the most attractive city in the world during one of its most appealing periods. As such TPLM is pure escapism and none the worse for it. It is the world of La Boheme transposed onto a crime novel, replete with would-be artists and wealthy patrons; with prostitutes and petty thieves; with bar owners and carousers – mostly trying to make it in the big city but grappling with the daily struggle for bread, companionship and shelter. And wine and absinthe.

Legris is not an unnatural superhuman superbrain up against an unnatural super villain. The crime although interesting is relatively mundane and is solved without recourse to a great “aha” moment, but is solved with wit, diligence and ingenuity. This fits the scale of the story. Although gripping, there is no chase round the top of Notre Dame nor through the depths of the sewers nor up and down the Champs Elysee. However given the series began with Murder On The Eiffel Tower, and will continue with thrillers set in Montmartre and the Marais, I suspect there will always be a Baedeker element to the series. Good. I look forward to following the further adventures of Victor Legris et chums.

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