The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont

Robert Barr's Eugène Valmont is Sherlock Holmes with a hangover and a sense of humor about himself. A former chief detective for the French government who has decamped to London, Valmont operates as a private investigator with a perfectly trimmed mustache, a perfectly devastating wit, and a perfectly healthy contempt for English pomposity. These stories are not straightforward whodunits. They are playful, ironic deconstructions of the detective genre that Barr's friend Conan Doyle helped create. Valmont disparages English values with delighted acidity, solves cases while romance blooms and Gothic terrors lurk in the margins, and never once takes himself seriously. The collection ranges from hilarious satires of media sensationalism to operatic melodramas featuring a ghost with a club-foot. For readers who love detective fiction but suspect it has always been slightly absurd, Valmont is the detective who knows it too.