I was fully enraptured by Joseph Goodrich’s
The Paris Manuscript, a historical noir set at the dawn of the fabled
Années folles that is at turns dark, whimsical, nostalgic, and deeply moving. Structured like an on-rush of memories, the book begins in 1979 when elderly widower Ned Jameson goes through an old trunk while deciding whether to move in with his daughter, the contents of which send him back to 1919, in the years following World War I, where he lived with his wife, Daisy. Tormented by memories of the war, he worked as a journalist, and Daisy as an illustrator. Intrigue overtakes their lives when Daisy’s brother is blackmailed into becoming a saboteur. After the blackmailer is found murdered at a party they were attending, Ned begins to suspect Daisy is behind it—and he sets out to find the truth with an unlikely amateur detective, Marcel Proust, who volunteered at a hospital during the war.
When Proust enters the picture, The Paris Manuscript takes on a wonderful air that’s almost magical realist at times, but Goodrich keeps it grounded, making Proust a believable character within the drama at hand. When one thinks about it, isn’t In Search of Lost Time the underlying theme of so many noir works? In this sense, Proust makes a natural, though not obvious, sleuth proxy. Through Proust, Goodrich also makes a strong case for the detective-as-artist (or, is it, artist-as-detective?). “My asthma made it impossible for me to leave the car,” Proust recalls. “…I had to content myself by feeding upon what I could see. But what I can see is never enough… I must extrapolate. I am predisposed to the art of detection by illness… What I do as an artist is not so very different form what I do when I discovered [a clue which you’ll have to read the book to find out!]”
