The Victor Legris Mysteries - A short book review

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I don't normally read book series one right after the other, but I had the first three books in this series and after I'd finished the first, I decided to carry on and read the next two. This is a series of period detective stories written by "Claude Izner" (actually the pen name of two French sisters). Set in Paris in the late 19th Century, the hero is Victor Legris, a Parisian book seller about thirty years old when the series begins. He runs his shop in partnership with Kenji, an older Japanese man who used to work for Victor's father. Since Victor's father died when he was still a young boy, Kenji helpe to raise him as a surrogate father, and has carried on as his business partner. Victor isn't rich, but his is financially comfortable and indulges himself with his hobby of photography in his spare time. He also reads a lot of crime fiction and fancies himself as an amateur detective. The stories involve him getting involved with unusual crimes that he has at least a passing personal connection to. In the first book, "Murder on the Eiffel Tower" a series of murders of apparently unconnected people takes place on and around the Tower. Circumstantial evidence suggests the culprit could be either Kenji or Tasha - a Russian artist who Victor falls in love with. Victor investigates in the hope of clearing the two people he most cares about in the world. In the second book, "The Pere-Lachaise Mystery", Victor's former mistress disappears, and his investigation reveals links to spiritualism and the Panama Canal project. "The Montmartre Investigation" starts with a schoolgirl being seduced then murdered - and then disfigured with acid. And one of her shoes turns up at Victor's shop. The actual mysteries in these books were of secondary interest to me - they're complex and I sometimes found the characters hard to distinguish from each other. What did appeal to me about these stories is Victor himself, and his circle of friends and acquaintances. Victor is not actually a very good detective. He jumps to conclusions and sometimes lets his pre-conceived ideas interfere with his perception of the true situation. This is just as much of a weakness in his personal life - as his romance with Tasha develops, he's often unreasonably jealous, suspecting her of going behind his back with some of the other artists that she knows. Kenji is Victor's father figure and mentor, but he's also very secretive. He's got something going on that he doesn't tell Victor about, but that causes him to take frequent trips to England at the start of the series. Victor suspects that Kenji is seeing a girl, but we don't find out the truth until the third book. Assisting Victor and Kenji in the bookshop is Jojo, an intelligent and likeable young man who resents Victor and Kenji's habit of leaving him alone in the shop while they go about thieir own mysterious business. Jojo has hopes of becoming a professional writer, keeps a notebook of news stories that interest him, and keeps a huge collection of newspapers at home, going back years. When he finds out that Victor is investigating crimes, Jojo wants to assist him, and eventually becomes Victor's unofficial assistant in his unofficial investigations. Tasha left Russia for Paris for reasons that haven't been spelled out as of the third book. She's on the fringes of the artistic scene that was flourishing in Paris in the 1890s. She's struggling to develop her own artistic style, but is full of passion. She loves Victor but doesn't want to marry him, fearing she would lose her independence. There are a lot of colourful secondary characters in each book - artists, newspaper men,the working poor who inhabit ever city, and the customers at the bookshop. It's the interaction between the various characters that I found the most interesting part of these books. These have been translated from French to English, and the translator made the interesting artistic choice of employing English slang. This does at least make the dialogue easy to follow to a Britisher. On the whole, I enjoyed these books. I probably won't re-read them, but I might well read further volumes in the series.