The
Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, by Sebastien Japrisot, and
translated by Helen Weaver, has languished in my to-be-read pile for a very
long time indeed. I’m not quite sure why this is so, since I enjoyed his
far-fetched but gripping thriller Trap
for Cinderella some years back. Perhaps the cumbersome title put me off. Now
I’ve finally read it, I must say I enjoyed it a good deal, with just a few
reservations.
Dany is a blonde, beautiful
and myopic woman of 26, who borrows her boss’s Thunderbird car on impulse and
sets off for the sea. But a series of mystifying events disrupt her journey –
people she meets tell her that she made the same trip the day before, when in
fact she was in Paris. She is attacked, and left injured, and then discovers a
body in the boot of the car. What on earth is going on?
This vivid premise really is
terrific, and reminiscent of the work of Boileau and Narcejac, though Japrisot
probably has more pretensions as a “literary” writer. The snag, inevitably, is
that the unravelling of the truth is rather cumbersome. Japrisot, like a number
of his contempories (Catherine Arley and Herbert Montheilet spring to mind)
sometimes struggled for a credible resolution to the dazzling puzzles that he
created. All the same, this book didn’t deserve to wait as long as it did to be
read.
Dany and her boss work in
advertising, and so for a time did Japrisot (his pen-name was an anagram of
Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name). Advertising and PR has supplied a good
many crime writers not only with settings but also with business experience.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Julian Symons, David Williams, John Franklin Bardin, Leighton
Gage, Elmore Leonard, David Goodis and Alan Furst are examples, and I’m sure
there are plenty of others. I’m not sure if anyone has ever written about the
connection between working in advertising and crime fiction; perhaps it’s a
subject worthy of further exploration.
