The Final Problem

[cornerofmadness]

The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I was hoping to like this one more than I did. It's not a bad mystery. It had the workings to be very good but for me it fell flat in several places. It has a great settling. Basically a locked room mystery combined with the isolated location/no help coming trope. Ormond 'Hopalong' Basil is an aged actor in the 1960s and he is taking a bit of a tour to ease his disappointment in job opportunities for actors of a certain age and ends up on a Greek Island with his friends Malabar (Italian producer) and Nallajah (which I'm sure I spelled wrong) an opera singer.

While on the Island a British tourist, Edith Mander is found dead in a cabana and it looks like suicide. However Ormond sees things that don't add up but before they can call in the Greek Police, a monster of a storm arrives and no sea travel is going to be possible for days so no help is coming. Vesper Dundas, the woman's companion (Edith was her secretary) didn't think she was suicidal either but surely she must have been.

Basil is unconvinced. His new companion Foxa Paco a Spanish mystery author eggs him on. After all Basil has played every Sherlock Holmes story out there and is synonymous with the great detective. This is also an unusual set up for a amateur sleuth: a detective playing actor (his mystery writer sidekick is much more common)

So it did have a good set up, an island hotel with just Vesper, the owner of the hotel and her three staff members, Basil, his two friends, Paco and the Klemmers, a German couple. No help is coming and so why not try to look for clues until they can get there.

But here is where it falls flat for me. Way too much time is spent convincing Basil he can do this because he's played the detective so often. As he rightfully points out, he's an old man who has pretended to be a detective. He actually isn't one. For reasons Paco pushes him hard to say yes (to the point I was wondering is he the real killer?) But this goes on and on and lingers even after Basil says yes.

Be prepared to hear all about Sherlock's cases and how he wasn't always right. This is a love letter to Sherlock but on the other hand it also, like getting Basil to say yes, becomes repetitive to the point of me thinking let's just get on with it please.

Also if name dropping bothers you, pass this by. Basil does nothing but name drop every actor he's met, slept with or stole a woman from (or vice versa), worked with etc. It's also a little much by the end.

Another place it needed help was tension. Even though Edith is not the only person to die on this island of very few people, there is no real sense of tension. There is minimal effort made to suggest they all stay together so the killer doesn't get a chance to pick off more of them, there just is no sense that anyone is afraid.

Also most mystery writers like nice tidy endings. I don't want to spoil the ending but the Final Problem is a good title for how I felt about the ending. It was problematic for me.

That said I liked Basil. Maybe some of the issues are from translation issues but overall it was a good mystery but not a great one. It had its moments and its problems.




I received this translated version via Netgalley.



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