A book a day: John Franklin Bardin: The deadly Percheron

Idioma original: English

Original title: The Deadly Percheron

Year of publication: 1946

Translation: Cesar Aira

Valuation: It’s pretty good and recommended for fans of the genre.

I don’t know if this novel has ever been adapted to film (I doubt it), but I know for sure who would have been the right director to do it, and it is none other than the ineffable David Lynch. I think the reason will be clear to anyone who has read the novel, but I fear it will be difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t, since its story also has the characteristic of being very complicated to explain. Apart from, of course, the fact that it should not be done, since, in the words of Cabrera Infante (who was a great admirer of this book), “Revealing the plot of this novel is a real crime“. As an explanation of what I have said about Lynch, readers will find here, in addition to crimes and mystery, amnesia, expeditious leprechaunsominous horses, strange fairground workers, fatal women, distorting mirrors, unreason and madness.

Very brief summary (just to tell something): George Matthews is a New York psychiatrist who receives James Blunt, a young heir to a fortune who fears he is going crazy, because he claims that some peculiar little men have hired him to carry out certain tasks, each one more absurd than the last. From there, Matthews finds himself immersed in a plot that is increasingly disconcerting and even hallucinatory, full of surprises and twists that make reading this story an intriguing and, at times, addictive experience.

And it is, above all, more than because of a wise dosage of mystery in the plot, because until the end one does not understand anything of what is happening, so that, even until just before that end, all possibilities are open. It is true, however, that perhaps the story has lost punch Since 1946, when it was published, or since the 1970s, when it was apparently rediscovered by fans of the genre and the prestige of The deadly percheron as one of the most enigmatic examples of the crime novel. Nowadays, however (due, in part and precisely, to the cinema of David Lynch and other somewhat bizarre proposals… such as the narrative of the translator into Spanish, our admired César Aira) it is more difficult for us to be surprised. That does not mean that reading this novel is something totally recommendable, even more so and I would even say that it is obligatory, for lovers of crime. noir.