The fifth in the Nouveaux mystères de Paris takes Nestor Burma into the Quartier latin in the fifth Arrondissement, to be confronted by students, immigrants and a fake-medieval nightclub. And it's December, so there's also snow, winter depression and the Asian 'flu.

A promising young medical student has been found dead in his car: the police are treating it as suicide, but his girlfriend isn't satisfied with their explanation, and asks Nestor to look into it. Since she's a lovely young woman and he's not got much else to do, he takes on the case, but without much hope of doing better than the experts. And, needless to say, he's soon up to his knees in corpses, intrigue, and a secret code buried in an edition of Baudelaire. With a bit of help from the ever-resourceful — but 'flu-ridden — Hélène, he manages to sort out all the mess in just under the statutory 200 pages.

I think the title of this one is almost better than the book itself, it's definitely the most gloriously silly tongue-twister in the series. But there are also still plenty of examples of Nestor's dry humour, and a few interesting little passing references to the author's early career as a cabaret singer and surrealist in the 1920s.

There is a certain amount of racism in the way Nestor describes the black characters in the story to us, and the language he uses wouldn't be acceptable nowadays. But it's made clear to us that he recognises that the way he reacts to black people is a matter of prejudice, and not creditable to him: he even tells us that he was involved in distributing an anti-racist newspaper before the war. This could be called trying to have your cake and eat it, but it's nowhere near as bad as most things written by white people about black people in the fifties. ( )

Nestor Burma dans toute sa splendeur, et le vocabulaire qui va avec. ( )