Customer Reviews

Deadly Percheron (Canongate Crime Classics)

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Dr George Matthews, a psychiatrist, encounters a patient who claims he is paid by a leprechaun to wear a flower in his hair. Another, he claims, pays him to whistle at Carnegie Hall during performances. A third pays him to give quarters away. Jacob Blunt wants Dr Matthews to confirm that he's mad. Dr Matthews is curious, so he accompanies his patient to a rendezvous with one of the leprechauns. His name is Eustace and he isn't at all pleased to see the doctor.

So begins the Deadly Percheron. After that it gets strange. First published in 1946 this unique murder mystery transcends the boundaries of the genre. It's noir, it's nightmarish, it's compulsive. John Franklin Bardin drags the reader into a world where the nature of identity is constantly questioned. Is our hero who he says he is? Can he be trusted? Is he, in fact, sane? Reality, as seen through his eyes, is a shifting kaleidoscope of memories.

As the murders mount up the fragments of his shattered psyche are slotted together. Slowly reality stabilises. At the end of the novel, but only then, it all makes sense. Who killed Frances Raye? Well, now, let's start at the beginning..."Jacob Blunt was my last patient. He came into my office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his curly blond hair. He sat down in the easy chair across from my desk, and said, "Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind.""

Dr George Matthews, a psychiatrist, encounters a patient who claims he is paid by a leprechaun to wear a flower in his hair. Another, he claims, pays him to whistle at Carnegie Hall during performances. A third pays him to give quarters away. Jacob Blunt wants Dr Matthews to confirm that he's mad. Dr Matthews is curious, so he accompanies his patient to a rendezvous with one of the leprechauns. His name is Eustace and he isn't at all pleased to see the doctor.

So begins the Deadly Percheron. After that it gets strange. First published in 1946 this unique murder mystery transcends the boundaries of the genre. It's noir, it's nightmarish, it's compulsive. John Franklin Bardin drags the reader into a world where the nature of identity is constantly questioned. Is our hero who he says he is? Can he be trusted? Is he, in fact, sane? Reality, as seen through his eyes, is a shifting kaleidoscope of memories.

As the murders mount up the fragments of his shattered psyche are slotted together. Slowly reality stabilises. At the end of the novel, but only then, it all makes sense. Who killed Frances Raye? Well, now, let's start at the beginning..."Jacob Blunt was my last patient. He came into my office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his curly blond hair. He sat down in the easy chair across from my desk, and said, "Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind.""

John Franklin Bardin was born in 1916 and during his lifetime he wrote ten dark or noir crime novels. He refused to recognize any difference between genres, once stating his belief there are only good and bad novels. According to Jonathan Lethem, who wrote a thoughtful and lengthy foreword to this edition, Bardin once said that Graham Green, Henry Green and Henry James were influential on his writing. The novel, Bardin's first, was published in 1946 and it is a very interesting noir novel indeed.

Amnesia and paranoia are the subjects and the characters, all unusual and distinct, sustain a complicated and bizarre plot through an abrupt but eminently satisfying conclusion. This is by no means a perfect novel, and the sixty-year-old style is sometimes disturbingly devoid of emotion. Shocking action is abruptly presented and just as abruptly disposed of. There is a fairly lengthy center section in which the amnesiac who is the protagonist, is established in his new and very much lower class life on Coney Island. Dr. George Matthews, a prominent psychologist, with a practice in midtown, and a comfortable upper class living, is confronted by a new client who arrives with a fresh hibiscus in his hair. For today's readers, especially those of us who lived through the seventies and eighties of the last century, that is nothing special, a man with a flower in his hair. In 1945, the sight was unusual to say the least.

We sense something odd and a little off kilter about the good Dr. Matthews, almost from the very beginning. He appears to have more than passing interest in the burgeoning sexuality he observes around him and he seems to identify rather too strongly with his new patient, Jacob Blunt, the man who wears a hibiscus. Blunt reveals that while he is wealthy enough to afford the counseling service of Dr. Matthews, he is working for a couple of midtown leprechauns, not Irish, he assures the doctor, American leprechauns. What's more, he is really anxious to be told that he must be hallucinating, is withdrawing from reality, and the events he is witnessing and doing are not real. He is happily losing his mind, which is far better, he believes, than being trapped in the apparent lunacy of this strange alter world.

The reader is rather suddenly brought up short when the doctor almost eagerly agrees to enter Mr. Blunt's world. From there we are drawn farther and farther into this weird world of murder, large horses, amnesia and paranoia. Events spiral at a relatively calm pace out of Dr. Matthews ken and out of his control, until the last section of the book in which a world a-tilt is set once more aright. Almost.

This edition, from Millipede Press of Colorado, carries a striking cover painting by Salvador Dali.

Better written than many novels today and captures a flavor of yesteryear. The ending drags out a bit, but it is fun to see where the author takes you.

John Franklin Bardin's 1946 novel shares most of its affinities with the genre of the noir novel (as perfected by writers like Cornel Woolrich or Dorothy B. Hughes), but it's something else besides... it starts out as a kind of humorous fantasy novel, much like something out of Thorne Smith, with a patient telling his psychiatrist three leprechauns pay him every day to complete different silly tasks such as wearing flowers in his hair. Then there's a murder, and then by the fourth chap[ter the novel starts all over again with the same narrator... who is being told he has a different name than he thought previously.

It would be wrong to give more away, but the whole work is certainly one of a kind, and partakes of many different genres and experiments greatly with the idea of an unreliable narrator (indeed, the great theme of the book is how much you can trust someone else's testimony). Its intriguing play with identity seems to anticipate later (and unfortunately better) books such as Patricia Highsmith's THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, and it certainly is a page turner. But it's ultimately not a very good book. There are too many murders, too many revelations that everything you'd been reading was not what you had thought it was; and the central intrigue that ties the whole plot together (and is of course only revealed at the end) is too outlandish. You can see why Millipede Press included it in its superb and beautifully bound re-issues of horror novels, but as fine as its aspirations are, it never really takes off to the level of a Highsmith or a Woolrich at their best.

I should confess that I did not know about the author before I bought this novel. In fact I bought it for my mother as a Xmas present.After reading it she told me, "it' s amazing you have to read it too!!!"
What a surprise!! She was right, it is one of the best novels I've ever read. A cocktail of madness, crime and human nature that will make you read without pause till you finish it.
The fact that Bardin' s mother suffered from a mental disorder made the author to include this thematic in this novel and part of his work
So if you want to read one of the best novels you can find buy it now...you will not regret.

Having recently come across several favorable references to the novels of John Franklin Bardin, especially THE DEADLY PERCHERON, I decided to give it a try. The story takes place in New York City in 1943-1944. The narrator is a psychiatrist by the name of George Matthews. The novel begins when a new patient enters his office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his hair and announces "Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind." Strange things involving leprechauns have been happening to the patient, so he consults Dr. Matthews. And Matthews is quickly sucked into a vortex of bizarre events -- including murdered bodies with percherons left tethered nearby, amnesia induced by blows to the head and drug/shock therapy, a knife-throwing midget, and a Coney Island funhouse.

THE DEADLY PERCHERON might have been somewhat novel in style and themes in 1946, but no longer. It has some decent scenes exploring identity, sanity versus insanity, and amnesia and memory, but on the whole the book is nothing special. Something that I read said Bardin's work was similar to that of Patricia Highsmith, but for my money Highsmith's Ripley novels are much more engaging, suspenseful, and memorable than THE DEADLY PERCHERON.