Mr Detective, Bring Me a Mystery!
There's a lot less hair cutting than I anticipated considering most of the story happens inside a hair salon.
The banging on the front door was so thunderous and insistent that to Cora Gromley it felt as though the furnace might soon explode.
Personally, if I had the loyalty of a barbershop quartet, I would ask them to follow me around to sing weirdly ironic songs for any situation that I’m in. But I guess that’s where Scorbion and I differ, because he just asks them to solve mysteries with him.
Renowned detective, Pignon Scorbion, has recently moved to the town of Haxford, ready to lift the police force to even greater heights. But any detective worth their salt knows that any kind of movement is bound to be followed by trouble, and sure enough, no sooner has he stepped foot into town is he besieged with requests to uncover whether a local townsman’s fortune is at risk of falling to an unexpected bastard son.
That just marks the first of the mysteries that are plaguing the town. In an unusual move, the novel features not one but three mysteries all solved within 300 pages. But you know somehow all these mysteries are interconnected, even though the crimes and suspects couldn’t be more different.
No crime is a match for a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes and even Hercule Poirot. Indeed, as the detective is in the midst of figuring out his cases, he claims to have been friends with Doctor Watson and met Poirot during his travels. But even so, Scorbian is more reminiscent of Miss Marple with his penchant for sitting and thinking over the crimes within one location.
It’s a very cozy mystery in that sense; there’s no wild chases or attempted murders when one gets too close. Instead, there’s just amicable discussion between Scorbian and his friends as they work through the clues together. If you’re more into mysteries like the Susan Ryland series where there’s more footwork and higher stakes, Pignon Scorbion and the Barbershop Detectives might be too slow for you.
The obvious nod to the hallmarks of the genre helps to take the pressure off any writer; there’s no need to be the next version of Holmes, Poirot or Kindaichi even if you’re already living in the same world as them.
All the crimes I would say are rather easy to solve—my inability to solve a mystery novel has been well documented over here—and I managed to follow along and even at times beat Scorbion to the conclusion.
However, the most unfortunate part of the novel is that despite Bleiweiss’ attempts to be inclusive—there’s a whole subplot about how independent Scorbion’s love interest is—he falls on some very dated tropes about Indigenous groups towards the end of the story. I can’t specify without giving away some key elements of the story but it’s definitely an unmissable red flag.
On the basis on that last critique, I wouldn’t recommend reading Pignon Scorbion. This might be the second review in a row where I’ve advocated for a sensitivity reader but I definitely think this is an instance where it’s more of a need than a want. Had one been present, the book could have been tied up a lot more neatly.
Rating: 3/5
Pignon Scorpion and the Barbershop Detectives by Rick Bleiweiss will be released 8 Feb 2022.