Triumphs of Eugene Valmont

Robert Barr (1849-1912) was a Scottish-born writer who spent much of his career in Canada, the United States and England. He worked as a journalist and editor and wrote a good deal of popular fiction. He was a colleague of Jerome K. Jerome, with whom he edited the magazine The Idler, and was a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont was published in 1906. It was written in the wake of the enormous popularity of Sherlock Holmes, and it plays with the conventions of the detective story rather than simply following them. Valmont, a French detective, is a witty and rather conceited figure, and the stories are shaped as much by his personality as by their puzzles. Among them is a parody of Holmes himself, a good-natured piece of mischief from a writer who admired the genre he teased.

The collection runs to twelve parts, some of them stories split in two, and the recording lasts just over nine hours. It was read by a single LibriVox volunteer. It will appeal to those who like classic mysteries from the early twentieth century, and to anyone who enjoys seeing how the genre looked to its own contemporaries, when the conventions were still fresh enough to be laughed at. Those who know the Holmes stories will recognise the pleasure of watching a famous formula tested, bent and teased, and those who do not will find that the cases hold up well as entertainments in their own right, each one self-contained and ready for a separate evening.