I picked up this book in the English bookstore in Paris, on that fateful visit to my mother, where she took off for Thailand after one day, leaving me on my own, to wander Paris alone.

And it’s a spooky one.

It’s very old fashioned, with a detective who is a juge d’instruction [the closest analogy for those of us in the U.S. would be a sort of prosecuting attorney, the kind they make TV shows about who solve cases, not the real ones], a “man-hunting dandy,” an elegant man who likes “to sit obscurely at a table with a glass of beer, in a gloom of colored lights, to hear the loudest jazz music possible – to dream whatever dreams go on behind the hooked eyebrows of Mephistopheles.”

When the book starts, the juge is “not wearing his evening clothes, and so they knew that nobody was in danger.” When he’s wearing a regular suit, his Watson tell us, café proprietors “bow low and offer him champagne”. When he is “wearing a dinner jacket” then the uneasy owners offer him a good table and a cognac. But when he is in full evening dress, they “do not offer any drink at all. The orchestra gets a little off-key. The waiters drop a saucer or two, and the knowing ones, if they have a favorite girl with them, hasten to get her out before someone pulls a knife.”

And this is the good guy.

The Watson expects that they will meet someone suspicious but instead they meet up with a little old man, the owner of the oldest wax museum in Paris; a place, the owner insists, that displays art not carnival material. The three of them slip into a back room, where they are joined by a handsome young soldier, and the juge begins asking questions about the young man’s fiancée who has gone missing, last seen entering the museum. The demand to search the museum and the old man is eager to agree – for strange things have been happening there. He thinks – he believes – he has seen some of the figures moving through the rooms.

Together the four of them return to the museum and search through the darkened, green-lit rooms, lit as if underwater. And, in the arms of a waxwork of a satyr in a twist of the stairs, they find the lifeless body of the fiancée’s best friend.

Sliding the satyr aside, they enter a narrow, bloodstained passage in the walls, used by the owner to manage the lights, leading to a door that he claims is never unlocked. The door lets out onto a narrow passage, gated and locked, that leads at one end onto the street, and on the other to another locked door.

A door that leads to one of the most infamous underworld clubs in Paris.

Disguises, masked balls where no one knows who they’re dancing with that end in private rooms. Blackmail, the haute monde mixing with the seamy underbelly of Paris…

It’s a gloriously creepy book, with shadows and slanted lights and sharp-toned heel-steps that echo through the streets. women in tight dresses and high heels. Smoke-filled rooms, dizzying lights, the smell of booze and cigar smoke.

And waxworks that, in the flickering, green, underwater lights seem to breathe and move.

Awesome!

And just the book you want to read alone in a strange city…