French Triangle

The Woman Who Was No More is an offbeat French mystery. It has no hero, and its principal character is an intellectual pygmy who is as real as mud and just as unenterprising. His creators, French Authors Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, have built him into the base of a very French triangle of adulterous villains and victims. They make of it a crisply written, ingenious novel of suspense that is calculated to grip a reader right up to its sardonic last line.

The pygmy is a traveling salesman named Fernand Ravinel who has the face of a brute and the soul of a sparrow. His mistress, Dr. Lucienne Mogard. is as cold and sharp as a scalpel. When they entice Ravinel's wife Mireille to Nantes, their object is murder and their motive is 2,000,000 francs of insurance money. As a killer, Ravinel proves tender and compassionate. After Mireille drinks a carefully prepared potion, her eyes close and Ravinel tearfully helps to lower her inert body into a bathtub full of water. "Don't worry, Mireille," he says. "You won't feel anything ... I swear I never wanted to do you any harm . . ."

Mireille is left to soak in the tub for 48 hours, then driven to a Paris suburb and dumped into a pond. A bit later, when Ravinel returns to discover his wife's "suicide." her body has disappeared.

Mireille's body is not in the Paris morgue, and, most unnerving of all, it shows signs of life. Ravinel receives letters in Mireille's handwriting and learns that she has registered at a Left Bank hotel. Even proud, logical Lucienne reacts with a look of stupor and alarm to the baffling news, but expresses a violent professional conviction: nobody could be alive after 48 hours under water. The guilt-stricken Ravinel takes it harder; he is convinced his wife is a ghost, and he goes to pieces puzzling over how Mireille can be dead and alive at the same time.

The mystery is not likely to puzzle the reader as much as poor Ravinel, but Authors Boileau and Narcejac keep the reader guessing the rest of it to the Gallic end.

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