Aristide Valmont
Aristide Valmont is a court valuer. He is called in to appraise a house or to say whether a document says what it seems to, and he nearly always arrives somewhere where something is already happening. He travels with a suitcase, a notebook and a pencil, and his manners are so carefully kept that, as he puts it, they are all that is left of his accent.
His method is a professional one: sorting people by the way they speak up, taking patient notes and paying attention to what nobody else looks at.
Published cases, in the suggested order
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Case 1
Three Things Put Straight
A landslip cuts off a house on a mountain pass with seven people inside it and twelve degrees of frost. In the morning the mistress of the house is found dead in the conservatory, sitting in her chair, and nobody has come in or gone out all night. Aristide Valmont, a court-appointed expert whom the snow has turned off his road, stands looking at three things somebody put straight that did not need putting straight at all.
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Case 2
First the Lamp Goes Down
At the press house there is an October rule that nobody explains: first the lamp goes down and then the man, and never alone. On the night Mercedes comes back after twenty-three years, she goes down alone. Aristide Valmont had arrived the day before… to value the property, and he stays because the cellar does not tell the same story as the family.
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Case 3
Houses Do Not Stretch
Bellabrida is closed off by the fever and the flood has taken the bridge. Doña Casilda Mansilla is dead, and her will reaches the court with a new wafer and one line too many. Aristide Valmont must say whether that line is hers, and he must do it… from the far bank of the river, with whatever crosses on Tuesdays and Fridays in the mail basket. The reader is handed the same papers on the same day he is: a sketch plan, six statements nobody could agree on, and a photograph.
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Case 4
Nobody Counts by Looking
The Charity Clothing Guild of Tornellosa is four women, eleven years of Thursdays and a bedspread of eighty-one crochet rosettes that has just won the Provincial Council's prize. An unsigned letter reaches the court: it says the bedspread was bought… in a workshop and the thousand pesetas were collected by deceit. The court seals the room and sends an expert to rule on who made the work. Nobody is dead, nothing is missing and no door has been forced. But the bedspread has eighty-one rosettes and the room has four pairs of hands.
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Case 5
The House Ate the Staircase
The Círculo Mercantil of Sarnia is opening its new dining room, its electric light and a whole house bought from the neighbours, and on the night of the opening sixty members watch a white shape cross the glass screen at a height where there is no… floor. Before the coffee, a doctor is found dead at the bottom of the well of a demolished staircase. The court sends an expert to say whether the man could have fallen on his own. The door was found locked, the key was found hanging on its hook, and in the porter's book there is no line for the return.
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Case 6
Houses Die of Heat
In December, in Norilsk, the sun does not rise. Block Seventeen has split open from top to bottom, and its tenants know that if the crack is the climate's doing, the block will be declared unsafe and they will finally go to the mainland. A reinsurer… in Zürich sends a Swiss expert who speaks no Russian to say whether the ground gave way or was made to. That night the black purga begins and nobody can go out. Next morning the man who was going to show him something is found frozen in the basement, his arms round a pipe that burns.
How to read his cases
Each case sets up and solves its own puzzle, so you can start with any of them. The suggested order is the order of publication: it shows Valmont in very different settings — a mountain house cut off by snow, a wine press in the middle of the harvest, a village left without its bridge by the flood — and lets you get used to the way he looks at things.
No spoilers
This page says nothing the synopses do not already say. The solutions are where they belong: at the end of each story.