Dumpkopfs

 “Karl Marx, Private Eye” by Jim Feast, 2023

This bon-bon of a book has drafted Karl Marx and his daughter into the august company of the detective lodge. This is a development we should have seen coming given the flood of modern mystery, crime and detective stories in books, TV and streaming series. Are you sick of them yet? Set in 1875 in Karlsbad, Bohemia, (now the Czech Republic) it resonates with the sedate manners of the period, sprinkled with archaic period English and slang. A group of well-off ‘naturists’ is taking the healing waters in a fine Karlsbad hotel. Karl and his daughter Eleanor are in disguise to avoid the police. A murder of a vicious U.S. capitalist arms dealer and his maid is committed in the spa’s pump water room. Who dun it?

Pater familias and daughter discuss the recently crushed Paris Commune, which both are writing about or have written about. Eleanor is deciding on whether she should dump or suspend her suitor. The capitalist is depicted as a vile crudity. His wife is heartily sick of him and interested in another man. Oddly, a young 16-year old Sherlock Holmes is also in residence at the hotel, brought there by his family. Holmes of course takes on the task of sussing the culprit, but keeps it from his father and mother. An escaped Serbian anarchist or lover, who had killed a princess in a carriage prior to this, is lurking in the city. He is the too-obvious suspect. A selection of ridiculous doctors, police, con men, society matrons and masters people the story. The radical-leaning proletarian maids significantly edge around the action.

Suspects abound per formula, even Karl, or ‘Dr. Arbuthnot’ as he is called – blamed by the capitalist’s wife and suspected by the police, who discover his identity. There are numerous romantic triangles. There are two deaths, so two possible killers. More killings follow. The clues seem to connect to bigger events – Serbia, the Commune, the capitalists – but in the end the motive is pedestrian. The location of the various hotel rooms, stories and abutments are somewhat mysterious in description - a clear picture of the physical layout is difficult. The story is overly and tediously complex, per genre. This story would make a better mousetrap of a movie, perhaps directed in sterile happiness, bright colors and pastel shades by Wes Anderson of the Grand Budapest Hotel.

At any rate, not sure why this story was written except to tickle the aesthetic word buds of the literati. The Marxs were dead broke most of the time, and setting them in this elegant spa atmosphere away from London is suspicious. It’s entertaining, perhaps a parody, and maybe touts or promotes Karl Marx among liberals. There are Communard refugees, members of the Serbian independence movement against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and a discussion of Hegel after all.

But personally I don’t get it. These fake crimes – which shadow real ones - are infotainment.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “A Walk Through Paris,” “The Young Karl Marx,” “A Spectre Haunting,” “The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx” (Callinicos); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx & Engels).

The Kultur Kommissar

7/25/2023