Review: Paris City of Night

Photographer Jay Grant used his darkroom skills just for fun, producing some believable fake daguerreotypes – but when one shows up at a Paris auction, threatening to connect him as a forger and a fraud, Grant dives in to recover the remaining fakes and keep his hands clean.  Unfortunately, he didn’t know how deep the water was: as the son of a spy, memories from his childhood and another set of daguerrotypes – believed to contain important secret messages encoded in a way only Jay can decipher – make him a target for the CIA, French intelligence, and possibly other spies and spooks with uncertain allegiances.   David Downie’s new novel Paris City of Night is Jay’s story, stringing together terrorism, auction house fraud, murder, photography, and Nazis into a captivating mystery.

It isn’t completely clear who Jay is up against at any point; even the most trusted friends might not be as trustworthy as they seem – and that constant suspicion drives the story’s suspense.  Jay Grant does his best to stay one step ahead of everyone, but throughout the novel those outside forces remain one step ahead of him, guiding his activities and trying to force Jay’s hand.  The books most novel feature is that Jay’s part in the mystery doesn’t come from his duty to work or country, but because he’s simply trying to cover his ass, and that makes it very easy to sympathize with the guy.  Jay hasn’t made the best decisions, which got him into trouble for the daguerreotypes in the first place, but the death of a family friend, the mystery surrounding his father’s death, and the shadowy people following Jay’s tracks all push Jay to step up and resolve the situation, sometimes against his better judgment.  The complexity does result in some small flaws, because the end of the book still seems to leave numerous threads loose, but it may have been intentional for a sequel and the loose threads aren’t integral to the story.  From Jay’s point of view, the book’s ending does resolve everything, leaving him happier than he was at the beginning.  The story is riddled with the escapist fiction that appeals to a middle-aged set of men, which the author is unapologetic about.  Like the author himself, Jay Grant is an American living in France, loves photography, and has an unusual vision flaw that is remarkably similar to one afflicting the author, but – as you’d expect – when he was put on paper Jay Grant “rides a BMW motorcycle, wears fancy suits, and appears to be upwardly mobile,” embodying what appears to be a healthy, creative way for an author to express some elements of a midlife crisis.  Paris City of Night is well aware of its status as a pulpy suspense novel, but it spares no effort in doing it with as much skill and fun as possible.

Initially, I thought the backstory of forged and modern daguerreotypes to be a rather fanciful, if effective, plot point, but I was surprised to find that there are a number of artisans producing daguerreotypes still today.  These modern aficionados use the same techniques used nearly two hundred years ago for their own artistic endeavors, as Jay did – but, like Jay’s dilemma, faked “antique” photos, including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, are troublesome to collectors and museums.  The familiarity with the daguerreotype made me curious if the author had been involved in the modern production of these types of photographs.   Downie replied, no, he hasn’t made any himself, but said “I have always loved them — my mother owned quite a few, showing her relatives in Italy in the 1800s — but I do not collect them myself,” and added that with his wife, professional photographer Alison Harris, he has had the opportunity to see some fine examples of early photographs in museum collections near his home in France.  The history of photography itself played into the creation of Paris City of Night, as Downie was inspired by the untimely death of photography pioneer Niepce and Daguerre’s subsequent invention of the daguerreotype as his initial novel idea.   Daguerre’s later relationship with Samuel Morse, who first used daguerreotype technology in the United States,  plays a deeper part in the story with some fictionalization mirroring Jay Grant’s mysterious encoded daguerreotypes.  Downie’s attention to detail and the smooth inclusion of the factual and the fanciful help give the book the believable weight which makes it a much stronger book than you might expect from its nondescript cover.  It might not ever end up as a movie nor winning a Man Booker, but as a weekend read it is well worth the time and money, whether you appreciate early photography or not.