Fiction the Flanders Panel by

Fiction The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Harcourt Reprint, 2004) The mystery novel the Flanders Panel is set in the contemporary art world. Its main protagonist is an art restorer and amateur detective, determined to solve a murder that occurred centuries ago. While cleaning "The Game of Chess" by Flemish Van Huys, Julia finds strange, painted-over Latin inscription on the 15th century Flemish painting, asking, 'who killed the knight,' i.e.

'quis necavit equitem.' "Only then did she realize that her work on 'The Game of Chess' would be far from routine" (1) the painting depicts Duke of Flanders playing chess, and the image seems to hold clues to a murder conducted around the time of its composition, that of Roger de Arras. Interpreting the iconography and messages embedded in the painting she speculates: "AR would be exactly right for the abbreviation of Arras. And Roger de Arras appears in all the chronicles of the time" (20).

Julia begins to read more and more about Arras, the circumstances that spawned the composition of the painting, and begins to feel as if the characters in the painting are familiar to her as her own friends in Madrid, Spain, where the mystery is set. However, the authorities at the Prado museum, which charged Julia to restore the work, seem uninterested in her finding beyond the word's significance to art, and they merely wish Julia to continue her restorative work on the same level of quality as always.

Looking for further information and aid that cannot be provided by texts alone, Julia first turns to her old guardian, Cesar, a cultivated, gay, gin-sipping art dealer, who knows a great deal about art, but has very little inclination towards learning about chess. Still, they both agree that "the key [to Arras' murder] does lie in the chess game," noting that in Latin 'necavit' means 'took' as well as 'killed'" (52).

However, the 500-year-old murder begins to take on added significance when Julia's caddish ex-boyfriend Alvaro dies, apparently murdered, after she asks him about the meaning of the inscription, and his interpretation of the depicted chess game -- and mysterious woman lurking in the picture. Julia finds some assistance in her quest to solve the apparently unsolvable age-old murder (and the apparently linked contemporary murder) from a clerk named Munoz, who is as passionate about the game of chess as Julia is about art.

He is also just as ruthlessly asocial as Julia is sympathetic -- he challenges Cesar, who asks him why chess is an interesting game with the words that he plays chess for the same reason that Cesar is a homosexual (70). Yet Munoz proves helpful to the protagonist because he uses what he calls retrograde analysis to reconstruct the chess game being played in the painting by a knight and the royal patron who may also have been his murderer.

Although presented as a rather scrawny, undeveloped, geeky sort of individual -- he is described at one point as looking like a wet dog -- Munoz begins to grow on Julia, as well as upon the reader, despite his initial abrasiveness, even though Cesar never seems to quite 'take' to the young man. The reason for this becomes profoundly, sadly clear at the end of the novel where all is revealed, not simply the back-story of the painting.

All information and details about art pale in comparison to the stunning revelation provided by Cesar that Julia's beloved old guardian was actually bubbling and seething with resentment against Alvaro's reinsertion into Julia's life. The man had ruined, Cesar said, two years of Julia's life, and Alvaro had characterized Cesar's presence in Julia's life as "unhealthy and obsessive" (273).

Although the reader is unlikely to admire Alvaro with the same intensity that Julia once did, Cesar's feelings about his old ward seem equally intense, unhealthy, and obsessive as the feelings she once harbored for her old flame. Soon it becomes clear that the old truth about many mystery novels holds true in the Flanders Panel -- one of the more sympathetic and unlikely killers is in fact the source of all of the turmoil depicted in the novel.

Art-obsessed (and Julia-obsessed) Cesar explains that he platonically fantasized that Julia and he "would share in the research and solve the enigma together...and it would mean fame for you" as well as increase the value of the painting. Cesar, he reveals, has been diagnosed with a tumor, and only has two months to live, and intends to kill himself with Prussic acid (279).

Thus Cesar is the man whom Julia has been looking for all of this time, the man whom she thought was her dearest friend, boon companion, and Dr. Watson in her Sherlockian struggle for the truth.