Detectable trouble in erudite mystery

A serial killer is on the loose in the seaside resort town of Santa Varvara, the kind of place that Somerset Maugham wittily described as “a sunny place for shady people.” The victims, thus far, are leaders of an influential, and probably corrupt, religious sect that calls itself the New Pantheon. The killer seems to sign his work with a number he carves onto the corpses: the number 8 -- or perhaps, if read sideways, the symbol for infinity.

So much for the first mystery presented by Julia Kristeva’s “Murder in Byzantium.” The second mystery that springs to mind is what, if anything, is the reason for the vogue of intellectually portentous mystery novels that has been going on ever since Italian semiotician Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” became an international phenomenon back in the 1980s? A surefire route to instant popularity? A way for members of the intellectual elite to connect with a wider audience?

Kristeva herself provides an explanation of sorts in the opening pages of “Intimate Revolt,” her 2002 nonfiction book bearing the daunting subtitle “The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis”: “[T]he detective novel, a popular genre that keeps the possibility of questioning alive, basically tells the reader, ‘You can know.’ ” Is that why, when people stop reading, they still read detective novels: the degree zero of this aptitude for judgment that is the interrogation, our only remaining defense against ‘the banality of evil’?”

Detective novels hold out the hope of a certain moral clarity, and the promise that questions can find definite answers. In any case, the genre clearly appeals to Kristeva, whose earlier novel “Possessions” was also a mystery, set in that same fictitious city and featuring the same investigative duo of Santa Varvara’s police chief, Northrop Rilsky, and visiting French journalist Stephanie Delacour, whom Kristeva has called her alter ego.

Kristeva, as it happens, is a far more interesting character than Stephanie. A literary critic, novelist, psychoanalyst and professor of linguistics at the University of Paris, she was born and raised in Bulgaria, arriving in France in time to participate in the May 1968 student uprising and to marry the editor of the influential journal Tel Quel. Maoism, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, Lacanian analysis, deconstruction: You name it, Kristeva’s been there and seen, if not necessarily done (or even approved of) all of that. She’s written brilliantly and provocatively about language, politics, art and psychology; about horror and melancholia; nationalism and exile; the relationship between the mother and the mother tongue.

But none of these distinctions guarantees one can write a good detective novel, or a novel of any kind, for that matter. And certainly, “Murder in Byzantium” provides a great deal of evidence to the contrary. The problem is not that the book is too recondite or “intellectual.” It’s simply that it doesn’t deliver the satisfaction we’re seeking in a mystery (or indeed in a novel of any kind).

To begin with, suspense is lacking: It’s hard to summon up sympathy for victims about whom we’re told nothing except that they’re leaders of a powerful and vaguely menacing religious cult. One doesn’t exactly feel a great sense of urgency about tracking down the perpetrator of these particular crimes. Secondly, there’s the matter of the prime suspect, who is also one of the book’s central characters: Sebastian Chrest-Jones. A famous professor who studies the phenomenon of human migration, Chrest-Jones is also engaged in a private, obsessional quest involving the encounter between an ancestor of his from the age of the Crusades and the fascinating Byzantine princess Anna Comnena.

Although Chrest-Jones’ (and hence, the novel’s) intellectual forays into the distant past are actually quite interesting, Chrest-Jones himself is not. Worse yet, he’s downright horrible. Early on, we watch him strangle his innocent young Chinese mistress and coolly dispose of the poor girl’s corpse. Knowing this, it’s hard for the reader to get riled up over whether Chrest-Jones also happens to be the man responsible for killing the sect leaders. Nor are readers likely to be as charmed as Stephanie is by Chrest-Jones’ “imaginative” and “creative” retelling of the story about Anna Comnena and his Crusading ancestor.

“Murder in Byzantium” suffers from being too discursive, yet not discursive enough. The explanations it provides explain very little. Kristeva uses this novel as an opportunity to touch upon such themes as migration, identity, religion and crusades of all kinds -- religious, political, personal. But none of these are explored in depth or with illuminating clarity. Indeed, when it comes to intellectual excitement and sheer readability, there’s more to be found in Kristeva’s nonfiction works. Or better yet, perhaps, her enthralling 1992 novel “The Samurai,” a quasi-autobiographical roman a clef about the Parisian intellectual set of the late 1960s, in which the characters are so engrossingly portrayed that it actually doesn’t matter whether the reader knows -- or cares -- about solving the mystery of whom they are based on.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.