Please Don’t Finger Me: Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac

I don’t remember how The Hands of Orlac ended up on my to-read list, but I’ve wanted to read it for years. Although it was a popular novel in France, and a few movie versions have been made, copies of the English translations were hard to come by (up until very recently).The first translation came out in 1929, but a second translation by Iain White was published in 1981. A new one by D.H. Bernhardt came out more recently, and that one is widely available as an ebook. I read White’s translation.

So a famous pianist is hurt in a train accident. When his wife shows up at the wreckage, she sees a ghost hovering near her bloodied and unconscious husband. A doctor manages to save him, but his hands are all messed up. Stuff starts to go missing from their house and bloody daggers keep showing up.

Reading this novel was a chore. It took me 2 weeks to get through the first hundred pages. The main character is the pianist’s annoying wife, and for every paragraph of plot there are 3 pages of her emotions. Maybe the translation had something to do with it, but I found this book to be unbearably overwritten. I rarely managed more than a couple of pages before turning the lights off to go to sleep. I wanted to give up, but forced myself to power through the last 20 pages over a couple of evenings last week.

There’s a few mysterious things happening in the book, but none of them are interesting except the suggestion that a decapitated murderer has been revived and that he has started to kill again. At this point my interest was piqued, but a few pages later it turns out there is another, far less cool, explanation. By the end of the book, everything has been explained rationally.

I hate it when that happens.

I don’t know. Maybe mystery fans will enjoy this, but I thought it was crap. If you want to read a better book about evil hand transplants, I would suggest Martin Thomas’s The Hand of Cain.