Auprès de ma Blonde (1972)

Nicolas Freeling's crime novel, which Open Library dates to 1972, finds the Amsterdam detective Piet Van der Valk moved to a quiet desk job to work out his days until retirement. A seemingly minor incident, a young man worried about a gold watch, sets him off on a private investigation, and it is his French wife, Arlette, who follows it through the world of art and antique dealers. (Open Library)

Watches

Patek Philippe watch: Van der Valk has just appeared on television talking about trust between police and public when a boy who works in a jeweller's comes to his office with a muddled story of odd occurrences at the shop and of something he has taken, which he is sure he was meant to take. He produces it: a plain, square, solid-gold Patek Philippe wristwatch. The boy is Richard Oddinga; his employer Saint's account is that the watch came back from a difficult customer, was found perfect by the workshop, and was dropped into a drawer and lost (p. 26). Van der Valk puts its value at seven or eight hundred and cannot see why a dealer would let a boy find it and pretend to notice nothing (p. 50); in the shop he later admires a similar Patek Philippe to see whether Saint reacts (p. 79). The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: It was a plain, square, severely expensive wristwatch, a solid-gold Patek Philippe; yes, indeed, seductive thing. (Nicolas Freeling, Auprès de ma Blonde, scan cataloged as Vintage Books, 1979 (Archive metadata; the scan's copyright page is not in its OCR), p. 21, with a stray tilde in the OCR dropped; the boy is named on pp. 28 and 49; Internet Archive scan OCR)