Rousseau's Ghost (1998)

Terence Ball's novel, published by the State University of New York Press in 1998, is a mystery set in Paris and Oxford. An urgent, cryptic summons from his old friend Ted Porter, a Princeton professor and fellow former Rhodes Scholar, brings New York lawyer Jack Davis to Paris, where he finds Ted dead, apparently electrocuted by a laptop computer that, as Jack's partner Grace insists, Ted would never even have touched. (Open Library)

Watches

Hamilton (unidentified model): Having argued a release form out of a deputy inspector, Jack takes it to the basement property room of the Paris police prefecture, where a wizened clerk makes him sign four forms in triplicate before handing over Ted's effects. Out tumble the arrowhead Jack once gave Ted, the keys to his houses in Princeton, Oxford and Paris, a monogrammed handkerchief, and an old Hamilton wristwatch on a scuffed brown leather band, followed by a Swiss Army knife, a cigar cutter, his passport and his wallet. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: There was a black pocket comb, a monogrammed white handkerchief — Ted never used Kleenex — an old Hamilton wristwatch with a scuffed brown leather band (Terence Ball, Rousseau's Ghost, scan cataloged as State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 12, with the OCR's line-break hyphen in "handkerchief" closed up; the visit to the property room begins on p. 11; Internet Archive scan OCR)