Book Around the Corner

So, we’re Wednesday and until now, I didn’t have the time or energy to write about my second day at Quais du Polar on Sunday.

I had booked a seat at a Literary Cruise on the Saône River and the speaker was Florence Aubenas. She’s a famous French international reporter and a war reporter. She works at Le Monde. She was abducted in Iraq in 2005 and was kept prisoner during five months. She’s also well-known for going undercover as a cleaning lady in 2009. She wanted to live the life of underpaid blue-collar workers who work insecure jobs and report about it. It became a bestseller, Le Quai de Ouistreham and it has been made into a film by Emmanuel Carrère.

I was curious to hear her talk about her experience and about her last book, L’inconnu de la poste. She writes about an actual murder case that happened in Montréal-La-Cluse, in the Jura region. It’s a village of 3500 souls where the postmistress was murdered when she was on duty. Florence Aubenas was sent there to cover the story, got hooked up with the mystery around it and went there on and off during several years. She relates this story in her book.

It was a delightful hour as she’s fascinating to listen to. She’s very friendly, close to the public and we all listened with rapt attention. The setting was great too because we got a cruise on the river out of it and I think it was a great idea to organize a conference in such a neat setting.

After that, I had planned to visit the bookstores set up in tents on the bank of the Rhône River with a friend but the weather was not cooperating at all. We gave up and stayed put in a restaurant.

In the afternoon, we went to Noir in Lyon, a panel of writers who wrote crime fiction books set in Lyon. There was Coline Gatel for her second book set during La Belle Epoque, Gwenaël Bulteau for his novel set in the Croix-Rousse neighborhood during the Dreyfus Affair, Loulou Dedola, a BD author and François Médéline for two books, L’ange rouge and La sacrifiée du Vercors, set during WWII. This panel was a bit too messy for my tastes but I got to discover local writers.

I manage to spend some time at open bookstore, chatted a little with Dominique Sylvain and upon her recommendation, bought the fourth volume of her Lola & Ingrid series.

This festival was the first one I went to in this COVID times. They managed to reorganize it in the season (usually it’s the last weekend of March) and to relocate it in several places in the city. There was a lot less visitors than usual, probably because you had to book conferences in advance, because the weather was terrible and only a few international writers managed to come. But it felt good to go to a real book festival and hopefully, things will get back to normal in March 2022.

Many thanks to the staff and volunteers who gave their time and energy to celebrate crime fiction in Lyon.