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Three Crimes Is a Charm #2 : French crime fiction for #ReadIndies and French February
This month is #ReadIndies, where we read books published by independent publishers. It’s hosted by Karen and Lizzy. Marina Sofia decided to do a #FrenchFebruary for herself and I decided to join her and combine the two events.
So here we are with three French crime fiction books published by independent publishers (Les Arènes, Les éditions du Rouergue and Zulma)
Let’s start with…
Mamie Luger by Benoît Philippon. (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Les Arènes, collection Equinox.
I came upon this book at Quais du Polar and its English title could be Nana Luger.
Berthe Gavignol, born in 1914 in a village in Cantal, France is the Mamie Luger of the book. Mamie, because she’s 102 when she greets the French police with her rifle and Luger because she owns a Luger gun acquired during the German occupation in WWII.
She’s taken to detention for shooting her neighbor and the police inspector André Ventura is in for a ride when she starts telling her life story.
Mamie Luger is a serial killer, out of circumstances. Her bad choice in men makes her a victim of domestic violence and she solves the problem with her Luger and her inhouse graveyard in her basement.
The author tells this incredible story on a tone laced with humor as a relationship builds between a bewildered Ventura and his new prison ward. It’s fun but a bit too long sometimes, less husbands wouldn’t have hurt.
Still, it’s a picture of what too many women have to endure and a take on rural life in France.
To read for fun and Marina Sofia’s thoughts on this one are here. Then, my February crime fiction journey led me to…
Par les rafales by Valentine Imhof (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Rouergue noir.
It came as a blind book date as I asked the libraire of Un Petit Noir to pick books for me. This deadly road-movie took me from Lorraine, to Belgium, Louisiana and Canada. How?
Alex is a free-lance music journalist. When the book opens, she’s in a hotel room in Nancy after a music festival. She’s with a man, for a one-night-stand when their hookup spooks her and she kills her companion. Savagely.
Then she’s back to Metz, where she has her base camp and her lover, Anton. Alex is haunted, her skin is tattooed with excerpts from various works of literature. Her tattoo artist is Bernd, in Ghent, Belgium. He suggested to hide under ink all the marks of torture that covered her body. And they we learn how Alex got them and why she feels tracked like wildlife during a hunting party.
Each chapter of the book starts with an unreadable text, an excerpt of Alex’s tattoos. Par les rafales is Alex’s highspeed run race against the police, her imaginary hunters and her very real internal demons born with the assault she was victim of.
The book could have been written by Virginie Despentes, the one from Apocalypse Baby. Feminist. Full of literary and rock and blues references. (The playlist is at the end of the book and I’ll put in on Spotify when I have time). Crude with a strong female protagonist.
An unusual book, well-written, violent and haunting. It needs a translator.
After all the cold and rain of Par les rafales, I went to the French countryside, in the Drôme department, between Lyon and Provence for a wonderful book by Pascal Garnier.
Low Heights by Pascal Garnier (2003) Original French title: Les Hauts du Bas. Publisher: Zulma
Another book with a fiery old person. Edouard Lavenant is an old curmudgeon, forced to retire to a family property in Drôme Provençale, near Rémuzat after he had a bad stroke. He has a nurse and housekeeper, Thérèse, that he likes to torture. He’s as gracious a character by Thomas Bernhard. You see the drift.
He’s like a petulant child who’s sulking because he had to change his life and at the beginning of the book, we see how Thérèse manages to get him out of his shell with her unwavering kindness. It sounds all bucolic and the descriptions of the Drôme natural landscapes are gorgeous. It seems to go into the fluffy direction of the old man mollified by his housekeeper and learning to enjoy life again and make peace with his past.
Only it’s not a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, it’s a book by Pascal Garnier. Edouard doesn’t get out of his shell; he gets out of his personal Pandora box and all hell breaks loose, from Rémuzat, to Lyon and to Switzerland.
This is perfect noir literature, in less than 200 pages. Extraordinary sense of place with vibrant descriptions of the region that will make you travel to the Drôme Provençale area. A sense of humor that made me chuckle time and again. A storyline built like a well-oiled machine, like Hot Spot by Charles Williams or a roman dur by Simenon. There’s also a scene with snails that reminded me of the short-story The Snail-Watcher by Patricia Highsmith. The crime fiction gods are all approving of Low Heights.
Both Garnier and Tavernier are dead now but I could see them team up and make Low Heights into a magnificent film. We still have Jacques Audiard and it’s right up his alley. So, fingers crossed, eh?
Lucky you, out of the three French books I read for French February and Read Indies, this is the only one available in English, thanks to the indie publisher, Gallic Books and Melanie Florence who translated it. See also Marina Sofia’s take on it for Crime Fiction Lover and rush for it.
Moon in a Dead Eye by Pascal Garnier
Moon in a Dead Eye by Pascal Garnier (2009) French title: Lune captive dans un œil mort.
Moon in a Dead Eye is my second Pascal Garnier and what a delight it was.
Martial and Odette are freshly settled in a gated community in the South of France. They used to live near Paris and they sold their house and left everything behind for this place. Only they are the first settlers. Pioneers of a new genre, they look at the rain falling down on their dream and hope for the arrival of new neighbours to break their loneliness and start activities at the brand new clubhouse. There are fifty houses in the complex and they are the only inhabitants. Pioneers, I tell you.
Martial has trouble adjusting to his new life. The house is full of furniture that smell new and Odette is on a mission to add as many trinkets as necessary to make this place feel like home.
| Odette, elle, colonisait les lieux avec une détermination de missionnaire. Chaque fois qu’ils allaient en ville elle ne manquait pas d’en rapporter une chose, un objet, utile ou décoratif, un tapis de bain, un vase, un enrouleur de papier toilette, une monstrueuse cigale de céramique jaune et noire… | Odette, meanwhile, was colonising the place with missionary zeal. She could not go into town without bringing some useful or decorative object back with her: a bath mat, a toilet-roll holder, a hideous black and yellow ceramic cicada… (translation by Emily Boyce) |
For non-French readers, these « hideous black and yellow ceramic cicada » are typical tourist crap beach merchants sell along the shore during the summer. It’s as Provence as lavender, Marseille soap and Provence table cloth. These cicada look like this:
and if you’re unlucky, it makes cicada noise as well. For a French woman, the mental image is immediate and screams beauf, which has no direct translation and is a slightly derogative way to say archetypal lower-middle-class Frenchman.
Arrive Marlène and Maxime Node. Neighbours, at last. Odette and Martial speculated about them and were looking forward to meeting them. Like in American series about hell in the suburbs, they welcome them with warmth and intend to be friends. After all they have to live in close proximity. Well, you’re still in France though because they don’t bring pie, only start with a little customary chat before going back to their house, laughing, gossiping about Maxime’s teeth being an ad for his dentist and celebrating by opening a bottle of champagne and a can of foie gras.
We see the two couples settling in a routine until a fifth person moves in another house. They wouldn’t be friend if they weren’t neighbours, so the distraction is welcome. Léa is alone and it’s not clear to the others why she chose to live here. They speculate. Is she a widow? Is she a spinster? Their mission is to include her in their little group.
Meanwhile, Martial still feels out-of-place, out-of-time.
| Oui, c’était comme de vivre en vacances, à la difference près que les vacances avaient une fin alors qu’ici, il n’y en avait pas. C’était un peu comme s’ils s’étaient payé l’éternité, ils n’avaient plus d’avenir. | Yes, it was like living on holiday, the only difference being that holidays came to an end. It was as though they had bought themselves a ticket to the afterlife; they no longer had a future. |
But Odette is determined to make the most of her new life. She pushes the developer to hire someone to take care of the clubhouse and entertain them now that they’re numerous enough. Madeleine joins them once a week. Deep down they all know moving there was a mistake but they refuse to acknowledge it, otherwise they’d fall apart.
All the characters are pathetic in their own way. They have a past, they’re not so young anymore and their motivations to leave their house, their friends, their neighbourhoods behind are incomprehensible. They’re looking for security. Odette and Martial’s first months on the property are creepy enough to make you run to the hills. After the Nodes arrive, they are set on socializing at any cost and it’s like they’re in a perpetual summer camp for grown-ups. Only it gets tiring. Only they’re not children anymore but ageing.
Pascal Garnier shows very well how hard it is for Martial to settle in a new place, how he misses his habits in his old neighbourhood, how everything seems forced and new. He also pictures masterfully how hell is other people, as Sartre pointed out in Huis-Clos. They have to live together and as they’re all retired, they are at home all the time and bump into each other repeatedly. Womanizer Maxime has a crush on Léa, he’s a little obnoxious and Marlène talks incessantly about her son, the lawyer. Odette and Martial are in this together, finding comfort in each other’s company. They are good together and they were chasing a dream of the South, as if life were easier, funnier under the sun.
Moon in a Dead Eye turns paranoid and gory at some point but I won’t reveal how and why. For that, you’ll have to read the book. I recommend it for its wacky sense of humour, Garnier’s poetry in his writing, for the characters who come to life and seem to come out of the pages to meet you. They are middle-class couples who dreamt of a sunny retirement, who looked for an escape to find a not-so golden prison.
Garnier describes the gated community and the artificial life it creates. People live in their world and are cut off of real life. Part of feeling alive is feeling a member of a community. And a healthy community has people from all ages, all backgrounds. Martial misses little things: small talk with the baker, having a café at the downstairs bar, being part of the hustle of a living neighbourhood. They’re living in an alternate world where children are banned and strangers have to be formally admitted at the gate. Moon in a Dead Eye is French to the core. Garnier has this nasty sense of humour so so French and usually directed at the bourgeoisie.
I’m with Pascal Garnier on this one. I’ll never understand how someone would willingly go and live in a place full of dos and don’ts and that regiments the presence of children. I’d suffocate. And let’s not speak of being forced-fed with silly activities at the clubhouse and being obliged to socialize with neighbours all day long. *shudder* I also don’t see myself leaving all my friends behind, my everyday life to chase after a dream of eternal sunshine in the South. Why would I want to move to a ghetto for senior citizens? I’d rather live downtown, near a cinema, a bookstore, a library and a bakery, with free access to family and friends. The rest is futile preoccupations, which leads me to recommend you Guy’s insightful review of Moon in a Dead Eye.
The place not to be
The Front Seat Passenger by Pascal Garnier. French title: La place du mort.
I have to admit that I discovered French writer Pascal Garnier on English-speaking blogs. Then a libraire at Quai du Polar highly recommended him as well. So I bought La place du mort, translated into The Front Seat Passenger. In French, la place du mort has a double meaning. Literally, it’s “the deadman’s place/seat”. For a car, it means the front passenger seat because according to the statistics, the risk to die in case of an accident is higher when you’re on this seat. Referring to the front passenger seat as la place du mort is very common language in France. The second meaning is to take a dead man’s place. Keep this in mind. Oh, and did I mention Garnier writes polars, aka crime fiction?
The book opens on a murder. A person voluntarily drives into a car, causes an accident where the driver and the front seat passenger die. First encounter with Garnier’s striking prose:
| In the forest a fox had just ripped open a rabbit. It pricked up its ears when it heard the squealing of tyres on a tarmac and the clang of metal in the ravine. But that only lasted a few seconds. Then silence descended again. With one bite, the fox disembowelled the rabbit and plunged its muzzle into the steaming innards. All around it, thousands of animals, large and small, were eating or climbing on top of each other for the sole purpose of perpetuating their species.Translated by Jane Aitken. | Dans la forêt un renard vient d’égorger un lapin. Ses oreilles se dressent en entendant le crissement des pneus sur l’asphalte et le bruit de la tôle dans le ravin. Ça ne dure que quelques secondes. Le silence reprend possession des lieux. D’un coup de dents, il éventre le lapin et plonge son museau pointu dans les entrailles fumantes. Partout autour de lui, des milliers d’animaux, des plus grands aux plus petits, s’entre-bouffent ou se grimpent dessus sans autre but que de perpétuer le jeu. |
I’m afraid the English translation misses out a bit the black humour at the end of the quote. s’entre-bouffent or eat each other has a humorous tone and it’s not written to for the sole purpose of perpetuating their species but for the sole purpose of perpetuating the game. But perhaps it doesn’t sound as well in English as it does in French. When I read this paragraph just after the murder, I see Garnier reminding mankind that they are animals and that the animal world is not bucolic but full of violence. So violence is part of our nature and that’s what he’ll show us.
Just after this gruelling scene, we meet with Fabien Delorme, forfty-something, visiting his father. The two men have nothing to say to each other and Fabien is there out of duty and without his wife Sylvie. When he comes home to his apartment in Paris, the police pay him a visit and tell him his wife is dead. She was killed in a car accident near Dijon with her lover, Martial Arnoult. Fabien goes to the hospital and briefly sees Martine, Martial’s wife. He notes down her name and address.
Back home, his friend Gilles decides Fabien that can’t leave alone and as a recently divorced father, he’s happy to invite Fabien to live with him. As Fabien points out Il n’était pas incapable de vivre seul, il ne concevait la solitude qu’accompagné. (He wasn’t unable to live alone but his idea of solitude was being with someone.) They find a new routine but Fabien decides to stalk Martine. He wants to seduce her, to take Martial’s place. He’s sort of seeking revenge: “he stole my wife, I’ll steal his widow”. He doesn’t know yet he’s going to embark on a crazy journey.
Fabien is not a likeable character and he’s surrounded by insane or childish characters. The story is pure noir but everything holds in Garnier’s unique style. Like here, in this conversation between the police and Fabien, after Sylvie’s death:
| – Did you know what her last wills were? – Her last wills?
– Yes, whether she wanted to be buried or cremated? – I don’t know…I suppose she didn’t want to die, just like anybody else. (my translation) |
– Savez-vous quelles étaient ses dernières volontés?- Ses dernières volontés ?
– Oui, si elle souhaitait être inhumée ou incinérée ? – Je n’en sais rien…Je suppose qu’elle ne voulait pas mourir, comme tout le monde. |
The whole novel is full of eccentric thoughts and acid piques, placing Fabien in a realm of his own.
I’ve seen Pascal Garnier compared to Simenon. I haven’t read Simenon, except for two or three Maigret books. Based on this, I don’t know where this comparison comes from. There’s a wicked sense of humour in Garnier that lacked in the Simenons I’ve read. I haven’t read the best ones, I know. I assume that the good ones are rife with black humour. For me, Pascal Garnier the crazy son of a Patrick Manchette with sprinkles of a Duane Swierczynski. And that’s a huge compliment. I read La place du mort on a plane and I kept chuckling and chuckling despite the dark path the story was taking. I had obviously so much fun reading it that my neighbour had to politely ask Excuse me, but what are you reading? It seems excellent and she left the plane with the reference of the book.
While I’m not tempted to read L’A26, I’m much interested in Flux which won the Prix de l’humour noir. Definitely a writer to discover. Definitely a writer I’ll explore.
PS: this would make an excellent film. (with Daroussin as Fabien, for example)
Quais du polar 2014: welcome to crime fiction
In 2014, Quais du polar celebrates its 10th anniversary. It’s a festival set in Lyon and dedicated to crime fiction in books and films. (See the meaning of the name here) The whole city is about crime fiction during three days. There are conferences, exhibits, films, a great book fair and a walk turned into an investigation in the Vieux Lyon. James Ellroy was there for a conference and he was the star of the festival. I didn’t have time to participate in anything but go to the book fair. Compared to other salons, publishers don’t have stalls there, only independent book stores do. It is reserved to independent book stores from Lyon. If you look up book stores in Lyon in the yellow page, there are 95 results. They some are specialised in SF or comics, children lit, scientific books… Only a few of them participate to Quais du polar. Each stand corresponds to one book shop and the writers present at the festival are dispatched among them. I guess the book shops made good money during the weekend, there was a lot of people there. The atmosphere was like a swarm of crime fiction readers buzzing around stands, waiting to meet writers and chatting with book sellers. It’s always nice to be among book enthusiasts.
Time to introduce you to a new French word: libraire. A libraire is a bookseller, a person who works in a book shop. But when I see bookseller I see vendeur de livres and not libraire because I’m under the impression that the selling part of the word is more important than the book part. When I hear libraire, I think of someone who loves books, reading books, being around books, talking about books and recommending books to others. The cash part of the story is only the ending, not the purpose. Books are not cans of green peas. A libraire is not a book seller. Libraire is a noble word that implies that the person in front of you is knowledgeable about books and will be all lit up if you share your reading with them. One of those owns the book store Au Bonheur des Ogres. I was happy to chat with him again as last year he had recommended The Blonde and Nager sans se mouiller. I told him how the copy of Nager sans se mouiller I purchased from him in 2013 is now sitting on a shelf in Beirut thanks to the magic of book blogging and that I had LOVED The Blonde. He’s a true crime fiction aficionado, he oozes crime fiction enthusiasm, it’s incredible. You could spend hours talking to him about books. This year, he recommended The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle, La place du mort by Pascal Garnier and Le tri sélectif des ordures et autres cons by Sébastien Gendron. (Turns out I already had the last one). We’ll see how it goes this year.
Lauren Beukes was also there, she’s very friendly. I now have a signed copy of her Zoo City. It was on my wish list after reading Max’s review. I managed to snatch a signed copy of The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson for my in-law. I haven’t read him –yet— but in France, he’s published by Gallmeister. So I suppose he’s good. Even without his cowboy hat and plaid shirt, you’d know he’s American. He’s very friendly too.
I said earlier that publishers don’t have stalls at the book fair. They are involved in the festival, though. I really liked the ads for the publisher Points. Tu ne tueras Points… mais tu liras des polars. Literally Thou shall not kill but thou shall read crime fiction. There’s a pun on Points / point which is an old version of the negative form pas.
I had a lot of fun that afternoon and I hope I’ll have more time to go to conferences and exhibits next year.
Book Around the Corner 