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Moth by James Sallis – I wish that Lew Griffin and Dave Robicheaux had café au lait together.
Moth by James Sallis (1993) French title : Papillon de nuit. Translated by Elisabeth Guinsbourg, reviewed by Stéphanie Estournet.
Moth is the second volume of the Lew Griffin series by James Sallis and I got my signed copy at Quais du Polar.
Lew Griffin is an African-American amateur detective, a former thug, an intermittent teacher of French literature and a successful crime fiction writer.
The book opens on a scene in an intensive-care nursery where Griffin is visiting a tiny baby, tagged Baby Girl McTell. Her eighteen-year-old mother Alouette has disappeared after she gave birth to her premature baby.
Lew Griffin isn’t related to Alouette and her baby, at least not on paper. But she is LaVerne’s estranged daughter and the late LaVerne meant the world to him.
There was no way I could tell her or anyone else what LaVerne had meant, had been, to me. We were both little more than kids when we met; Verne was a hooker then. Years later she married her doctor and I didn’t see her for a while. When he cut her loose, she started as a volunteer at a rape crisis cente and went on to a psychology degree and fulltime counseling. It was a lonely life, I guess, at both ends. And when finally she met a guy named Chip Landrieu and married him, even as I began to realize what I had lost, I was happy for her. For both of them.
One paragraph and you know why Chip Andrieu hires Griffin to find the missing Alouette and why Griffin takes this investigation at heart. LaVerne and Alouette were estranged because her father, the doctor mentioned earlier, kept his daughter away from her mother. And Alouette fell with the wrong crowd, becoming a drug addict.
Griffin will do everything in his power to find her, even if it means endangering himself, having a road trip in remote places in Louisiana where he’d rather not go to or losing his second chance with his lover Clare. He owes it to LaVerne. He’s paying his respect again, he’s faithful to their shared history. And it is a last way to have her back, even if she’s dead now.
Moth is a first-person narrative which means that we are privy to Lew’s inner thoughts, feelings and vision of life. And as a reader, it’s a nice head to be in. He’s struggling with his past, his addiction to alcohol and tries to put himself together. His three meaningful relationships left bruises and regrets, a sort of unfinished business with LaVerne, Vicky who left him after an intense relationship and Clare who wants and deserves more than what he’s willing to give.
As often in good crime fiction, the plot is important to keep the story moving forward but the crux of the book is on the sidelines.
James Sallis is a poet and a translator of Georges Perec which means he’s skilled with words. It is noticeable in his prose. I’ve read Moth in French but his translators give justice to his incredible style and sense of place. With his background in poetry and French literature, Sallis brings something new to crime fiction. I loved Griffin’s digressions about French literature and the descriptions of New Orleans and Louisiana.
Moth takes the reader to pre-Katrina New Orleans as Griffin doesn’t own a car and walks through the city a lot. As a French reader, there’s always an odd familiarity with books set in New Orleans. I had the same feeling when I read Kate Chopin and James Lee Burke. It’s probably because of all the French names like Andrieu and remaining traces of French culture, like Griffin and his café au lait. (Btw, Alouette means Skylark).
The city falls apart, led by corrupted politicians and a disregard for its poor population, something Sallis point out as Griffin walks around and something we’ll all see when hurricane Katrina hits the city. Walking around New Orleans with Griffin is a melancholic experience as we feel the city decaying due to a lack of TLC.
The trip in the Louisiana back country is also very cinematographic. The Deep South and its seedy motels, its isolated gas stations and its well-groomed Confederate cemeteries. Everything is described in such a way that Sallis transports you there and you feel how uncomfortable Griffin is in these areas.
In our times of growing tendencies to censor people who don’t abide by political correctness, to point out people who wander out of the path defined by self-appointed defenders of morality and to erase edges that displease the said righteous people, tolerancce has become a hot commodity. Spending time with Lew Griffin is refreshing. He knows he’s a flawed man, he knows he’s got scars he has to live with and he’s accepting. He doesn’t judge other people, he doesn’t give lessons, he goes with the flow. He trusts his backbone, keeps his word to his friends and chooses his battles.
Life is full of too many gray areas for them to be all mapped out and classified as compliant or not. Characters like Lew Griffin walk a narrow line in lives full of gray areas. Their self-doubt and their tolerance help them navigate the complicated waters of life. And in a way, they are patting the reader’s back and telling them they’re not alone in their own sea of gray areas and that they’re doing alright.
I closed my copy of Moth in awe of James Sallis. I loved this book and I’ve started to recommend it around me. I wish I could put Lew Griffin and Dave Robicheaux in a room and have them interviewed by Ron Rash. Imagine the vivid discussions about the South, poetry, jazz, politics, and literature. Imagine them talk about their life experiences, New Orleans and their friends and family. What a blast it would be. But, hey, who knows, maybe ChatGPT can do it for us?
Darktown by Thomas Mullen – black police officers in Atlanta in 1948. Highly recommended
Darktown by Thomas Mullen (2016) French title: Darktown. Translated by Anne-Marie Carrière.
As often, I’m late with my billets. April and May are a sort of rat race, all for good reasons but I didn’t have a lot of time for blogging, reading other bloggers’ posts and reading books. I read Darktown by Thomas Mullen in March, before Quais du Polar as I knew that the author would be at the festival. I did have the opportunity to get the sequel of Darktown, Lightning Men, and have it signed.
Darktown is considered at historical crime fiction as it is set in 1948 in Atlanta. That year, under political pressure, the Atlanta Police Department hires their first black police officers.
They are not welcome by their white peers and are second zone policemen. They can’t arrest white suspects. They can’t carry a weapon. They can’t drive a squad car and they can’t enter the police headquarters and have to use the basement of a gym instead.
Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are part of this new team of eight black policemen managed by a white officer, McInnis. They operate in Darktown, a black neighborhood in Atlanta and share the territory with a team of white officers, Lionel Dunlow and Denny Rakestraw.
When patrolling one night, Boggs and Smith see a black woman taken away in a white’s car. She’s Lily Ellsworth and the driver is Brian Underhill, an ex-cop. Later, Lily’s body is found beaten to death in a dump. No one cares about her murder, except for Boggs and Smith.
They will do their best to find her murderer, even if this investigation crosses some dangerous lines and puts them at risk.
Thomas Mullen created a set of characters that works really well. Boggs and Smith are both black but don’t come from the same background. Boggs comes from a poor family and went to France as a soldier during WWI. He knows violence and ingrained racism aimed at him. Smith is the son of a bourgeois black family; his father is a well-known reverent who fights for black people’s rights through the system. Smith is educated and lived a rather sheltered life, until he made the decision to help his community by applying to the Atlanta Police Department. This duo complements each other. Boggs needs Smith’s calm and education to smooth his edges. Smith needs Boggs’s street smartness.
The duo of white cops is another story. Lionel Dunlow is the old school policeman: violent, racist and corrupt. Darktown is his fief and he acts as if he owns everyone’s life and, in a sense, he does. Rakestraw is a newbie who wants to play by the book and recoils from gratuitous violence. He hates his partner but he knows that Dunlow is well-respected in the department. Rake is more progressist, less racist and willing to cross the line and throw a hand to his new black colleagues but he’s prudent.
The investigation progresses and Mullen shows the atmosphere of the town. He describes Smith’s and Boggs’s quotidian and the constant humiliations that they must swallow. It’s like a flock of tiny needles picking at them all the time. You need a tough skin to let them slide and keep your calm and your dignity.
This black team can’t work properly because they are black. Nobody cares about the death of a black young woman. Nobody cares to find the real murderer and the police would rather fabricate a perpetrator to give the illusion of justice. All layers of the white community in Atlanta collaborate, actively or not at keeping black people down and maintaining the status quo.
Were these behaviors a surprise? Of course not. Any reader would expect this kind of atmosphere in 1948 in Atlanta. But Mullen’s talent is such that he makes you feel a bit of what Smith and Boggs experience and I felt so angry on their behalf that I couldn’t read Darktown at night. I was so worked up by what I was reading that it was not sleep inducing.
Darktown and its new police squad is the kind of topic that Colson Whitehead could have written about. Thomas Mullen is white and while he was signing my copy of Lightning Men, I asked him whether people had questioned his writing about black history and with black characters. It shouldn’t be an issue but it could be nowadays. He said that, no, he didn’t have any issues with that, probably because he did his homework before writing and had the facts and the atmosphere right.
Very highly recommended.
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson and Dancing Bear by James Crumley – sons of western Montana
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson (2014) French title: Yaak Valley, Montana. Translated by Nathalie Peronny.
Dancing Bear by James Crumley (1983) French title: La danse de l’ours. Translated by Jacques Mailhos.
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson and Dancing Bear by James Crumley have been written thirty-one years apart but when I read the Crumley, I thought about the Henderson, as if there were a parentage between the two.
The main character of Fourth of July Creek is Pete Snow. He’s in his early thirties, separated from his wife Beth, who just decided to move to Texas, taking their thirteen-year-old daughter with her. Pete is a social worker in the north-west of Montana, near the Yaak River.
His life is a mess, he drinks too much, his daughter hates him and he’s worried about his ex-wife’s lifestyle as she’s a junkie. His brother Luke is hiding from his parole officer and he doesn’t get along with his father. In other words, Pete is something who’d need to benefit from his own social services.
We follow him in his work area as he tries to do his job as best as he can. He’s mostly busy with two families, one where the mother is a drug user and has two children and another more mysterious one, the Pearls. Benjamin Pearl intruded into a school and the principal called Pete. Benjamin lives in the woods with his survivalist father. He’s homeschooled and his father is into conspiracy theories.
Pete wants to help Benjamin and his contacts with the Pearl family will get him into trouble. Meanwhile, his personal life turns to hell…
Milo Milodragovitch, the main character of Dancing Bear is a former PI, current security agent who lives in Merriwether, Montana. He comes from money but his father’s will says he can’t get the family money until he’s 52. He’s now 47 and is doing odd jobs to earn his keep until his age frees his inheritance.
He drinks too much but tries to monitor his drinking and stay in control. Let’s say that he switched from whisky to peppermint schnaps and cocaine. Not sure it’s a better combo. He’s bored with his security job but cares about his employer, Colonel Haliburton who hires veterans to help them adjust to civilian life.
His past life comes into his present when he’s hired by Sarah Weddington, one of his father’s former lovers. She’s an old lady now and she’s spying on her neighbors. She’s seen some weird rendezvous in the park near her house and she wants to know who the people are. She wants Milo to find out and she’s willing to pay well and as it sounds more like indulging an old lady than anything else, Milo agrees to dig into this couple’s life and find their identity.
Wrong move. Milo’s propension to attract troubles is out-of-this world. This easy assignment turns into a dangerous dive into drug and influence trafficking. Lots of cocaine-sniffing, brawls, gunfights, car chasing and housebreaking, that’s Milo for you. Same old Milo as in Wrong Case, the first Milo Milodragovitch book.
The two stories seem very different but the two books have common points. The most obvious one is that they are set in the same area in Montana and at the same time. Indeed, even if it was published in 2014, Fourth of July Creek is set in 1980/1981, after Reagan’s election.
Dancing Bear was published in 1983. Both books describe Montana and America at the turning point of the 1980s, Henderson with hindsight and Crumley with insight. The fun of the 1970s is fading away. Outsourcing public services like garbage collection to private firms has started. Economic liberalism is about to take over everything, cutting State budgets like the ones that finance Pete’s actions. It will deregulate lots of industries and allow more appropriation of natural resources.
Henderson and Crumley set their stories in Montana; they don’t show the ranchers or the farmers but the people in towns. (I don’t understand the French cover of Henderson’s book). The atmosphere in Merriwether is polluted by the paper mill near the city. They depict the poor workers, the people who live on the margins. The hopeless.
Pete and Milo have unfinished business with their fathers, a love-hate relationship that is corrosive to their souls. Pete and Beth got married very young because she was pregnant with Rachel. They were too immature to be parents and not ready to leave the booze and the partying behind. Milo has been married and divorced five times; he has no relationship with his son.
Pete and Milo are flawed and their personal life is a mess but you get attached to them. They have a lot of empathy for people around them. They care. See how Pete sees his job:
There were families you helped because this was you’re your job, and you helped them get into work programs or you set up an action plan and checked in on them or you gave them a ride to the god-damn doctor’s office to have that infection looked at. You just did. Because no one else was going to. And then there were the people who were reasons for you to do your job. Katie. Why. Fuck why.
She just was.
Pete cares about little Katie and isn’t comfortable to let her live with her mother. He goes out of his way to connect to Jeremiah Pearl, Benjamin’s father. Deep down he knows that a child who breaks into a school class is crying for help.
And Milo helps Mrs Weddington for the money, but also in memory of their former acquaintance and because he’s too kind-hearted to refuse. He’ll help a colleague at Haliburton Security. People around them acknowledge that they have good hearts and support them. They need it as they tend to get into a lot of trouble.
Henderson and Crumley have an excellent style with original, flawed but engaging characters. They have a beautiful way to describe the Montana weather and wilderness. I have these two novels in French translation but here’s the opening paragraph of Dancing Bear.
We had been blessed with a long, easy fall for western Montana. The two light snowfalls had melted before noon, and in November we had three weeks of Indian Summer so warm and seductive that even we natives seemed to forget about winter. But in the canyon of Hell Roaring Creel, where I live, when the morning breezes stirred off the stone-cold water and into the golden, dying rustle of the cottonwoods and creek willows, you could smell the sear, frozen heart of winter, February, or, as the Indians sometimes called it, the Moon of the Children Weeping in the Lodges, crying in hunger.
Both writers have an incredible sense of place, an ability to feel the time of their story and build vivid characters. Dancing Bear is crime fiction, a plot-driven genre but in Four of July Creek too, the reader wants to understand what happened to the Pearl family, who Jeremiah really is and if Pete will solve his personal issue involving his daughter Rachel. (Trying to avoid spoilers here.)
I don’t know if James Crumley influenced Smith Henderson but I saw a link between the two, probably because they have main characters who have a moral compass and question the model of the American psyche. Making money. Being sucessful. What does it mean, in the end? Through their actions, Pete and Milo question the system and its values. What’s actual freedom? Do I need to comply to laws I find unfair?
Third crime is the charm #3 – Nice, London and Tokyo
Boccanera by Michèle Pedinielli (2018) Not available in English. (Yet?)
This was our Book Club choice for April.
Ghjulia “Diou” Boccanera, the Boccanera of this crime fiction book by Michèle Pedinielli, is a PI who lives and works in Nice, on the French Riviera.
She’s hired by Mauro Giannini’s boyfriend after Mauro was murdered. The police would like it to be a homophobic crime, Diou thinks that it’s too easy a scenario for it to be accurate.
She starts investigating and takes us around Nice, its old town, its Promenade des Anglais and its gay scene. The story is well-sewn and the pleasure of this book lies in the suspense of the plot (who did it?), the colorful and attaching characters that populate Diou’s life and the author’s love for her native city.
Boccanera wants to be Nice’s Montale but I think that Izzo was a more gifted or more experienced writer. We’ll see how the author’s style and characters develop in the next volumes. It still is an excellent book for entertainment and armchair travelling. Nice is a few fours from Lyon, too, opposite direction of the Vosges mountains and totally different vibe but very tempting too.
Boccanera is a series and I got the second volume, Après les chiens, at Quais du Polar and got it signed by this friendly and enthusiastic writer.
Body Language by A.K. Turner (2020) French title: Body Language.
A.K. Turner is another author who was invited at Quais du Polar, I was reading her book during the festival and I attended a panel where she discussed the setting of her crime fiction series. Body Language is the first volume of her Cassie Raven series.
Cassie Raven is a mortuary assistant at the morgue in Camden Town, London. Her parents died in a car accident when she was four and she was raised by her grand-mother. She had a rather chaotic adolescence, lived on the margins for a while until her teacher, Geraldine Edwards, mentored and tutored her until she got her diploma.
On the police side, Camden Town has a new detective, Phyllida Flyte. She’s a transfer from the Winchester police and she’s a by-the-book police officer. She needs to adapt to policing in Camden Town while she works through her personal drama.
When Geraldine’s body arrives at the morgue after a death in puzzling circumstances, Cassie starts investigating. The police tends to think it was an accident, Cassie isn’t so sure.
Cassie, with her Goth style and her past as an outsider couldn’t be more different from her. Flyte’s first instinct is to be suspicious of this weird mortuary assistant. As the story progresses, the two will forge a tentative work relationship.
The plot moved forward at an good pace, Cassie and Phyllida have catching backgrounds and life in Camden town is part of the book. A.K. Turner explained that this neighbourhood’s culture sits well with Cassie and asks Phyllida to adjust.
Body Language is an entertaining book, like watching a TV series and I wouldn’t mind spending more time with Cassie but I left London for Paris and then Tokyo with Louise Morvan.
Baka! by Dominique Sylvain (2007) French title: Baka! Not available in English.
Baka! is a Japanese word that means idiot. Dominique Sylvain is a French author who lived a few years in Japan. She first wrote Baka! in 1995 and then rewrote it in 2007. I have the last version, the first one is OOP.
Baka! is the first volume of the Louise Morvan series. She’s a PI who lives in Paris. She inherited her uncle’s PI agency when he died in action. She’s still working through his death and is trying to find her footing at the head of the agency.
She’s hired by Bishop Chevry-Morvan to go and check on his nephew Florent who has moved to Tokyo. Florent has asked his uncle for a substantial loan and the bishop is worried. Or so it seems.
Louise arrives in Tokyo, speaking English but not a word of Japanese, like most of us, I guess. She quickly realizes that things aren’t as straightforward as the bishop said and that she got herself into a dangerous mess.
Tokyo and Japan are an important part of the book: the geography, the customs, the way-of-life. I thought that in this one, Dominique Sylvain tried to embrace too many things at the same time. As we say in French Qui trop embrasse mal étreint, literally meaning that if you try to hug too many things at the same time, you don’t hold onto them very well.
There are too many plot threads in the book, the characters are all connected and have their personal goal or issue in the global picture. I thought it was a bit too much.
However, I really liked Louise Morvan as a character. Unapologetic. Bold. Fearless. In Baka!, we didn’t stay long in Paris before and after the Tokyo trip, but Louise Morvan has the same kind of microcosm as Ghjulia Boccanera in Nice. Familiar faces in a local café and informal relationships with the cops.
Other reviews of books by Dominique Sylvain:
- A standalone also set in Japan: Kabuchiko an excellent one that needs an English translator who speaks French, knows France and Japan. (Wonder who that could be? 😊)
- A standalone set in Paris Les Infidèles
- The second volume of the Louise Morvan series Soeurs de sang,
- Also set in Paris, the first volume of the Lola Jost & Ingrid Diesel : Passage du Désir. This one is available in English and is entitled Dark Angel.
I also started and abandoned 19500 dollars la tonne by Jean-Hugues Oppel. It didn’t work for me.
Upcoming crime fiction billets: the excellent Darktown by Thomas Mullen, the incredible Dancing Bear by James Crumley and the masterpiece Moth by James Sallis.
Quais du Polar 2023 : friends, museum, boats, music, panels, books and more importantly, writers
Life got busy this week and I’m late with my billet about the 19th edition of the Quais du Polar festival. For newcomers to Book Around the Corner, it’s a literary festival dedicated to crime fiction and set in Lyon, France. This year it was from March 31st to April 2nd.
Despite the capricious April weather, the festival was a success, bringing 90 000 visitors and allowing independent bookstores to sell 290 000 euros worth of books in three days. See the avid readers milling around writers and bookstellers.
As usual, the organizers have surpassed themselves and there were a lot of events set in the city and its suburbs.
An investigation to explore the city on foot, buses with judiciary and police experts talking about their jobs, panels on bateaux-mouche, a CSI exhibition set up by the police themselves, lots of literary panels, music & literature events, visits to museums, crime fiction films in cinemas…All around real crime solving and justice and crime fiction.
And most of all, lots of writers from various countries, who seemed to really enjoy themselves.
I spent the weekend with a friend who came for the festival and had the chance to see Marina Sofia again. We were happy to spend time together. Thanks for the lovely time!
So, what did I do during these three days of festival?
Friday.
We went to the Modern Art Museum and visited the exhibition The Skin Is a Thin Container by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, followed by a discussion with Johana Gustawsson, a French crime fiction writer married to a Swede. The talk was fascinating as she explained her family history and background, how it fuels her book stories and why she felt connected with the exhibition.
We had a grand time with her, as she was open about her family legacy and eager to exchange views with the attendance. I’ve never read her yet and I got one of her books, La Folly. I didn’t get a signed copy as the lines were too long.
That’s when we joined Marina Sofia in the great hall of the Chamber of Commerce where the independent bookstores are set with their guest authors. I managed to talk briefly with Peter Farris and William Boyle, both authors published by Gallmeister and tour budies (their word), as they are touring together in France for a few weeks.
We then met with friends in a restaurant to have drinks and appetizers. We had a wonderful time.
Saturday.
The day started with a bateau-mouche cruise with the artist Joann Sfar. This is a one hour cruise on the Saône river with a writer interviewed by a journalist.
It’s usually a lovely hour and Sfar talked about his latest BD, Riviera, about his hometown Nice. He’s friendly, funny and made me want to visit Nice again. Imagine that he went to the same lycée as Joseph Kessel and Romain Gary.
At the beginning of the afternoon, we attended a panel in the grand salon of the City Hall. The writers were Carlos Zanón who has taken over the Pepe Carvalho character, AK Turner, William Boyle and Elizabeth George.
It was supposed to be about the importance of their chosen town in their work, Madrid and Barcelone for Zanón, Camden Town in London for AK Turner, Gravesend in Brooklyn for Boyle and London for George. The journalist didn’t really manage to make them interact and it wasn’t the best panel I’ve ever attended.
The next panel at the Chapelle de la Trinité was excellent. It was about writing crime fiction set in remote places. The authors were Andrée Michaud and Roxane Bourchard, both from Québec and writing books set in the woods or in Gaspésie, Henri Loevenbruck who has created a fictional Channel Island, Thomas Mullen whose last book is set in a commune in Washington and RJ Ellory with his book in a mining town in Québec.
The atmosphere of this panel was relaxed and full of banter, thanks to Michel Dufranne, the journalist who led the discussion. His sense of humor backed up by Roxane Bouchard and Henri Loevenbruck’s own brand of fun made them crack jokes and had the attendance laughing.
I was impressed with Loevenbruck’s island, Blackmore: imagine that he created an island, built its scale model, imagined the lives and biographies of its 1000 inhabitants. And now, it’s an open source island, meaning that, provided that they ask his permission, any writer may use this setting to write their own book. Isn’t it unheard of?
Roxane Bouchard won the Quais du Polar prize for crime fiction for her novel Nous étions le sel de la mer. I really want to read it as I’ve been to Gaspésie and I’m curious about her book.
Sunday
First, an international panel at the Chapelle de la Trinité again, with Peter Farris (USA), Takashi Morita (Japan), Jacob Philipps (UK) and Jakub Szamalek (Poland). Farris and Szamalek write novels while Takashi Morita made Arsène Lupin into a manga and Philipps draws comics.
I’m curious about all their books, with a preference for the novels. I’ll wait for their paperback editions to read them, though. Le Présage by Peter Farris received glorious reviews by French journalists and libraires. It’s only available in French translation and I hope he’ll be published in his native language some day.
Szamalek’s book explores contemporary Poland and our digital world. It sounded fascinating. I don’t think it is available in English translation.
Then, we went to another cruise on the Saône river, this time with Javier Cercas and about his Terra Alta trilogy. I haven’t read it and it felt like I was really missing out. Have you read it?
We really felt that we had just shared a privileged moment with a great writer. He talked about his crime fiction trilogy, about writing, about literature. All in French.
And last but not least, we went to the opera where William Boyle had a rock and talk hour. First, a local rock band played a few songs and then Philippe Manche, a music journalist, interviewed Boyle about his love for rock. He used to be in a band and listens to a lot of rock music. We had a great time.
Between the various events we attended, we spent time at the bookstores, bought books, had them signed and talked a little with writers. I think I had the opportunity to talk to all the writers I wanted to see: Michèle Pedinielli, William Boyle, Peter Farris, Thomas Mullen, Victor del Arbol, Santiago Gamboa. All of them were friendly and it’s a great opportunity for readers.
They all seem to have a good time, spending time with their libraires, their publishing house, other writers and meeting readers. And people stay in line, eager to share their love of books, there’s a constant rush of people buying books, talking about books, reading books in lines or in corridors and sharing book recommendations. What a blast!
The outcome: an increase of my crime fiction TBR:
Next year will be their 20th anniversary of the festival, from April 7 to April 9-2024. See you next year for another Quais du Polar episode!
Third crime is the 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.
Third crime is the charm : England in the Middle Ages, high tech in Virginia and a haunting past in Finland.
Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (2007) French title: La confidente des morts. Translated by Vincent Hugon.
This is the first instalment of a series by Ariana Franklin featuring the female doctor, Adelia Aguila. We’re in Cambridge, in 1171, during the reign of King Henry II of England. Adelia came from Sicily with Simon of Naples and Mansur.
They were sent by their king upon Henry II’s request. Children have been murdered in Cambridge and the local population accuses the Jews of the crime. They have been staying in a castle for months now and as valuable tax payers, Henry II wants them back to their occupations.
Adelia is an oddity for 12th century England: she’s a woman, a doctor and “mistress of the art of death”, in other word, the ancestor of medical examiners.
The book is a criminal investigation, a cool description of life in Cambridge at the time. I’m not sure that everything is totally accurate or that the characters are historically plausible but I didn’t care. I’m no historian, the main details were correct and I had a great time following this ad hoc team of investigators while they looked for the perpetrator of these gory murders.
Recommended to spend a good afternoon on the couch, with a blanket during a cold winter Sunday or lying on a towel on the beach during a hot summer day.
Livid by Patricia Cornwell (2022) Not available in French. Yet.
My daughter raised to the challenge of getting me a book for Christmas and the poor child sweated bullets and spent a lot of time in a bookstore wondering what to buy to her bookworm of a mother.
I hadn’t read anything by Cornwell in 25 years, I think. I used to read her, Mary Higgins Clark and Elizabeth George in my teens and twenties. Then I got tired of them, even if Elizabeth George is the best writer of the three. What Came Before He Shot Her is truly remarkable. But back to Cornwell.
Kay Scarpetta is back in Alexandria, Virginia, as the chief of medical examiners and let’s say that CSI techniques have progressed since Adelia’s time in Cambridge.
The book opens with an excellent trial scene where Scarpetta is testifying and put under unfair pressure by the Commonweath’s Attorney while the judge doesn’t intervene. The said judge is Annie Chilton, her college friend and by the end of the day, Scarpetta learns that the judge’s sister Rachael has been murdered and that there was an attempted terrorist attack against the president of the USA.
Scarpetta goes on the crime scene and the CIA and FBI have already invested the place as the victim worked for the CIA. Scarpetta quickly understands that Rachael was killed by a microwave gun, a very rare and specific weapon. Later, another body is discovered in the neighborhood.
Follows a family investigation since Scarpetta does the autopsy, her niece is on the case as an FBI agent and so is her husband Benton, as a secret services agent. What a family, eh?
It’s good entertainment even if the pace of the book is a bit weird at times. The description of Scarpetta’s work at the morgue seemed to drag on while the denouement was rushed and not detailed enough. The characters sounded a bit formulaic and I wasn’t too interested in the office politics and antagonism.
It was published in October 2022 and I couldn’t help noticing that the war in Ukraine was already mentioned in the book. Eight months after it started it’s already in a published book. There was no time wasted in editing and polishing this book before its publication, it seems.
Anyway, this is another Beach & Public Transport book, one you read as you watch a CSI episode on TV.
The Oath by Arttu Tuominen (2018). Not available in English. French title: Le serment. Translated by Anne Colin du Terrail.
The Oath is truly the best book of the three. We’re in Pori, Finland in 2018. Jari Paloviita is the interim head of the local police and Rami Nieminen is murdered by Antti Mielonen during a party in a cabin in the woods. The victim was stabbed in the back and Antti ran out of the cabin and was found in the woods with his sweatshirt full of the victim’s blood. There is no doubt he did it.
Inspector Henrik Oksman and his partner Linda Toivonen know it. All they have to do is follow procedures to the letter to ensure there is no room for doubt about Antti’s guilt when the trial comes.
But Jari Paloviita used to go to school with Rami and Antti. Antti was his best friend while Rami bullied him relentlessly. He and Antti share a heavy baggage as the story unfolds and we discover what happened to them during the summer 1991. They were 13 at the time and dramatic events pushed them out of childhood.
To what length is Jari prepared to go to in the name of an old friendship?
I’d say you’ll have to read the book to find out but sadly, it’s not available in English. It baffles me since Nordic crime is such a hit in the English-speaking world. It’s a real pity because the plot is tight, the back and forth between 2018 and 1991 is gripping and full of grey areas. The characters’ personal life is troubled and I can see the beginning of a great series.
This is also my contribution to Annabel’s event Nordic FINDS.
It strikes me that I didn’t choose the three books I just wrote about. I got the Ariana Franklin with my Quais du Polar entry ticket, my daughter gave me the Cornwell for Christmas and the Tuominen came with my Kube subscription. The Tuominen is probably the only one I would have bought myself, so kudos for the Kube libraire who blind-picked it for me.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy – great literature.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (1987) French title: Le Dahlia noir. Translated by Frédéric Michalski.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy is probably one of the oldest books of my TBR. The mention inside says my roommate gave it to me in 1995. Ahem. I was reluctant to read it, not sure I’d get along with Ellroy. I only started to read noir fiction after I went online with Book Around the Corner and discovered Guy’s blog, His Futile Preoccupations. Guy’s a crime fiction and noir afficionado.
And now I wonder: what was I waiting for?
The Black Dahlia is loosely based upon a real case, the murder of Elizabeth Short that the press nicknamed the Black Dahlia. She was born in 1924 in Boston and was murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. Her case became famous because her body was horribly mutilated and it’s still unsolved.
Ellroy uses the Black Dahlia case as a basis to write a complex story with a striking picture of Los Angeles in the 1940s.
Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert is our narrator. He’s a former boxer and LAPD agent. He met Lee Blanchard, another LPAD agent when they covered the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. Both have a checkered past. Bucky is the son of a German immigrant who doesn’t hide his racist tendencies. Bucky’s patriotism was tested during WWII and he agreed to give his Japanese neighbors up to keep his job with the LAPD. He’s still reeling from it.
Lee Blanchard is famous for solving a hold-up case and shacking up with Kay, the criminal’s girlfriend after the trial. He still lives with her and this scandalous relationship cost him a promotion. His little sister was murdered when he was a teenager and he feels guilty of not protecting her enough.
As semi-famous former boxers, their bosses ask them to fight against each other to raise funds for the LAPD and promote a bill that would increase the wages of the LAPD agents. They get a transfer to the Warrants department. They agree to it. The fight is highly publicized, they are nicknamed Fire and Ice. Their bond is based upon camaraderie and respect but is also tainted by politics and tactics. The relationship between Bucky, Lee and Kay is central to Ellroy’s book.
As you imagine Bucky and Lee are detached to the police force dedicated to solving Betty Short’s murder. They get swallowed in the case and the book moves to a classic investigation.
Ellroy follows the thread of a murder investigation and shows corruption and power fights in the LAPD. He takes his characters to the shadiest neighborhoods of Los Angeles and takes pleasure in describing brothels, dives, underground gay and lesbian meeting points and seedy hotels. He also brings us to rich neighborhoods and uncovers the ugliness present behind closed doors and polished manners. Greed. Sex. Perversion. They invade every corner of the city and Ellroy exposes what’s behind the Hollywood dreamy facade.
He conveys the pulse of the city, its rapid growth and real estate moguls, the Hollywood hype and the sordid world of hopeless hope of aspiring actresses.
He takes us across the Mexican border to Tijuana in an even more violent and corrupted country. He describes perfectly the intricacies of office politics in the LAPD, the violence against suspects and police procedurals. Or lack thereof.
It’s well-oiled book that keeps the reader on edge. I wanted to know how Bucky would come out of it, if Ellroy would make his characters solve the murder while reading about Los Angeles in the 1940s. I was curious about Bucky, Lee and Kay’s trio. I wondered if the big LAPD machine would run over Bucky or if he’d make it alright.
A brilliant book but I’m glad I waited to read it. There will be more Ellroy in my future.
For the record, I also have the graphic novel of this book by Miles Hyman Matz and David Fincher and it’s a good companion book.
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams – it’s a question of hooks
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams. (1953) – “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive.”
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams was previously entitled Hell Hath No Fury. This noir thriller dates back to 1953 and I guess it was renamed after the film version of the book was released in 1990.
In French, it was translated by Bruno Martin for the Série noire collection in 1955. The French title was Je t’attends au tournant and I found a copy in a second-hand bookstore.
The original translation seems out of print which is good because it’s an abridged version. There’s no way to translate all the sentences of a 190 pages English book into a 185 pages French paperback, since the said French paperback is smaller than the English book and French takes more words than English to say the same thing. I checked a random paragraph and bingo, the original sentences are cleverly cut to keep the book under 200 pages as it was supposed to be read in one sitting on a train journey.
Lucky French readers, Gallmeister published a new translation by Laura Derajinski 2019 and kept the title Hot Spot. These different translations didn’t impact my reading though, since I read The Hot Spot in English.
Now, the book
I lighted a cigarette and smoked it out nervously, listening to the night sounds and thinking of the dangerous mess I was drifting further into all the time. I had twelve thousand dollars I couln’t touch, I was crazy about a girl who was in some kind of trouble she couldn’t tell me about, and I was getting more hopelessly fouled up every day with crazy Dolores Harshaw.
This is Harry Madox. He’s a twenty-eight drifter who comes to a small Texas town, finds a job as a car salesman and settles in a boarding house. He works for George Harshaw who also has a side-business in car loans to go with the dealership. Gloria Harper runs the loan office.
Harshaw is married to Dolores who seduces Harry for what he thinks is a simple hookup. She doesn’t see it that way and although she’s definitely not in love with him, she sinks her hook in him and wants him all to herself. He’s her ticket out of her boring marriage. But Harry falls for Gloria who has a lot of issues of her own. When Gloria and Harry start dating, it sends Dolores on the war path.
Besides the sex and love affairs, Harry put himself in a nice little mess of his own doing when he robbed the local bank.
Two events sparked this crazy idea: first, during a fire on Main Street, he noticed that all the people were focused on the fire and that the bank was left almost unattended and second, as Dolores asked him to help her move some boxes in an abandoned building near the bank, he noticed it was full of junk and that is was an incredible fire hazard. What if he set the building on fire, robbed the bank and made sure to be seen helping the firefighters?
That’s what he does it but the local sheriff is cleverer than he expected. He doesn’t buy it and intends to question him until he relents and spills the beans. He’s only released from custody because Dolores spontaneously lies and gives him an alibi. His relief is short-lived. Now she has him and she knows it.
Harry still thinks he can get out of it if he lays low but his feelings for Gloria get in the way. He feels protective of her and things get out of hand when he tries to help her with her own issues.
Harry is taken in a web of lies and crimes. Dolores is a skilled manipulator but she’s enabled by Harry’s actions. The robbery and his relationship with Gloria give her leverage. She’s poisonous but his actions leave him with his flesh exposed and she just sees where and how she can sink her hooks into him.
The Hot Spot is a masterpiece of noir fiction. All the right ingredients are there.
An unreliable narrator who would want us to forget he’s a bank robber. A beautiful young woman who’s not as innocent as she seems. A femme fatale who knows what she wants and how to get it. And the whole plot, clever and articulate as a Shakespearian tragedy is served by an excellent literary style. We are with Harry in this little Texas town. We imagine the heat, the town, the dealership, the cars and the characters in their 1950s outfits. We sweat with Harry and recoil from the violence and we see how events unfold in an implacable manner.
A must-read for all crime fiction lovers.
Have a look at Guy’s excellent review here.
Five crime fiction books, all different
Friendship Is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle (2018) French title: L’amitié est un cadeau à se faire. Translated by Simon Baril
This is my second book by William Boyle after The Lonely Witness and he’s definitely an author I want to keep reading.
Friendship… is set in Brooklyn, in the Bronx and upstate New York. It all starts when Rena Ruggiero, the widow of a mafia gangster, kicks her eighty years old neighbor and thinks that she killed him as he lays unresponsive on her floor. High on Viagra, he tried to rape her.
Rena takes his car and drives to the Bronx where she wants to stay with her estranged daughter Adrienne and rekindle her relationship with her granddaughter Lucia.
She arrives there just as Richie Schiavano decides to steal money from a mafia gang.
Rena and Lucia find shelter at Adrienne’s neighbor’s house. Lacey, ex-porn star known as Lucious Lacey, welcomes them in her home and they end up fleeing the Bronx with the mafia on their tail.
The book takes a delightful Thelma and Louise turn and the reader is in for a fantastic ride.
William Boyle has a knack for a crazy plot, for attaching characters and an fantastic sense of place. A wonderful discovery by Gallmeister.
Alabama 1963 by Ludovic Manchette & Christian Niemiec (2020). Not available in English.
This is a French crime fiction novel set in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, just before President Kennedy was assassinated and right in the middle of the Civil Right movement.
Girls are rapped and murdered. Bud Larkin, a white PI, former police officer, is volunteered to help a black family find out who killed their daughter. His former colleagues also hire him a black cleaning lady, Adela Cobb. In segregated Alabama, she’ll be an asset to Larkin as black people talk to her but not to him.
As other murders happen, Bud and Adela get more and more anxious to find out who’s behind these crimes. And if this adventure can help them sort out their lives, all the better.
I’m always a bit suspicious about books written by French writers and set in America, written as if they were American writers. This one was OK, and the fact that the two authors’ day job is to translate American TV series into French probably helps writing a convincing story. They know all the codes.
I had a good time reading it, I got attached to Adela and Bud.
As the Crow Flies by Craig Johnson (2012) French title: A vol d’oiseau. Translated by Sophie Aslanides.
This is the 8th volume of the Walt Longmire series. I read them in English now since the French paperbacks are no longer published by Gallmeister but by Pocket. The books aren’t as nice, so, the original on the kindle is better.
This time around, Caddy, Longmire’s daughter is getting married in two weeks on the Cheyenne reservation when Walt discovers that she no longer has a venue.
He’s on his way to visit another location with his friend Henry Standing Bear when they see a woman fall from a cliff and die. She had her six-month old baby in arms when she fell. The baby miraculously survived.
Walt Longmire will mentor the new chief of the Tribal Police, Lolo Long during this investigation. She’ll learn a few tricks, soften some hard edges and see how to navigate the tricky relationship with the FBI. Very useful skills if she wants to keep her job or stay alive while doing it.
As always, Craig Johnson delivers. The plot is well-drawn, a part of fun is introduced with Lolo Long’s blunders and the relationship between Walt and Caddy is lovely. This volume is set on the Cheyenne reservation and it rings true, at least to my French ears.
Craig Johnson doesn’t disappoint and I’m looking forward to reading the ninth book.
Sœurs de sang by Dominique Sylvain (1997, reviewed by the author in 2010). Not available in English
I’ve read several books by Dominique Sylvain. Kabuchiko, set in Japan, Les Infidèles and Passage du Désir set in Paris. The three books are different and Soeurs de sang is closer to Passage du Désir than to the other ones.
We’re in Paris. Louise Morvan is a PI who is hired by Ana Chomsky to find a former lover that she spotted as a character in a video game. Louise starts investigating, discovers that he’s Axel Langeais, one of the creators of the game.
It could stop here but Victoria Yee, the lead singer of the group Noir Vertige is murdered on Axel’s barge, in front of his sister Régine. Louise embarks on a murder investigation that will lead her to Berlin and Los Angeles and into the strange artistic world of the Victim Art.
I read this with pleasure, a novel set in a very peculiar milieu, the one of extreme art and I was curious to see how the story would unfold.
Ames animales by JR Dos Santos (2021). Not available in English.
This was one of our Book Club choices and it was a promising read.
It’s a Portuguese novel set in Lisbon. The main character is Tomas Noronha whose wife Maria Flor is involved with a charity that works on animal intelligence. When the director of this charity is murdered, she’s the last one to have seen him and is accused of murder.
Chapters alternate between the crime plot and flash backs where the militant and director is enlightening Maria Flor about the latest researches about animal intelligence. These lengthy explanations were too didactical for me, cut the flow of the crime investigation and I lost interest.
I abandoned the book. I don’t read crime fiction to read scientific lectures, there are radio podcasts for that. A missed opportunity.
I have also read The Hot Spot by Charles Williams but this one is so good that it deserves its own billet.
Crime fiction in August: Mexico, America, South Africa and New Zealand
Let’s have a tour of my August crime fiction travels. First, let’s go to Madrid.
Adiós Madrid by Paco Ignacio Taibo II (1993) French title: Adiós Madrid. Translated by René Solis
Paco Ignacio Taibo II is a Mexican crime fiction writer. I’ve already read Days of Combat featuring the PI Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. Adiós Madrid is the seventh or ninth book of the series.
This time, Belascoarán is sent on a mission to Madrid by his friend Justo Vasco, the assistant manager of the museum of anthropology in Mexico. He’s going all the way to Madrid to deliver Vasco’s threat. The Black Widow, “ex-rancheras singer, mistress of an ex-president of Mexico who had recently passed away, ex-icon of the Mexico nightlife and ex-landlord of the country.”, lives in Madrid.
Belascoarán has to tell her that if she tries to sell the plastron of Moctezuma, an antique that belongs to the anthropology museum, Vasco will leak all kinds of embarrassing information about her.
Belascoarán is happy to get a free trip to Madrid, the city where his parents grew up and it’s a bittersweet experience for him to confront the Madrid that his parents described to the actual and modern one. And then of course, things don’t go according to plan as far as the threat delivery is concerned.
Adiós Madrid is a very short book for crime fiction (102 pages in French) and it was good fun but nothing more. No need to rush for it.
After Madrid, it was time to fly to Washington DC and let George Pelecanos drive me through his hometown.
The Cut by George Pelecanos (2011) French title: Une balade dans la nuit. Translated by Elsa Maggion.
In The Cut, Spero Lucas, a former marine who was in Afghanistan, works as a non-licensed investigator for a lawyer, Tom Petersen. Spero’s job is to unearth useful clues that help Petersen during procedurals.
Spero starts on a case where he finds crucial clues that unable to bail Petersen’s client’s son out of jail. The thing is: Petersen’s client is Anwan Hawkins, head of a marijuana trafficking organization and currently in jail. Hawkins uses the “Fedex method”: send the drug via Fedex at the address of an unsuspecting citizen, follow up the delivery on internet, be on location at delivery time and intercept the parcel.
Now two parcels went missing and the loss amounts to 130 000 USD. For a 40% cut, Spero is ready to track down the missing parcels. And that will prove to be more dangerous than expected, even for an ex-marine.
Spero Lucas is a well-drawn character, we see him struggle with his military past and his father’s death. He comes from an unconventional tight-knit family with Greek roots and the personal side of the book was a nice addition to the crime plot.
My only drawback is Pelecanos’s style. You can see that he’s used to writing scenarios as it is very cinematographic. Lots of descriptions of driving the streets of Washington DC were hard to picture and didn’t bring much to the book. In my opinion, it could have been more literary. It was Good entertainment though.
Then, I traveled to South Africa to read my first Deon Meyer. He’s a writer I’d seen and heard at Quais du Polar and had wanted to read for a long time.
Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer (1998) French title: Les Soldats de l’aube.
Dead at Daybreak is, according to Goodreads, Matt Joubert book #1.5. This is a series I’m very tempted to read after this introduction to Meyer’s literary world.
Zatopek van Heerden is a former police officer, he’s adrift and when the book opens, he’s hungover in jail after fighting in a bar in Capetown. Like Spero Lucas in The Cut, he’s hired by a lawyer, Hope Beneke, to help her with her client Wilhelmina van As. Here’s the reason she hired van Heerden:
Johannes Jacobus Smit was fatally wounded with a large-calibre gun on 30 September last year during a burglary at his home in Moreletta Street, Durbanville. The entire contents of a walk-in safe are missing, including a will in which, it is alleged, he left all his possessions to his friend, Wilhelmina Johanna van As. If the will cannot be found, the late Mr Smit will have died intestate and his assets will eventually go to the state.’
It seems simple enough: find the will. Van Heerden will have to get out of his drunken funk, informally reconnect with his former colleagues, solve the case, get paid and move on. However, the case takes him to another affair that happened in 1983, during the time of the Apartheid and economic sanctions against South Africa.
Dead at Daybreak is a fantastic crime fiction book and it has it all. A riveting plot. Fascinating thoughts about South Africa, the change of regime and relationships between the black and white communities. Well-drawn characters.
The plot driven chapters are third person narrative, with the reader following the investigation. They alternate with chapters with first person narrative, where van Heerden writes about his life, from his childhood to the events that brought him to get into bar fights and drink too much. These chapters were captivating too. The ending of the book was both the closing of the investigation and closure for van Heerden.
Excellent book: highly recommended.
My next crime fiction book took me to New Zealand where I was happy to reconnect with Maori police officer Tito Ihaka.
Fallout by Paul Thomas. (2014) Not available in French. Published by Bitter Lemon Press.
Fallout is my second book by Paul Thomas as I’d already read and loved Death on Demand.
Fallout has a triple plot thread with interconnected stories. It starts with Finbar McGrail, the District Commander in Auckland who is on the verge of retirement. His first murder case in 1987 is still unsolved and he recently had a new lead. He asks Ihaka to look into it and see if he can find who murdered Polly Stenson at the posh Barton party in 1987.
Meanwhile, Ihaka’s former colleague Van Roon is hired as a non-licensed investigator to find Eddie Brightside. This man has been hiding abroad for years and he was seen in New Zealand.
On the side, Miriam Lovell, Ikaka’s ex-lover, contacts him regarding his father’s death, some twenty years ago. Lovell is writing her PhD thesis about work unions in New Zealand and as Ikaha’s father was a well-known unionist, she comes across breaking news: Jimmy Ihaka might not have died of a heart attack but could have been murdered. Ihaka decides to investigate his father’s death.
I loved Fallout as much as I loved Death on Demand. Ihaka is an incredible character. He’s a maverick police officer with a code of conduct of his own. He’s loud, crude but loyal. He’s either respected or despised and he’s not good with precinct politics. This is Ihaka, assessing a witness.
Gentle, thought Ihaka; sensitive; arty. Probably plays the guitar and writes songs about how hard it is being gentle, sensitive and arty in this fucked-up world.
Political correctness is not Ihaka’s strong suit and that’s why I enjoyed my time with him.
Fallout is a tour de force. I never felt lost between the three investigations, mixing up characters or stories. It was perfectly orchestrated, a fine-tuned mix of standard crime, personal matters and political issues as it branches out on the topic of New Zealand anti-nuclear stance in the 1980s. Fascinating stuff.
Excellent book: highly recommended.
So, that was my month of August with crime fiction. All in all, it was a good pick of books, various places and well-drawn characters and plots. I’m looking forward to reading more by Deon Meyer, so don’t hesitate to leave recommendations in the comments below.
All these books belong to my 20 Books of Summer challenge.
PS : Fallout is published by an indie publisher, Bitter Lemon Press, their books are available online and well, the more books they sell, the more chances we have that they bring us great crime fiction books.
Catching up on billets: six in one
I really really have a hard time keeping up with billets and blogging at the moment, so I’ll catch up on different books I’ve read and write mini-billets about them. Everything is fine, I’m just terribly busy.
I’ve been reading American literature again or books related to America. All were good, I’ve been lucky with my reading choices. They all deserve a full billet but I’m too knackered to tackle six billets at the moment.
The first one is a French book, set in Ellis Island, Those Who Leave by Jeanne Benameur 2019. (Original French title: Ceux qui partent.) We’re in 1910, in Ellis Island, New York.
Emilia Scarpa and her father Donato, Esther Agakian and Gabor are all candidatures to emigrate to America. Emilia and Donato are Italian and she wants to be free and be a painter. Esther is survivor of the Armenian genocide. Gabor is a Rom and is fleeing the pogroms. All aspire to start a new life, either to leave traumatic events back in Europe or to open to opportunities they wouldn’t have in their native country.
Andrew Jónsson, an American photograph also spends a lot of time at Ellis Island, recording the arrivals of new immigrants. His father emigrated from Iceland with his grand-mother when he was a child and Andrew chases his own history through the newcomers.
All the characters meet at Ellis Island and their lives intertwine for a while. Jeanne Benameur muses about leaving, about new beginnings. Can you start over or as the song says, “You don’t rebuild your life, you only go on”? What do “roots” mean? How to you survive a genocide? How are you linked to your lineage?
Jeanne Benameur has a lovely and poetic style. Her tone is smooth, contemplative and tries to convey the characters inner thoughts.
It was a good read but sometimes I felt she could have said the same in less pages.
Then I was in New York again with The Fire, Next Time by James Baldwin (1963). This non-fiction book is composed of Baldwin’s letter to his nephew James and an essay about being black in America.
The letter was very moving, one James giving advice to his namesake nephew. Words of wisdom and self-confidence.
As always, Baldwin is spot on, direct and unflinching. He’s intelligent, nuanced and never lets himself fall into the pitfall of simplification.
He explores the idea of violence and various schools of thought about the future of the black community in America. He’s not convinced by any extremist thinking.
There is no hatred in his words but a challenge issued to white people: the condition of black people will change only if they’re willing to acknowledge that they need to change.
Then I moved to Kansas, around the same time as The Fire, Next Time, with In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965) I read it in French (De sang froid) in the 1966 translation by Raymond Girard.
This translation needs to be updated, that’s for sure. It was done in a time where we were a lot less Americanized and the translation reflects this with comments about obvious American things or weird spelling. (“base-ball”, really?) I was intimidated by In Cold Blood and thought it would be best to read it in French but I think I could have read it in English.
Anyway. I’m not sure it’s necessary to remind you that In Cold Blood is about a true crime affair. The Clutter family, a well-loved family in the village of Holcomb, Kansas was savagely murdered without any reason. Capote reconstructs the crime, showing the murderers before and after their crime, including their time in jail and switching of point of view to picture the family and the KBI inspectors who work on the case.
It was a memorable time for many people and Capote’s various angles shows the trail of devastation and life-changing moment that such a crime entails for a broad cast of people.
I enjoyed it a lot more than expected and it was easy to read. The chapters cover the different moment of this terrible crime, with a bit of suspense. The writing is vivid, like a reportage and it’s well worth reading.
After Capote, I changed of scenery but remained with law representatives. I went to North Carolina, where Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash (2014) is set. It was my first novel by Ron Rash, as I had only read a collection of short stories before, Burning Bright.
In this novel, Les is 52, sheriff in a county in North Carolina. He’ll retire in three weeks, handing over his job to Jarvis Crowe. He has a burgeoning relationship with Becky, a park ranger. They both carry a heavy personal baggage.
Les has to handle two cases that represent the spectrum of country sheriff duties: on the one hand, he has to deal with Gerald who trespasses on his neighbor’s property and on the other hand he has a very precise intervention to close a meth lab, as drug is a major issue in this State.
Above the Waterfall is representative of books set in small towns America.
Like Longmire, the sheriff of the fictional Absaroka County, Les has to take into account the local history, the relationship between the parties and look the other way sometimes to preserve peace. They all have to live together anyway. Btw, this reminds me that I also read Hell Is Empty by Craig Johnson but I won’t write a billet about it as it’s not my favorite Longmire story. It felt like a long race in the cold, in the falling snow of the Rocky Mountains.
But let’s leave Wyoming behind and go back to Rash’s novel set in the Appalachians, where he lives.
His books are cousins to David Joy’s or Chris Offutt’s books. Should we call them the Appalachians School? They are in the same vein and as a reader, I think they give an accurate picture of their land. Rash is less violent than Joy and he’s also a poet. I know from attending his interview at Quais du Polar, that he reads his books aloud to ensure they ring well. Above the Waterfall has a very poetic side and I’m not sure I caught all the beauty of his descriptions of wilderness.
It was a story full of grey areas where what is right isn’t always legal and vice-versa. Life isn’t black and white and like with Baldwin, I appreciate that Rash doesn’t over simplify issues but turns his writing spotlight in different corners of this Appalachian county, near the Shenandoah National Park. He lets us see different point of views.
I still have another book by Rash on the shelf, Serena and I’m looking forward to it as I really think that Ron Rash is a talented writer.
Then I flew to Argentina and you may wonder how Thursday Nights Widows by Claudia Piñeiro (2005) belongs with a billet about America. Well, it does because it is set in a country, a gated community at 50 kilometers from Buenos Aires. This huge compound is modeled after its American counterparts and it’s a sort of Argentinean Wisteria Lane. Rich businessmen have their house there, they live in close quarters and their wives, who don’t work, have very few opportunities to spend time in real Argentina.
Everything is about status, not making waves and getting along with everyone. Buy a the end on the 1990s and early 2000s, a devastating economic crisis shatters Argentina and these couples’ carefully balanced life is at threat. Unemployment spreads at Covid speed. The husbands try to keep face, the wives are oblivious and everyone has dirty secrets that stay hidden (or not) behind closed doors.
Piñeiro excels at describing this microsociety and its unspoken rules. Their carefully assembled houses of cards is fragile and drama looms. We know from the start that a tragedy occurred and the author takes us to the genesis of it, coming back to recent events or to older ones with anecdotes that pinpoints the characters’ tempers.
I have read it in a French translation by Romain Magras. It is entitled Les Veuves du jeudi and I recommend it.
At my personal bingo of literary events, I ticket several boxes with these books. All but the Jeanne Benameur count for my 20 Books Of Summer Challenge. (Books 5 to 9) Thursday Nights Widow counts for Spanish and Portuguese Literature Month hosted by Stu.
Have you read any of these six books? What did you think about them?
Crazy me, I’ll do 20 Books of Summer again #20booksofsummer22
I’m crazy busy and yet, I plan on doing 20 Books of Summer again.
Cathy from 746Books is the mastermind behind this event. I could pick only 10 or 15 books but I wanted to have 20 books to choose from and then we’ll see how it goes.
I already have the books from my ongoing readalongs with my Book Club, my sister-in-law, my Proust Centenary event and my non-fiction challenge. That makes seven books.
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (USA)
- Thursday Night Widows by Claudia Pineiro (Argentina)
- The Survivors by Jane Harper (Australia)
- Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer (South Africa)
- Fall Out by Paul Thomas (New Zealand)
- Days of Reading by Marcel Proust (France)
- Proust by Samuel Beckett (Ireland)
In August, I’ll be travelling to the USA, going through Washington DC, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I’ve already read The Line That Held Us by David Joy and Country Dark by Chris Offutt. I love to read books about the place I’m visiting, so I’ll be reading:
- Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (Louisiana)
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (North Carolina)
- Serena by Ron Rash (North Carolina)
- Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash (North Carolina)
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (Southern Region)
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (Appalachians)
- The Cut by George Pelecanos (Washington DC)
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Southern Region)
That’s eight more books and some of them rather long. I also wanted to do Liz’s Larry McMurtry 2022 readalong as I’ve had Lonesome Dove on the shelf for a while. That’s two chunky books in a beautiful Gallmeister edition.
And then I’ve selected four novellas, to help me reach the 20 books with one-sitting reads:
- Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (France)
- A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi (Algeria)
- The Miracles of Life by Stefan Zweig (Austria)
- Adios Madrid by Pablo Ignacio Taibo II (Cuba)
I’m not sure I’ll make it but who doesn’t love a little challenge? I’m happy with my choices, a mix of countries, of crime, literary and non-fiction and of short and long books.
Have you read any of the books I picked? If yes, what shall I expect?
If you’re taking part to 20 Books of Summer too, leave the link to your post in the comment section, I love discovering what you’ll be up to.
Three crime fiction books from France – three very different rides
- The Wounded Wolves by Christophe Molmy (2015) Original French title: Les Loups blessés.
- Missing in Pukatapu by Patrice Guirao (2020) Original French title: Les disparus de Pukatapu.
- Little Rebel by Jérôme Leroy (2018) Original French title: La petite gauloise.
This week I’m taking you through three different parts of France with three different authors. Christophe Molmy takes us to Paris, Patrice Guirao to Tahiti and Jérôme Leroy to a suburban town in Province.
Let’s start with Paris and Les Loups blessés by Christophe Molmy (The Wounded Wolves).
Molmy is the chief of the BRI (Brigade de recherche et d’intervention), the Gang unit of the French police. In other words, he’s specialized in fighting against organized crime. Like Olivier Norek, he’s policeman and a writer.
The commissaire Renan Pessac, chief of the BRI, is exhausted by his work, the relationship with his hierarchy and working on the field. He’s recently divorced and feels rather lonely. He has a close but complex relationship with his informers, a mix between co-dependance and sometimes attraction, as one of them is a prostitute. He’s not in a good place professionally or personally and if someone offered him an out, I had the feeling he’d take it gladly.
On the other side of the law is Matteo Astolfi, a criminal, with a master degree in holdups, living on the run and running a criminal organization. Astolfi is getting older, his partner accepts less and less to live under false identities. They a have a son, he’s six and it’s getting more and more complicated to keep him out of a normal life. Astolfi wants to do a last job and stop his illegal activities. He doesn’t want to go to prison and he wants to start a life in the open somewhere.
Two petty criminals from a Parisian suburb, the brothers Belkiche decide to branch out of hashish trafficking and attack a post office. Their team included Doumé, Astolfi’s little brother. Pessac is on the case and this affair will make Astolifi’s and Pessac’s lives collide.
Les Loups blessés is a good read as we alternate between point of views and see what happens on the three sides of the affair: Pessac, Astolfi and the Belkiche brothers have their say. Pessac felt real, with a physical and mental fatigue weighing heavily on his shoulders. Astolfi sounded human, despite the killings and years of criminal activities.
Recommended to Corylus Books, they might want to translate it into English!
Now let’s go to Tahiti.
Les disparus de Pukatapu by Patrice Guirao (Missing in Pukatapu) is set on a very isolated atoll in Tahiti. The kind of atoll where a boat comes every four months for resupplying. *shudders* You’d better not forget the sugar on the grocery shopping list! Maema an Lilith, journalist and photograph landed in this remote atoll to write an article about the impact of global warming on the locals’s life. There are 26 inhabitants on the atoll and no children.
Things start to go wrong when Lilith discovers a dead hand on the beach, while she’s lying down under a coconut tree. Whose hand is this? Maema and Lilith start investigating and digging into the inhabitants’ secrets.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the ocean, a military basis is doing secret researches and their laboratory is threatened by a submarine volcanic eruption.
The reader follows what happens on the atoll, only to realize that the paradisiac setting does nothing to abate humans’ baser instincts. The passages on the mysterious (and nefarious) military basis felt like jumping from one subject to the other and didn’t mesh well with Maema and Lilith’s work.
I thought that Guirao was trying too hard to pack an investigation and raise awareness about Tahiti and the destruction brought by the French presence there. It was in Tahiti, in the Mururoa atoll that the French government did their nuclear tests, without caring much about the consequences on the local population.
Trouble in Paradise would be a good title for this book, I think, but I wasn’t convinced by the story or the construction of the plot. The sense of place wasn’t good enough for me, which is also what I’m looking for in that kind of book.
Les disparus de Pukatapu is not translated into English and let’s say it’s not translation tragedy.
Now, the next one, Little Rebel is available in English, thanks to Corylus Books. Yay!!
It’s only 141 pages long but what a ride! It draws an actual picture of a part of today’s France. It is set in an industrial town in the West of France, where the extreme right has won the city hall election.
The characters ring true and Leroy shows the implacable puzzle of various pieces that lead to a terrorist attack. What he describes feels horribly accurate and his tone based on a sharp irony and direct talk to the reader is very effective.
I don’t want to go into details about the characters or the plot because it would give too much away.
It is a social crime fiction book and the analysis is accurate. Several important pillars of our society are eaten by pests and they threaten its foundation. Political abandonment of working and middle classes. Racism and fear. School and the disenchantment of teachers. Boredom. Infiltration of suburbs by foreign extremists. Social networks and the endless possibility to spread hatred and fake news.
And things aren’t as straightforward as they seem.
You want to read about a France that doesn’t look like Provence, sun and lovely postcards? Read Little Rebel. You want to understand how the dreadful Marine Le Pen scored that well at the last presidential election? Read Little Rebel.
On top of a breathless ride on this side of France, you’ll help Corylus Book, an independent publisher who wishes to bring new voices to crime fiction in English. And, as you know, our fellow blogger Marina Sofia is part of this adventure.
Little Rebel: Highly recommended.
Three crime fiction books set in Africa
Adieu Oran by Ahmed Tiab (2019) (Adieu Oran)
Hunting Down the Shrew by Florent Couao-Zotti (2017) (La traque de la musaraigne)
The Head Chopper Case by Moussa Konaké. (2015) (L’affaire des coupeurs de tête.)
I’ve always loved to explore other countries through crime fiction. These books usually take you out of the bourgeois society and show you the dark side of a place, the one you won’t find in a tourist guide. I’m also more and more interested in reading Francophone literature, to see how French sounds in other countries. I’m not talking about Belgium or Switzerland here, their French is really close to the one from France, itt is more about French from Québec or Africa.
It wasn’t deliberate but I ended up reading three crime fiction books set in Africa in three weeks. All come from former French colonies, which explains why they are written in French.
Ahmed Tiab is an Algerian writer born in 1965. He lives in the South of France since 1990. Florent Couao-Zotti was born in Benin in 1965. He’s a writer and a journalist. Moussa Konaté (1951-2013) was a writer from Mali. These three books have first been released by independent publishers, Les Editions de l’Aube for Ahmed Tiab, Les Editions Les éditions Métailié for Moussa Konaté and Jigal Polar for Florent Couao-Zotti.
Now, the books!
Adieu Oran, as the title suggests, is set in Oran, a big city on the Mediterranean, west from Algiers. It features Tiab’s recurring character, the commissaire Kémal Fadil.
Adieu Oran is hard to sum up because the plot isn’t really straightforward. We have Chinese workers murdered in Oran and human trafficking. Fadil’s girlfriend Fatou is an emigrant from Niger and she works as a nurse for a non-profit organization in Oran. Along with other migrants, she’s kidnapped and sent to the South of Algeria to be sent back to her country.
I thought that the plot was a bit messy and we were following the murder of the Chinese and then left this case a bit behind to run after Fatou who was kidnapped. Note that, like in Yeruldelgger by Ian Manook, the crime involves Chinese businessmen who run business out of their country, import their own workers, work according to their own ways and have their ambassy meddling in the investigation, bypassing the local police.
Tiab delivers a scathing portrait of Algeria with corrupted and inept politicians. Nothing runs well and the population’s needs are never met, the country paralyzed by former military men whose resume is reduced to having fought against the French for the country’s independence. This act of glory is enough to maintain them in power and hush up any criticism.
Tiab also shows how the Islamists have set roots in the country, importing their vision of Islam from the Middle East. He sums up Algeria that way, in a pessimistic statement:
| Lorsque que la génération qui a fait la guerre sera éteinte, le pays entrera alors dans le XXIème siècle avec ses rejetons imprégnés d’une idéologie directement inspirée du Moyen Age. Bonjour la modernité ! | When the generation who has fought in the war will be dead, the country will enter into the 21st century with an offspring permeated with an ideology directly inspired by the Middle Ages. Hello modernity! |
(By the way, this use of “it’s the Middle Ages” is a very European-centered point of view because at the time, in some aspects, the Arabs were more modern that the Europeans.)
Adieu Oran also takes you to into the city’s streets where the past French colonization is still palpable with the streets’ names. Even the high school where Fadil went kept its French name. Coming from a country where the 1789 revolutionaries even changed the calendar, I’m surprised that the Algerians didn’t change the street names or the name of places right after the independence to erase all traces of the French occupation and show that they regained control on their land. For example, there’s still a Michelet market.
I discovered the issue of migrants in Algeria. I wonder why I was so surprised. How dumb of me: did I think that they arrived to the shores of the Mediterranean by magic? Of course, they had to cross other African countries to end up there and Algeria is one of them. We usually hear about Morocco because it’s close to the Spanish border or Tunisia, because of its border with Libya and its proximity to the Sicilian coasts. It never occurred to me that Algeria was a destination too.
Tiab describes the discrimination against migrants and the racism of the local population against black people, migrants or not. Some characters use the derogatory term of nigrou. He also comes back to the complicated relationship between France and Algeria since the independence, through two characters, a French colon who fought with the Algerians for their independence and remained in Algeria and a mysterious women hidden behind a veil, born from the rape of her mother by a French soldier.
Adieu Oran broaches too many topics at the same time to keep the story in a straight line and it is a book I found more interesting for its context and its characters than for its plot.
The two other books I read were more plot driven.
Hunting Down the Shrew by Florent Couao-Zotti is the story of a chase and a bad case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The book opens in a strip-club and jazz club in Porto-Novo, Benin. A Frenchman, Stéphane Néguirec has left his Brittany to settle in Porto-Novo. He’s about to leave the club with one of the dancers when she’s kidnapped on the street and he’s assaulted. His path will also cross Déborah’s, who is on the run. Stéphane accepts to hide her but they are soon attacked by criminals.
Déborah’s real name is Pamela and she left the neighboring Ghana after she participated to a hold-up that turned into a triple murder. She left with the money.
Her former partner in life and in crime, Ansah Ossey, aka Jesus Light, is the other survivor of the hold-up and he’s quite enraged that she left him and took the money. He’s after her too and we follow him on his road trip from Ghana to Benin to track her down. The novel is a double track race across Benin, Stéphane and Déborah on one hand and Jesus Light on the other hand. The reader discovers the country through the characters’ eyes.
Along the way, Stéphane, as a French, is seen as bait money by the Islamist rebels. They want to kidnap him to get a ransom and finance their war. The Islamist threat is present in this novel too, as it is in Tiab’s.
The plot was a bit confusing at times but I enjoyed the ride. Couao-Zotti has a wonderful voice, a French language that mixes the codes of Noir fiction and French from Africa.
The Head Chopper Case by Moussa Konaté is the lightest of the three books.
Set in Mali, It features Konaté’s recurring character, the commissaire Habib. The story is set in the city of Kita where several bodies of beheaded hobos are found. The local commissaire, Dembélé, is dumbfounded and doesn’t quite know where to start the investigation. They have the bodies but not their heads which complicates the identification of the victims.
A local pious man receives a out-of-the-world message about Kita being sin city and needing to atone for its sins. The souls of the ancestors are also seen up the mountain and the population, Dembélé included, is tempted to believe in an otherworldly intervention.
Commissaire Habib is more into earthly criminals and is sent from Bamako to his hometown to solve this case.
The Head Chopper Case pictures a Mali torn between traditions and modernity. Kita seems like a religious town, where the imam plays an important role, the one the Catholic church used to have in France too. Konaté describes Kita and its culture and how he and his second in command Sosso have to adapt their investigation methods to the local ways. According to the person they want to interrogate, they choose the straight police line or make a detour through polite conversation to make the person talk and not clam up in front of a policeman.
Konaté’s characters make frequent jokes about their ethnic origins. Kita is mostly of the Malinké ethnic group. The policemen Sosso and Dialo are Fulani. They throw goodhearted digs at each other but I couldn’t help wondering how this banter would turn out if the population was thoroughly manipulated by extremists.
The Head Chopper Case was written in 2015 and since then the civil war has blown up in Mali and violence seems out of control. Sadly.
So, what about these three books? I had a nice time with the three of them, they were armchair traveling. They took me to countries I’ve never been to and enriched my vision of the world.
Unfortunately, none of them are translated into English.
Book Around the Corner 