A crime novel that continues to puzzle
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students can only dream of. The A35 in question runs through north- eastern France between Strasbourg and Basel. One evening, at some point in the 1970s, a wealthy lawyer named Bertrand Barthelme is killed when his Mercedes goes off the road as he is driving home to the town of Saint- Louis. The death seems accidental. The real mystery is why Barthelme was on the road in the first place.
The main narrative consists of two separate and diverging investigations that find their way to different conclusions. Chief Inspector Gorski, the head of SaintLouis’s police force, pursues semi- official inquiries, hampered by the town’s obstructive bourgeoisie and by his own insecurities. Can Barthelme have had something to do with the brutal murder of a prostitute in Strasbourg earlier on the night of his own death? A condescending hotshot Strasbourg detective is convinced that he has.
Meanwhile, Barthelme’s teenaged son, Raymond, is blundering towards another set of answers. Reading Sartre’s The Age of Reason and gripped by an existential crisis, he turns detective in the neighbouring town of Mulhouse. He steals a dagger and becomes obsessed with a louche and dangerously attractive girl. The result is a crime novel with post- modern flourishes and without a tidy ending. The ghosts of Sartre and Simenon haunt its pages. The characters of Gorski and Raymond are beautifully observed. All this is topped and tailed by editorial notes in which Burnet appears as the editor of a posthumous novel by a French crime novelist, Raymond Brunet, who committed suicide in 1992. Burnet suggests that Brunet was in fact basing the novel on his own experiences — that he was Raymond. Oh, and by the way Brunet was also the notional ‘ author’ of Burnet’s first novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau. Confused by the echoes and anagrams? So am I. Not that it matters. This novel may not reach the Booker shortlist but it’s wry, intelligent and lot of fun.
By arrangement with the Spectator