San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Two new mystery novels feed fantasies about France
France has captured the imagination of wildly varied Englishspeaking writers, from Edith Wharton to James Baldwin and beyond. Martin Walker and Cara Black — born in Scotland and the United States, respectively — display their affection for French culture through mystery series that draw us in not just for the cheese and wine but also for the forensics and Christiestyle puzzles.
Walker’s popular detective Bruno (Benoît Courrèges) was born in the Perigord and, after serving in the military, returned to try policing; he is now chief for the entire Vézère Valley. Black’s private detective and security consultant Aimée Leduc is a native Parisienne, daughter of a disgraced policeman.
Both authors feel the drumbeat of France’s past, from colonialism to Vichy to Jacques Chirac. Leduc scooters around a city synonymous with romance and intrigue. Bruno drives his battered Jeep through one of the most history-rich regions on Earth, where cave walls portray aurochs and the woolly mammoth.
Black has studied Buddhism in India, taught English in Japan and visits Paris at least twice a year with notebook in hand to explore and to interview les flics about crime and procedure. The 20th Aimée Leduc novel, “Murder in the Porte de Versailles,” is taut, vivid, smart, rich in humanity and addictive momentum.
It is set in 2001, only a couple of months after 9/11, and police and international authorities are on high alert. A friend of Aimée’s is found unconscious in an explosion’s rubble, with evidence indicating he may have set the bomb. Black races ahead, in alternating scenes with Leduc and crooked cops and everyday people caught beyond their depth.
Walker came late to fiction, after a long and successful career as a journalist — a quarter-century in Moscow as Russian bureau chief for the Guardian, editor-inchief at UPI, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, author of books on topics such as the Cold War and the Clinton presidency.
After he and his wife bought a house in France, Walker was inspired by a real-life local policeman to create
Bruno. Both he and Black conjure an international background — corporate greed, terrorism, environmental threats — as vividly as they sketch a vineyard or an alley.
The strangest thing about Walker’s series is how often Bruno starts out like Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry and winds up like James Bond — with a dash of Anthony Bourdain. The running description on each Bruno novel is about landscape, not characters: “A Mystery of the French Countryside.” Walker has altered the subtitle for this collection to “And Other Stories of the French Countryside,” because these are not detective stories, although they are about a detective.
If you are new to Walker’s series, don’t start with “Bruno’s Challenge.” Begin with “Bruno, Chief of Police” (2009). You don’t have to read the novels in order, but doing so will let you witness how character relationships grow and change.