Review of Philippe Georget's Autumn, All the Cats Return

Autumn, All the Cats Return, by Philippe Georget (Europa Editions, 2014)

My favorite mysteries are the ones that expose me to a different world. That's something I get with the Gilles Sebag series, which began with Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored (see review here), and is followed up by Autumn, All the Cats Return. Sebag is a homicide inspector in Perpignan, in France's Mediterranean south, just across the Pyrenées from Spain. Perpignan is a center of the Catalan region and the reader has the pleasure of being exposed to both French and Catalan language, food and culture.

In this new book, the reader's cultural and historical horizons are broadened even further by the book's main plot, which is the murderous targeting of Perpignan residents who, back in the 1960s, were Pieds-Noirs, French residents of Algeria, during the bloody fight for independence.

French President Charles de Gaulle reached a cease-fire agreement with the Algerian independence forces, which outraged a rogue group of French army officers, who formed a guerrilla force called the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS. The OAS brutally attacked their opponents, hoping to terrorize them into acquiescence with continued French rule. Despite the appalling numbers they killed, they were unsuccessful and most Algerian residents with French ties fled to France.

Corpses in the streets were commonplace
during the Algerian war for independence

Now, when an old man is discovered executed in his Perpignan apartment, with "OAS" painted on his door, Gilles Sebag and the rest of the squad soon figure out that despite the decades that have passed since Algeria gained its independence, someone is targeting old OAS fighters. After all this time, they have tough challenges to identify potential new victims and to figure out who the murderer could be.

At the same time, Sebag is anxious to help his grieving teenage daughter by conducting an unofficial investigation of the death of her school friend, who was on his scooter when he was struck by a delivery van. The cop assigned to the investigation isn't known for his work ethic, and Gilles wants to make sure his daughter and the dead boy's family know exactly what happened.

Perpignan

If you haven't read the first Gilles Sebag, that's OK. There is not much that happens in the first book you need to know to enjoy the second. There is a running theme from the first book that continues in this book about Sebag's fear that his beloved wife had an affair, but you don't really miss anything on that plot element if you haven't read the first book.

To appreciate this series, I think you need to have a strong interest in reading books set in unfamiliar locales. You must also enjoy a long book with a deliberate pace and an often melancholy tone. The book includes the Victor Hugo quotation "Melancholy is the happiness of feeling sad," and that's an apt comment on the book's own style.

Review of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad

The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette

I just finished a real binge of history reading and am finally back to mysteries. My first mystery read in about a month was a very forgettable old Golden Age mystery. The less said about that the better.

But then it was on to Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad. Manchette, who died in 1995 when he was only in his early 50s, was said to have saved French crime fiction from the then-dominant fusty and formulaic police procedurals. Manchette's style is spare, violent noir.

I shouldn't like Manchette; I'm addicted to characters, but Manchette's characters are stripped down, serving a plot that rushes on as fast and devastating as a bullet. Several of Manchette's books have been made into graphic novels because the graphic novel style meshes so well with Manchette's stories. Regardless of whether I should like them, I do like Manchette's books, very much. Unfortunately, not all have (yet) been translated into English.

All of Manchette's books that are available in English are about contract killers. In Three to Kill, Georges Gerfaut, a company executive with a dull work and family life, witnesses a murder and is then pursued by the assassins. Georges decides to turn the tables on them––and his life. In The Prone Gunman, Martin Terrier is a hired gun who's had enough. He wants to retire, go back home with his savings and marry his old love. Be careful what you wish for.

I read Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman years ago. I was excited to see that New York Review Books was coming out with The Mad and the Bad (2014; translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith). This was one of Manchette's earliest novels, and is doesn't have quite the spare, searing style of the later novels, but it'll do.

Julie is a young woman who's been living in a country estate home for the mentally ill for the last five years. As the novel opens, a limo comes up the long drive to the estate, and the redheaded Michael Hartog emerges. He's come to pick up Julie and take her to London, where she will be the latest in a line of nannies for Hartog's young orphaned nephew, Peter.

Why in the world would Hartog hire Julie? It's not a mystery. We quickly learn that Hartog has hired an English hitman, Thompson, to kill Peter and Julie, and make it look like an insane Julie has done the deeds. Why Hartog wants to do this is not explained; I suppose it must be because Hartog's vast wealth all comes from Peter's parents, who were killed in an accident, and Hartog doesn't want Peter to get any of it.

Manchette doesn't explain the "why" of the plot because he only has 163 pages to get right into some of the wildest, goriest, and just flat-out crazy action ever in a thriller. Thompson seems an odd choice for a contract killer. He is practically crippled by a bleeding ulcer and seems at least a soupçon more unhinged than Julie. He has also hired a pair of colleagues whom no discerning contract killer would want as associates. But it's all grist for this hallucinogenic swirl of violence.

Jean-Patrick Manchette

The Mad and the Bad isn't as good as either Three to Kill or The Prone Gunman, but it was a wild ride and nothing like anything else I've read this year––or expect to read anytime soon.

I want to mention one other thing about this NYRB edition of The Mad and the Bad, and that is its introduction by crime writer James Sallis, who is probably best known for his Lew Griffin series. This introduction reminded me of a story from college that a classmate told me. He was in a literature class, with the students and teacher in an intense discussion of the symbolism and deep meaning of Moby Dick. But then one guy, Mike, commented that he thought it was just a simple sea story. That probably sounds like a complete non sequitur, but stay with me.

In the introduction, Sallis writes:

Manchette's profoundly leftist, distinctly European stance may be something of a problem for American readers. Like many of his generation, Manchette was influenced by the Situationist Guy Debord, whose theories, elaborated in The Society of the Spectacle, were everywhere during France's 1968 insurrections. Situationists held that capitalism's overweening successes came only at the expense of increased alienation, social dysfunction, and a general degradation of daily life; that the acquisition, exchange, and consumption of commodities had forcefully supplanted direct experience, creating a kind of life by proxy; and that liberation might be found in fashioning moments that reawakened authentic desires, a sense of adventure, a ransom from dailiness.

And further:

For Manchette the world is a giant marketplace in which gangs of thugs––be they leftist, reactionary, terrorist, police, or politicians––compete relentlessly; one in which tiny groups of individuals, "torn to pieces by the enemy and sodomized by [their] own leaders," stay afloat by clinging to the flotsam. In his work he alludes to and parodies literary writers such as Baudelaire and Stendhal, juxtaposes the vulgar and the precious, enjambs depictions of quotidian life against scenes of such extreme and often implicit violence as to call into question all the myriad fictions of bourgeois, accepted existence.

Well, alrighty then. I'm glad I only skimmed Sallis's intro before diving into the book, or I might have been too intimidated, thinking that I was going to be challenged by a revolutionary political and literary manifesto. Instead, I was like Mike and Moby Dick. He read a simple sea story and I read a graphic noir thriller. I didn't experience the levels of meaning Sallis did, but this bourgeois got all I wanted from the book.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Halloween!

Review of Robert Harris's An Officer and a Spy

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris

I knew the basics of the Dreyfus Affair, but what I didn't know is that the most interesting parts of the story happen when Captain Albert Dreyfus is offstage. First off, I should say that although An Officer and a Spy (Knopf, January 2014) is classified as fiction, author Robert Harris tells us that his goal is to use the techniques of a novel to retell the true story of the Dreyfus Affair. The characters and the events are real.

The central figure in this dramatic story is Colonel Georges Picquart. As someone who had become acquainted with Dreyfus some years earlier, when Dreyfus was a young officer training at the military college where Picquart taught, Picquart was present at Dreyfus's October 1894 arrest by the army on charges of passing secret military information to German agents. Picquart had no trouble believing in Dreyfus's guilt, in part because Picquart was an anti-Semite, as most soldiers were, unfortunately.

Dreyfus was convicted a few months later and sentenced to life imprisonment in terrible conditions on Devil's Island, 8,000 miles from France. He left behind a young wife, two small children and other family members who were determined to use the family's considerable wealth to exonerate Dreyfus.

None of this was of any particular interest to Picquart, until he was assigned, shortly after Dreyfus's conviction, to become the chief of the military's secret intelligence bureau, called the "Statistical Section." Almost by accident, Picquart soon discovered that the evidence against Dreyfus was almost nonexistent, but that there was good evidence that the real traitor was a womanizer, gambler and cheat, Major Walsin Esterhazy.

This is the set-up to what becomes a story that would be too unbelievable as an original piece of fiction. But it's only too plausible today, when we've become jaded by seeing how, all over the world, political, military, religious forces and their associates often place their own institutional interests above quaint concepts like truth, honor and justice. Dreyfus, Picquart and other individuals were just pawns in a chess game for the various institutions' visions of the future of France and its military. But chess game is putting it too politely. This was a game of double-dealing, dirty tricks, and possibly even murder.

The late 19th century was a time of ferment in France. The French Republic was in its infancy and besieged by monarchists, the Catholic Church and the military on one side, and socialists and anti-clericalists on the other. The Army, having suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, was rigid, hidebound and reactionary. The warring sides seized on the Dreyfus Affair to carry their messages, inciting a press war, whipping up the populace to riotous demonstrations and bringing the country to the brink of civil war.

Robert Harris, probably best known for his masterful novel of alternate history, Fatherland, has brought history vividly to life here. He slowly and deliberately establishes his story, but by about halfway through, events are rolling forward like a steam engine at peak running speed. Even if you already know exactly how the historical events unfolded, I think you'll find it as hard as I did to put the book down.

Harris's character portrait of Picquart paints him as more attractive than he probably was in real life. Harris doesn't make him an out-and-out hero, but he underplays Picquart's anti-Semitism as much as possible. He emphasizes that Picquart is an anti-clerical. I'm not at all sure there is much evidence for Picquart's anti-clericalism, but it helps illustrate the larger forces at work behind the Dreyfus case. And, although we don't get inside Picquart's heart and mind deeply, Harris so well describes the effect of him on the endless inquiries, trials and re-trials: "I am the founder of the school of Dreyfus studies: its leading scholar, its star professor--there is nothing I can be asked about my specialist field that I do not know: every letter and telegram, every personality, every forgery, every lie."

Harris also makes several of the Army officers almost comic-opera villains, especially Major Armand Mercier du Paty de Clam. Who knows, though; that may be accurate. Mercier du Paty de Clam (amazing name, isn't it?) was the officer principally responsible for identifying the officer who was passing secrets to the Germans. His choice of Dreyfus as the culprit seems to have been motivated by little more than Mercier du Paty de Clam's rabid anti-Semitism. And the apple didn't fall far from the tree. Mercier du Paty de Clam's son, Charles Armand Auguste Ferdinand Mercier du Paty de Clam, became Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government during World War II.

I wish Harris could have worked in more detail about the political ferment behind the events described in the book, but I recognize what a challenge that would have been. Despite not having that stronger historical foundation, and some possible oversimplification of the characters, this was a completely riveting read. It's the kind of book that will stay in my mind for hours or days to come.

Springtime with Bruno: A Review of Martin Walker's The Resistance Man

The Resistance Man by Martin Walker

Ahhh, Dordogne on a spring morning, and Bruno Courrèges, Chief of Police in the picturesque village of St. Denis, is trying to teach his basset hound puppy that the chickens and ducks on his modest farm are neither food nor toys. While Balzac may be the most intelligent dog Bruno has ever known and can already sniff out truffles, his prey-seeking behavior still needs a lot of work.

Bruno's morning is interrupted by a phone call from Father Sentout, who has spent the night at the bedside of a dying man, a hero of the Resistance. Loic Murcoing had died clutching a beautiful antique banknote. Bruno has never seen its like, but the priest immediately recognized it as one from the daring train robbery at nearby Neuvic during World War II, when the men of the Resistance relieved their German occupiers of hundreds of millions of francs. To this day, it remains the greatest unsolved train robbery in history.

In Neuvic, according to the London Telegraph:

"No plaque recalls that right here, on July 26 1944, about 100 Resistance men pulled off the train heist of the 20th century, bagging the equivalent of £230 million [about $750 million in today's money] ... The train was ambushed at Neuvic at 7.38pm. By 8.15, two trucks carrying 150 sacks of money were making for a Resistance HQ in the forest near Cendrieux, 30 miles away. Official reports claimed the money was used legitimately. Historians and locals know better. Perhaps £50 million, perhaps more, evaporated. Political parties took handfuls and so did individuals."

(If you have ever thought, as I have, that some of the murders in the Bruno books seem unnecessarily violent, you might want to click on that link to the complete Telegraph article. There are some extremely tough people in this sleepy bucolic region, and they have very long memories––and knives.)

While Bruno is making arrangements for the appropriate funeral of a Resistance hero, he is notified of the break-in and theft of many valuable antiques in the chateau of a retired Englishman. This is the third such crime this month, but so far the police have no clue to the obviously professional criminals. This time, though, they have misjudged their target. Jack Crimson, the owner, is only recently retired from one of Her British Majesty's secret services. When another Englishman, an international antiques dealer, is found dead with his head battered almost beyond recognition, Bruno calls in the Police Nationale in the persons of Isabelle, Bruno's onetime lover, and her boss, J. J. Things are a little awkward for Bruno when Pamela, his current lover, returns from Scotland to find that Isabelle has returned, even temporarily.

While most of the Bruno mysteries include obscure bits of history and current politics, this one has a larger than usual and slightly bewildering number of characters and sub-plots. Bruno solves his current crimes and a long-ago one handily, but the true mystery of the train robbery and the missing millions remains, hélas, unsolved.

Of at least equal importance to the crimes and their resolutions in this series are the author's exquisite descriptions of the food and the meals, the quirky cantankerous residents and the evocative scents of fine cheeses and flowers that infuse all of these books. They keep me first in line, thrilled to read each new one as it comes out and sorry to have it end. It is a perfect way to enjoy a wonderful imaginary vacation in this seemingly endless winter as snow and sleet storms chase each other across the country.

Note: I received a free review copy of The Resistance Man, which will be released by Knopf on February 25, 2014.

Discovering Daniel Pennac

Ooh la la, translations of wonderful French books are popping up more and more and, as Sister Mary pointed out on Monday, they can't be published quickly enough! I can't even recall when or how it was that I recently sighted a series and author that piqued my interest. The author is ex-school teacher Daniel Pennac. When I checked him out and found that he was born in Casablanca, traveled extensively and had varied careers from cab driver to woodcutter, I was hooked. It took me a while to get a copy of his first book, The Scapegoat. On Amazon US, it costs a fortune ($83 new, $33 used!) but I finally prevailed. I am very glad I did.

It’s not that you won or lost-
But where you placed the blame
Misquote of Henry Grant, sportswriter

Benjamin Malaussène works at a retail giant emporium known as The Store. His official title is Quality Controller, but his daily grind consists of taking the flack for everything that goes wrong with any item purchased at the store. He has turned his work into the fine art of convincing irate customers that no matter how bad an experience a shopper may have had with their faulty purchases, there is always someone suffering even more. Usually, this is Benjamin himself and the disgruntled complainers often leave apologizing for any inconvenience they may have caused.

Belleville

Although Benjamin detests his competence as official scapegoat, he needs the job because he is taking care of four of his siblings left behind by their fly-by-night mother, each of whom has very endearing qualities. But, while at work, he has had the misfortune of being close to where several apparent terrorist bombs have detonated, causing minimal damage but killing a series of old people who are an assortment of World War II survivors.

It is not long before the fickle finger of fate seems to be pointed directly at Benjamin, since he was in close proximity to all the explosions. However, there are other things of more importance on Benjamin's mind, since he and Julie, an investigative reporter, have begun to dig up an even deeper mystery that might be more sordid and foul than anyone expects.

Daniel Pennac

The Scapegoat (translated from the French by Ian Monk, Harvill Press, 1998) is the first of Daniel Pennac's Belleville Quartet, written around Benjamin Malaussène, the professional scapegoat. It takes place in a neighborhood in Paris that was once a working-class district. Today, Belleville is a colorful, multi-ethnic neighborhood that has not changed a great deal because Belleville was ignored, perhaps spared, during much of the architectural modernization efforts of the 60s and 70s. Belleville is as much a character in Pennac's stories as are the unusual personalities who populate his quartet. Pennac wrote these books in the late 1980s and it was a decade later that they were translated and published in the UK.

These books have acquired somewhat of a cult status in Europe. They seem to be surfacing so much later in the US perhaps because, as some critics suggest, Americans don't appreciate the very British tenor of the translations. I had no problems with them.

The strength of this first book lies more with Pennac's fantastic imagination than with the mystery. The plot and the conclusion are good, but most of the fun is in what happens around them. And this book is fun. Pennac is a master at wordplay and I always appreciate that.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
Somehow this is all going to be my fault.
Misquote from Sir Walter Scott

In the next of the series, The Fairy Gunmother, Benjamin is now working in the capacity of official Literary Director (unofficial scapegoat) for Vendetta Press. He has taken a prolonged leave of absence because there have been changes in his life, as well as in Belleville. The neighborhood is in an uproar because more than a half-dozen elderly grannies have been found with their wrinkled throats slit. And then, on a cold winter's night when police Inspector Vanini is hanging out on a street corner looking for suspicious anti-ancients, he spies an elderly lady beginning to slip on a sheet of black ice:

Then the old dear's shawl suddenly spread out, like a bat taking off, and everything came to a standstill. She'd lost her balance. Then she got it back again. The disappointed blond [Vanini] cursed between his teeth. Watching people fall flat on their faces always made him laugh. That was one of the nasty things about this blond head. Though it looked as neat and clean as can be from the outside, with its dense, evenly barbered crewcut. But its owner didn't like oldsters much. He found them a bit disgusting.

But then the tables are turned and the old lady, suspecting a mugging as Vanini crept up on her, turned and fired on him point blank. She was a dead shot. Of course, there are no witnesses––or at least ones who will talk––so the situation in the streets becomes very tense. It seems that the grannies are arming themselves.

Into this edgy situation, along with a generous helping of suspects, full-fledged criminals, and heavy-handed cops, stumble Benjamin Malaussène and his journalist love, Julie. Julie has been working on a case involving a new spate of drug addictions. This time, the victims are all among the wrinklies. They are ideal targets for the dealers, because they are the most vulnerable. They are weak, feeble, tired, sick, lonely and, many times, alone. Add to this, they have some money from their pensions.

Julie has been rescuing some of these desperate oldsters and is hiding them at the Malaussène home because she fears they are in danger. Benjamin and his family of siblings and epileptic dog incorporate four old men as grandfathers and are nursing them back to health. Julie herself has not been seen for a while. She is hunting for the evil that lurks in the hearts of some powerful men, and Benjamin fears for her safety. The problem is Benjamin himself seems to be in the police's spotlight as an ideal murderer and drug dealer. Is he a saint or a sinner?

This story is filled with fascinating characters into whom Pennac breathes the spark of life. There is the Pastor, who is a policeman who can get anyone to confess his crimes with his secret technique. And there is Widow Ho, an elderly Vietnamese woman who tries and tries to get attacked and robbed, but she has more protectors that she can count. She is a lot more than any one thinks she is.

Benjamin's siblings are also fleshed out and seem very real. The underlying themes of renovation of aging neighborhoods, racism and the care of the elderly play a role in the plot, and while there are many episodes of absurdity, the story's message is deadly serious.

The story meanders a bit after the exciting beginning, but then my imagination was captured and I was on the edge of my seat for a very suspenseful dénouement. Nonetheless, I found a great deal of humor in the book which is always a plus.

Third in the series is Write to Kill, which I hope to read as soon as the postman can bring it. There are not any Pennac books in my local library. I hope this omission will be rectified.

A Very French Cinderella Story: Review of Katherine Pancol's The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles

The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles by Katherine Pancol

I took a break from mysteries with an entertaining book I think you might enjoy. I'll confess, it's probably classifiable as "chick lit," but since it's French, maybe we can think of it as chic lit.

The cheerful colors of the cover make it perfect for these cold days

Katherine Pancol's "Joséphine" trilogy sold like Paris street-vendor crèpes in France, and now the first of the three books has been translated into English. The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles introduces us to ugly duckling Joséphine Cortès, who has always been treated dismissively by her snobbish and stylish mother, Henriette, and by her sister, chic society wife, Iris.

Joséphine is a poorly-paid history researcher trying to support her family, including her two daughters, Zoé and Hortense. Her husband, Antoine, had been a high-flying executive until he was laid off after his company was acquired by an American firm. Now he's thinks he's too good to take a normal job, and after a year of unemployment, making ends meet is getting trés difficile. After Joséphine discovers Antoine's been having an affair with a hairdresser, she boots him out and he leaves with the mistress, Mylène, to manage an African crocodile farm.

Joséphine is really in the soup now. Not just financially, but with the girls. Zoé is a sweetheart, but the barely-into-her-teens Hortense is your worst nightmare of a daughter. She's spiteful and dismissive to her mother, dresses in revealing clothes and, now that puberty has hit, she uses her looks to entice grown men––the kind with fast cars and money to spend on her––into her web.

The answer––at least to the financial problems––comes out of left field. Iris, a sharp-elbowed competitor among Parisian ladies who lunch, has been feeling like the spotlight isn't highlighting her enough, so she announces to her set that she's writing a historical novel. The spotlight swivels to her, alright, but it's all little too hot with expectation when a publisher acquaintance expresses keen interest. Iris's brainstorm solution is for Joséphine to use her 12th-century historical knowledge to write the novel, which will be credited to Iris, and Iris will slip the proceeds to Joséphine.

It's a workable plan until the novel becomes a runaway success and word of the book's real provenance starts to leak out. This description makes it sound like a straightforward story, but there is a huge cast of supporting characters who provide their own subplots, like Joséphine's stepfather, Marcel, who runs a successful home goods business and takes refuge from his ice queen wife, Henriette, with his voluptuous and warm-hearted secretary; Joséphine's neighbor and friend Shirley, who has a mysterious past in England; Hortense and her cold-blooded tactics; Antoine and Mylène's adventures on the crocodile farm; and nearly a dozen others. Even Joséphine's novel's heroine, Florine, is a character in this book––and one with a life that would put any soap opera to shame.

When I picked up this book, I was a little nervous about Joséphine's character, because downtrodden characters in books are often so passive that I want to shake them and tell them to grow a backbone. But Joséphine isn't like that. She does stands up for herself, at least verbally, and has some very choice words for both Antoine and her mother. I cheered for her all through the book, and looked forward to seeing the meanies get their comeuppance.

This is a fast-paced, funny and poignant story and, as with the best stories, I couldn't wait to find out what happens next. There were a couple of weak points, like young contemporary children being interested in Marlon Brando and John Lennon, and one subplot that strains credulity, but these were easy to forgive.

The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles (translated from the French by William Rodarmor and Helen Dickinson, Penguin, 2013) is perfect for a movie. The Cinderella-ish plot is tailor-made for the screen. Of course, if Hollywood gets to it, Joséphine will be played by somebody like Julia Ormond and you'll only know she's an ugly duckling because she won't be wearing eyeliner or Hermès scarves. But I can live with that.

I wonder how long it will take before we see English translations of the other two books in the trilogy. The second is called La Valse Lente des Tortues (The Slow Waltz of Turtles) and involves a serial killer striking Joséphine's neighborhood, while the third, Les Écureuils de Central Park Sont Tristes le Lundi (Central Park's Squirrels Are Sad on Mondays), has Joséphine battling writer's block until she finds a 1960s diary about a young man who is mesmerized by Cary Grant when Grant is in Paris filming Charade with Audrey Hepburn. I'll look forward to reading these, which have also been huge bestsellers in France. Not to mention that they sound almost like crime fiction, not just chick/chic lit.


















Note: Versions of this review may appear on other reviewing sites, such as Amazon and goodreads, under my usernames there.

Mesmerism and Murder: Review of Steven Levingston's Little Demon in the City of Light

Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris by Steven Levingston

In the late 18th century, a German physician named Franz Mesmer used what he initially called "animal magnetism" to hypnotize subjects in order, presumably, to cure their physical and emotional ills.Throughout the following century, hypnotism spread like wildfire through the clinics and drawing rooms of fashionable Europe and North America; part parlor game, part pure charlatanism, and part science. According to the literature of the period, quite ordinary people could easily learn the technique and practice it on their friends, to the amazement and occasional embarrassment of their subjects.

By the 1880s, there were two major reputable schools of thought on the topic. In Paris, the famous neurologist Jenan-Martin Charcot, whose students included the young Sigmund Freud, associated the ability to be hypnotized with hysteria, a mental instability he observed and treated particularly in women. He did not believe, however, that anyone could be coerced to extreme or immoral behavior under hypnotism. Jules Liégeois of the Nancy school had experimented extensively with hypnotism and firmly believed that the personal will of the subject could be completely submerged and directed by the hypnotist. While this view offered startling unpleasant perspectives to religions and the legal system, it had been tested in court only once. In 1879, a dentist had been convicted of rape upon a hypnotized patient, whose helplessness and lack of free will was accepted by the court.

The Belle Epoque period in France paralleled the Gilded Age in the United States, and was every bit as garish. Painters, playwrights, and scientists were producing new sensations every day, even as the seedy, sexy Victorian period grudgingly yielded to the more refined Edwardian Age. In 1889, Paris hosted the largest exhibition ever produced. Mr. Eiffel's marvelous tower (the tallest structure in the world) loomed over the Exhibition and the vast glass Hall of Machines was over four football fields in length.

Into this Parisian stew of lavish sensationalism arrived young Gabrielle Bompard, fleeing from an unhappy home. Her mother had died when she was only five, and her governess was installed in her father's bed even before her mother was buried. Gabrielle had been sent away; first to live with an uncle, then to a succession of convent schools, from all of which she was sent home in disgrace. Neglected, undisciplined, attractive and sexually mature, she was ripe for trouble.

In Paris, she soon ran out of money and became the mistress of businessman and con man Michael Eyraud. Despite his wife and children at home, Eyraud proudly escorted his new young mistress about town. Being very easily hypnotized, Gabrielle provided a reliable bit of amusement in the salons of the jaded city. When Eyraud lost his job for embezzling funds, the pair needed cash, and quickly. Whose idea it was to entrap and rob their wealthy acquaintance Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé is not clear, but on the evening of July 26, 1889, Gabrielle invited Gouffé to visit her rooms. She and Eyraud had laid their plans carefully; installing a pulley to hang their victim and purchasing a large trunk in London to hold the body. But the pulley came loose, and Eyraud was forced to strangle their victim, who the couple had assumed to be carrying a large sum of money. Afterwards, the couple loaded Gouffé's body into a large trunk that they had shipped with them when they fled the city. They dumped the body in a river, and broke up and discarded the trunk farther downstream before hiding out temporarily with Eyraud's brother in Marseille.

It took months and a second autopsy before the stinking corpse pulled from the river was positively identified as Gouffé's. Newly appointed Sûreté chief Marie-François Goron and his staff pursued the criminals for many months over three continents, always barely missing them, before Gabrielle turned up at the Sûreté with her new wealthy lover––another of Eyraud's intended victims. Gabrielle claimed that she had been hypnotized by Eyraud and forced to aid him in the crime. Eyraud was finally captured in Cuba, and brought home to face trial.

The trial was an international sensation, and the French system of justice quite an eye-opener to me. The judge was unabashedly biased in his opening to the jury (this is permitted.) The co-conspirators were tried together, and were permitted to shout out to the court or each other directly during testimony. Gabrielle had been examined by a number of hypnotism experts appointed by the court, but a specialist proposed by the defense was not even permitted to talk to her. There appeared to be no public doubt about Eyraud's guilt, but much about Gabrielle's, who had courted public favor for months before his capture. By US legal standards, it was a circus, not a trial, and newspapers around the world loved it.

If you enjoyed Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, you will very likely enjoy this book, which is also the story of a true crime set in a major city during glamorous and hectic times. It is told in a factual rather than a sensational style, but is by no means dry. Little Demon in the City of Light has no need of added drama; the incredible facts of the case, the extended manhunt, and the dramatic courtroom scenes need no embellishment. Was Gabrielle in fact hypnotized by her lover, as she claimed, during the commission of the murder? If so, to what extent did that erode her free will and affect her complicity? What effect did––or should––her dismal upbringing and circumstances have on determining her responsibility? The author carefully refrains from sharing his opinions, leaving it to the reader to decide. There are easily half a dozen points in this book stimulating enough to engage a book discussion group. Highly recommended!

Note: I received a free advanced readers' copy of Little Demon in the City of Light, which will be released in the US on February 25, 2014 by Doubleday. Similar reviews may appear on various sites under my user names there.

Mmmm, Bacon

In recent years, there has been a bit of a trend toward making famous figures protagonists in mysteries. Oscar Wilde in Gyles Brandreth's series, Jane Austen (Stephanie Barron), Daphne du Maurier (Joanna Challis), Josephine Tey (Nicola Upson), the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (Peter Lovesey), Beatrix Potter (Susan Wittig Albert), Dorothy Parker (J. J. Murphy) and many more. Just check "Real People" under Stop, You're Killing Me!'s Job Index to see the others.

Janice Law has picked a not-so-famous figure: Francis Bacon (the 20th-century painter of famously gruesome art, not the 17th-century philosopher) for the protagonist of her mystery series, which she began in 2012 with Fires of London, and follows up with The Prisoner of the Riviera (Mysterious Press/Open Road Media, December 10, 2013).

A Bacon self-portrait. Yikes! And this is subdued and almost cheerful compared to most of his work.

Bacon is a surprising choice for a mystery protagonist. He was booted out of his home by his domineering father for being flamboyantly effeminate, and lived on his wits, mostly in London, seeking out wealthy older men to keep him. More often, he lived with his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who had always been more of a mother to him. But don't be fooled by the seeming domesticity of a grown man living with his old nan. She didn't put any sort of a crimp in his style. The two of them used his studio as an illegal gambling den at night, and she passed judgment on any prospective lovers who answered his coyly-phrased advertisements for a "gentleman's gentleman."

Janice Law sets Fires of London in 1940, shortly after the wartime blackout made nighttime London a place of misty, impenetrable blackness. She has Bacon acting as an ARP (air raid precautions) warden, walking a beat at night. One night, he learns that one of his acquaintances in London's gay demimonde has been brutally murdered in a nearby park. Not long afterward, Bacon literally stumbles on another victim. Feeling under threat himself, Bacon uses his patrols and contacts to try to find the murderer.

Law skillfully mixes wry humor with heart-thumping suspense. Bacon's scenes with his nan are a little like a comedy double act; full of charm and chuckles. The mood changes completely when Bacon stumbles through nighttime streets and alleys with only falling bombs and incendiaries as illumination to help him avoid threats from a host of attackers. I've read a lot of World War II-era mysteries, and several novels that take place during the London Blitz. I don't remember another that did such a good job at conveying the chaos, fear and exhilaration of being on the streets during a raid.

For her second Francis Bacon novel, The Prisoner of the Riviera, Janice Law jumps ahead to 1946. At first, I was disappointed that Law had chosen to leave the London-during-the-Blitz setting after just one book, but I quickly got over it. Setting stories in the immediate postwar period seems to be all the rage these days, or maybe that's just a coincidence in my recent reading. It's a rewarding period because, as Law has one character put it, in France "power was lying on the ground during the war" and it was picked up by dubious characters who couldn't just return to the plow when the war was over. These characters abound in The Prisoner of the Riviera.

Let's back up and set the scene. Francis is out for dinner in London with his longtime lover, Arnold, when they come upon a man who has been shot and is bleeding to death in the street. Francis uses all his ARP training skills to keep the man alive until an ambulance arrives, but it doesn't look good. He is contacted shortly afterward by M. Joubert, proprietor of a London casino that holds a dauntingly large number of Francis's gambling chits. Joubert tells Francis that the man, a Monsieur Renard, did die after a few days in the hospital, but left a farewell letter for his wife, who lives in the south of France. If Francis will deliver the letter, Joubert will tear up Francis's chits.

There's something rotten about this setup, right? You and I know it, and so do Francis, Nan and Arnold. Aside from the imbalance between the value of the gambling chits and the going rate for in-person mail delivery, there's something fishy about that letter. Francis and Nan couldn't resist painstakingly removing and replacing the wax seal on the letter, and they suspect it's really a coded message––though one they can't crack without a cipher key. But it's cold, grey and rainy in London and the rationing means the food is even more depressing than the weather. Who can resist the siren call of the Riviera?

After enjoying a few days in the sun, Francis decides it's about time to deliver the letter to Mme. Renard. Afterward, he narrowly avoids attack from a couple of goons as he heads back to his hotel and, soon after that, he learns that Mme. Renard was found murdered later that same day––and he is the number one suspect.

Attempting to clear his name and avoid a long stretch in a French prison, Francis uses a couple of false identities to investigate the murder and figure out what this supposed farewell letter really is. He's not the only one interested, and soon it seems that the entire south of France is seething with characters who are after the letter, Francis and each other. They all seem to have had secret underground pasts during the war, but it's impossible to be sure which side they were on, if not both, and whether their current intentions are to help Francis, use him, abuse him or carve him up.

Here's an odd thing. When I read The Prisoner of the Riviera, I kept thinking about P.G. Wodehouse. In part it's because most of the story is set in the south of France, where Bertie Wooster often used to travel to get into trouble gambling and falling in love. And here's Francis, on his arrival in Nice: "Have I mentioned my fondness for sailors? I have a weakness, as Nan would say, for members of the maritime profession, for the toilers of the sea, for jolly jack-tars and also the not-so-jolly ones, who are really more to my taste." Can you see a Wodehouse-ish style in that? I can.

There's a lot more about Janice Law's writing style here that makes me think her Francis Bacon is a sort of Bertie Wooster-ish character–––if Bertie had a dozen or two more IQ points, considerably less of "the ready," liked risky sex (with men) and kept running into murders. The books are written in the first person, and even when fists are flying or guns are blazing, there is an air of Bertie describing one of his sticky wickets.

And, like Bertie Wooster, Francis is soon beset with troubles involving false identities, mistaken impressions, getting caught sneaking into other people's houses and bedrooms––and even being bedeviled by a pair of troublesome aunts. I found the book a dizzyingly improbable but delightful caper, just like a Wodehouse story. Unlike a Wodehouse story, this one does have a great deal of serious crime and danger in it, but for mystery lovers, that's all to the good.

Janice Law

During the Golden Age of mystery, a typical novel would clock in right around 200 pages. For a skilled writer, that was plenty of time to limn the characters, bump off the victim(s), and collect enough clues to solve the crime. Janice Law may not be a high-profile mystery writer, but she's a longtime author with an Edgar nomination under her belt (in 1977, for Best First Novel), and she knows how to write a good, tight story in that Golden Age manner. At a little under 200 pages each, these books are quick reads, but terrifically entertaining. I should note that the books include sexual content, but there are no detailed or graphic descriptions.

Note: I received free review texts of the ebook versions of these titles from the publisher, via Netgalley. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.