Maigret––An Iconic Detective

I have been reading mysteries since I was eight or so years old. Like many others, I started with Nancy Drew. As I think back, it wasn't long before I had run through those and started on Mike Shayne and Perry Mason. Even then, I began to see blurbs about comparisons between my chosen fictional detectives and the greatest of all detectives, apparently, the one and only Chief Inspector Jules Maigret of the Flying Squad, created by Georges Simenon. Over time, I have made a literary acquaintance with many iconic Depression-era detectives like Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op––but Maigret was on that list we all have, the "I'll get to it sometime" list.

Just recently, I came across a set of new publications from Penguin Press. Each month, beginning in Fall 2013, Penguin is re-releasing one of the 75 Maigret books, as chronicled by Simenon, and the time was right to dive into these books.

Maigret was introduced in 1931 in Pietr-le-Letton. It's always good to be able to read the genesis of a character, and I began with it. I read it with the most recent English title, Pietr the Latvian, also known in the past as The Case of Peter the Lett. The case begins as Maigret prowls around his frigid office in the center of Paris, stoking a coal fire, smoking a desperate pipe and waiting for more news about the journey of a devious con-man making his way to Paris by way of the train Étoile du Nord. As was the custom of those days, all Maigret had was a word picture description sent by telegram in secret police code to help him identify Pietr from Latvia. This he memorized, especially the ear anatomy because it was one thing that was hard to alter or disguise. Maigret was certain that if he saw the correct ear, he would have his man.

"Ear unmarked rim, lobe large, max cross and dimension small max, protuberant antitragus, vex edge lower fold, edge shape straight line." Even knowing a bit of ear anatomy didn't help me decipher this code.

Maigret is described as a giant of a man, but Simenon puts it more poetically: "He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there. His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues. It was something more than self-confidence but less than pride. He would turn up and stand like a rock with his feet wide apart. On that rock all would shatter, whether Maigret moved forward or stood exactly where he was."

I liked Maigret and Simenon from the start. The style of writing is concise and straightforward, and it was easy to pass over the antiquated features of policing in the thirties. Even though Maigret was a member of a flying squad, he mostly had recourse only to public transportation or a bike! He often used messengers instead of a telephone, although these were available. Far from being a romantic or dashing fellow, Maigret was deliberate and thoughtful. He thought about his wife at times, but in these early books she was a minor character at best.

When Maigret meets the train on arrival in Paris, he is first confronted with a dapper gentleman detraining who fits the description to a lobe, but he is immediately called to see the corpse of a very similar gentleman, recently killed and whose otic whorls and folds were eerily similar. But Maigret is sure of his target, and the game of cat and mouse begins.

Maigret stories differ from others in the genre because the details of solving a crime are less important than the detective's journey of discovering what he can about the characters that flesh out the plot. Simenon felt that Maigret's driving force was a search for the "naked man"––man without his cultural protective coloration.

In Pietr the Latvian, the scoundrel uses plenty of protective coloration, but Maigret is an implacable force. As he gets nearer to his prey, the desperate man turns the tables on him and he is shot while crossing the street. A through-and-through bullet means little to Maigret, but when someone close to him is murdered by sophisticated means, he steels himself to go on. There is plenty of drama with a dollop of melodrama: "It was fearsome! Tragic! Terrifying!," which really makes for a page-turner.

Maigret uses his intuition to try to understand characters' motives and what drove them to their destructive behaviors. He views most people with compassion, tempered by a reality-based cynicism.

This is more obvious in the second book of the series, The Crime at Lock 14 (also published as Maigret Meets a Milord). In this case, a woman is found strangled at a lock along a busy river. Who she was and how she got there is a mystery until Maigret begins to unravel threads that lead back into the past. The world of canal, barges and locks seems like it belongs in another century, but the human motivations are all too modern and pervasive. Maigret begins to appreciate what drove the murderer and while he hounds him implacably to his death, he still allows the man a remnant of dignity.

Georges Simenon was born in 1903 in Belgium, but his life took him to France and the USA after World War II and, finally, to Switzerland. He wrote more than 200 books under as many as 16 different pen names. What made him stand out was his spare, direct prose that occasionally was poetic. He could evoke psychological tension beautifully while, at the same time, keep a calm tenor as a counterpoint.

One constant theme is the isolated existence of the abnormal individual whose neurosis instigates criminal troubles. When Maigret begins to understand for whom he is looking, the cases are soon solved.

It seems that there have been new editions of Maigret mysteries a couple of times a decade, so it may not be an exaggeration when Simenon is referred to as one of the greatest novelists of his time. He has been compared to Chekhov and Hemingway, because he portrayed the bleakness of human life in a way that today we would characterize by the phrase "It is what it is."

The Dancer at Gai-Moulin came out in September 2014. October's release is The Bar on the Seine. The Shadow in the Courtyard and The Saint-Fiacre Affair will follow in November and December. I can't wait to spend some snowy days with Maigret.

Recipe for Murder

I'm supremely untalented in arts and crafts. I can't sew a straight line; in life drawing class, my version of a reclining human form looked like a displaced sea lion; my attempts to learn how to knit were so laughably futile I decided I'd have better luck using the knitting needles as chopsticks. My failures in this sphere are probably part of what caused my lack of interest in craftsy mysteries.

I'm not bad at cooking and baking, so I perk up more at mysteries that feature food. Not so much the ones with cute, culinary titles and lots of recipes in them, though. I prefer books that integrate a lot of good food in the characters' lives and make me want to dash out to a restaurant or into the kitchen to put the pots and pans to work.

Crèpes Suzette

Naturally, the French and Italians specialize in making the reader drool all over the page. Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret regularly eats traditional dishes, like fois gras with truffles, tripe á la Caen, coq au vin, onion soup and crèpes Suzette––and there's more where that came from when he's at home. Madame Maigret is characterized as a good, plain cook, but her meals sound delicious to me––and they attract Maigret home for lunch quite often. There is even a book of her dishes, collected by Robert J. Courtine and titled Madame Maigret's Recipes. The book is out of print, but can be located.

Marseilles café

Even in a gritty, noir series like Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy, protagonist Fabio Montale takes time out from investigations to enjoy the city's bars, music and, yes, food.  Of course, it has a more Mediterranean flair than your Parisian cooking, but that's not a bad thing; not with dishes like spaghetti with basil and garlic, baked anchovy purée, and fricassée with clams.

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's not just amoré, it's a regular night in a book featuring Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti, Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano or Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen. Maybe my favorite meal description is in Camilleri's The Smell of the Night, when Montalbano stops in at a tiny trattoria recommended to him. It doesn't look like much of a place to him, but he's ravenous and decides to give it a try. The proprietor tells him they have burning pirciati that evening if he feels up to it. Montalbano doesn't want to give the man the satisfaction of asking how the dish is prepared, and he certainly feels he's "up to it," whatever that means, so burning pirciati it is. When the dish arrives, it smells wonderful, and Montalbano immediately digs in––only to feel as if his mouth has burst into flames that are only barely subdued by his drowning them in an entire glass of wine.

Pirciati (not sure if it's burning, though!)

Montalbano decides he must know what is in the dish, and the proprietor tells him: "Olive oil, half an onion, two cloves of garlic, two salted anchovies, a teaspoon of fine capers, black olives, tomatoes, basil, half a pimento, salt, Pecorino cheese, and black pepper." Battling the sweat pouring down his forehead, Montalbano devours the whole dish and grabs bread to mop up the juices, "[p]unctuating his forkfuls with gulps of wine and alternating extreme agony and unbearable pleasure." He refuses a second course, and the now-respectful proprietor is understanding, since he comments that "[t]he problem with burning pirciati is that you don't get your taste buds back until the next day."

Braised wild turkey

Closer to home, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is at least as famous a gourmand as he is a detective. He keeps a full-time chef, Fritz, at his brownstone, and with Fritz's cooking, there is no wonder the detective weighs, as his colleague Archie Goodwin tells us, one-seventh of a ton. You won't be surprised to learn that The Nero Wolfe Cookbook was published–––and, unlike Madame Maigret's Recipes, this book is still in print. Georgette Spelvin is devoted to Nero Wolfe (and even more to Archie), and I have challenged her to write about the objects of her devotion here. In hopes that she'll be more likely to comply, I won't say any more about Nero Wolfe, Archie or Fritz's cooking.

Steak frites

Regular readers of Read Me Deadly know how dedicated I am to Louise Penny's Armand Gamache/Three Pines series. If I could enter the world Penny creates, I'd head straight for Olivier's bistro in Three Pines. The croissants sound like they're of Parisian quality, but Olivier doesn't make them; he buys them from the bakery down the block. So, much as I love croissants, especially pain au chocolat, what I'd show up for would be Olivier's impressive sandwich creations and, most of all, the steak frites. Come to think of it, Martin Walker's Bruno Courrèges makes a pretty mean steak, too. What I know about steak is a little secret I learned from the folks at America's Test Kitchen. Here it is, from the May & June 2007 Cook's Illustrated magazine:

Pan-Seared Thick-Cut Strip Steaks (for four)

2 boneless strip steaks, 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 inches thick (about 1 pound each)
Kosher salt and ground black pepper
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 275 degrees. Pat steaks dry with paper towels. Cut each steak in half vertically to create four 8-ounce steaks. Season steaks liberally with salt and pepper. Using hands, gently shape the steaks into uniform thickness. Place steaks on wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet; transfer baking sheet to oven. Cook until instant-read thermometer inserted horizontally into center of steaks registers 90-95 degrees for rare to medium-rare, 20-25 minutes; or 100-105 degrees for medium, 25-30 minutes.
2. Heat oil in 12-inch heavy-bottomed skillet over high heat until smoking. Place steaks in skillet and sear until well-browned and crusty, 1-1/2 to 2 minutes, lifting once halfway through to redistribute fat underneath each steak. Reduce heat if food begins to burn. Using tongs, turn steaks and cook until well-browned on the other side, 2 to 2-1/2 minutes. Transfer steaks to clean rack and reduce heat under pan to medium. Use tongs to stand two steaks on their sides. Holding steaks together, return to pan and hold them with the tongs so that you can sear all the edges until browned, about 1-1/2 minutes. Repeat with remaining 2 steaks.
3. Return steaks to wire rack and let rest, loosely tented with foil, for about 10 minutes. If desired, make a steak sauce in the now-empty skillet; e.g., red wine and mushroom pan sauce.

Delhi street food vendor

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to the audiobook of Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken.  The protagonist of Hall's mystery series is Delhi private detective Vish Puri. When I tell you that his nickname is Chubby, you begin to understand that food is something Vish takes very, very seriously. As he zips around Delhi, he makes detours to all his favorite street vendors. In just this one short book, he eats at least a dozen meals that will have you looking up airfares to India, or at least plotting an immediate visit to the nearest good Indian restaurant. Half of these dishes I've never heard of, like poori, rajma chawal, papdi, channa batura and bedmi aloo, but that doesn't mean I wasn't ravenous for them.

Butter chicken over rice

What I didn't know about the book is that in its printed form, it includes some recipes at the end. On audio, you don't even get a hint of that. While I was reading about Vish devouring butter chicken at a cricket banquet, all I could think about was how much I wanted some. I didn't care that it killed a guest at the banquet. I just remembered the butter chicken at Amber India in Mountain View, California. When I worked in Palo Alto, a group of us would go there for their lunch buffet every couple of weeks. It may have been a buffet, but I only had eyes for the butter chicken. I don't know what recipe Tarquin Hall put in his book, but here's the Amber India recipe that was printed in the San Francisco Chronicle some years ago:

Butter Chicken from Amber India

Main ingredients

3 pounds chicken (2 half-breasts, 2 thighs, 2 legs), skinned
Juice of one lemon
1 tablespoon hot red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons salt
1-1/2 cups unflavored yogurt
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1-1/2 teaspoons garlic paste
1-1/2 teaspoons ginger paste
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander seed
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon garam masala
1/2 teaspoon salt

Sauce ingredients

1 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground red chile
Pinch garam masala
Pinch mace
Pinch nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/4 cup butter
2 cups canned tomatoes, chopped
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 cups water, or more as needed
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons ground fenugreek
Salt to taste

Instructions

1. Make 3 parallel cuts on top of each piece of chicken. Place the chicken in a resealable bag.
2. Combine the lemon juice, red pepper flakes and salt; pour over the chicken. Seal the bag and refrigerate 30 minutes.
3. Combine the yogurt and cream in a bowl; blend well.
4. Mix together the garlic paste, ginger paste, coriander, cumin, garam masala and salt. Add to the yogurt mixture, blending thoroughly.
5. When the chicken has marinated for 30 minutes, remove it from the refrigerator, open the bag and pour in the yogurt mixture. Reseal the bag and refrigerate overnight.
6. Next day, to make the sauce, combine the ginger, ground red chile, garam masala, mace, nutmeg, white pepper and brown sugar in a small bowl.
7. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, the spice/sugar blend and water. Simmer, stirring frequently, for 20 minutes.
8. Add more water if the mixture gets too dry.
9. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
10. Remove the chicken from the marinade; discard the marinade.
11. Arrange the chicken pieces in a baking pan large enough to hold them in a single layer. Bake for 30 minutes.
12. Let the chicken cool until you can handle it; then remove the meat from the bones and discard the bones.
13. Add the chicken meat, the cream and fenugreek to the sauce. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent burning. Add salt to taste and serve over rice.

Serves four.  Nutrition information per serving: 325 calories (not including the rice), 28 grams protein, 8 grams carbohydrates, 20 grams fat (10 grams saturated fat), 1 gram fiber.

Swedish cream wafers

If you want to read mysteries that won't make you hungry, I would recommend most Nordic mysteries. The food usually sounds dreary at best, dreadful at worst. Sheep's head or fermented shark fin, anyone? If the food isn't frighteningly grotesque, it's just sad, like Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander and her regular diet of frozen pizzas. I always feel so sorry for the Nordic books' characters that I want to make them some Swedish cream wafers; simple cookies so good that I haven't made them in decades because I will eat the entire batch all by myself. I have no idea where I got this recipe. I just have my handwritten index card from at least 30 years ago.

Swedish Cream Wafers

Wafer ingredients

1 cup salted butter (at room temperature, so it's soft)
1/3 cup thick cream
2 cups sifted flour
Granulated sugar for coating the wafers

Filling ingredients

1/4 cup salted butter (at room temperature, so it's soft)
3/4 cup sifted confectioner's sugar
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla (or lemon extract if you prefer)

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix together the wafer ingredients and refrigerate the dough for at least an hour, until it is cold. Using one-third of the wafer dough at a time, keeping the rest cold, roll out the dough 1/8 of an inch thick on a lightly floured surface. Cut the dough with 1-1/2 inch round cookie cutter (flour the cutter so it doesn't stick), coat both sides of each wafer with granulated sugar, prick with a fork four times. 

Bake the wafers for 7-9 minutes, until a light golden. Do not brown. Let cool.

While the wafers are baking and cooling, mix the filling ingredients until the filling is smooth. Once the wafers are completely cooled, spread the flat side of a wafer with the filling and lightly press the flat side of another wafer against the filling to make a filled cookie. Repeat with the rest of the wafers and filling.

Would you like to tell us some of your recipes and the books that inspire you to make them?

French Leave

Sure, it seems like the only international mysteries anybody has been able to talk about for the last couple of years are Nordic crime novels. That's the legacy of Stieg Larsson's books. But long before tattooed and pierced girls like Lisbeth Salander came along, biking around Stockholm, readers have loved novels set in France.

It's autumn now, the time when all good French citizens have returned from their long August vacations and are back to their workaday lives. It may be the best time for us to take a trip to France. The harvest is on, the days are growing shorter, and there is a crispness in the evening air that invites us to pour a warming glass of wine or a cognac.

The thing about French mysteries—at least those written in English—is that they're almost inevitably "lifestyle" novels too. Not that that's a bad thing. In between finding dead bodies and chasing down bad guys, detectives sit at café tables with a pastis or go to a favorite bistro to dine on perfectly prepared oysters, paté terrines, tapenade, escargots, cassoulet, haricots, asparagus, coq au vin and unpasteurized cheeses, along with, of course, lovingly chosen wines. They walk down narrow streets in a Paris arrondissement steeped in history, or a market square in a sun-soaked village in Provence or the Dordogne.

British adman Peter Mayle is almost single-handedly responsible for the absolute crush of British and Americans visiting and wanting to live in Provence in the last 20 years. Mayle's A Year In Provence was so filled with good food, wine and entertaining local color that he was able to make a living writing followups to the book. They include a few meringue-light caper-style mysteries: Hotel Pastis, Anything Considered, The Vintage Caper and Chasing Cézanne, and a novel with a slight mystery element, A Good Year. The only substantive element in these books is the luxurious food and wine, but they are a pleasant way to pass some time and dream of a visit to France.

Not surprisingly, British travel writers have a propensity to want to live in France and to write about it. M. L. Longworth, a longtime travel writer, has just written her first mystery, called Death at the Chateau Bremont, set in the city of Aix-en-Provence. This is the start of a new series featuring judicial investigator Antoine Verlaque and his former lover, law professor Marine Bonnet. I didn't find Longworth to be completely successful in her plotting or creating believable and compelling characters, but she did manage to convey a mouth-watering sense of place and has a promising writing style that makes me think I'll be trying her next book.

Fellow British travel writer Martin O'Brien writes a more gritty style of mystery, befitting his locale: the sun-soaked but sometimes seedy and dangerous port of Marseilles. His protagonist is Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot, a former rugby player. The Jacquot series doesn't start out well–Jacquot and the Waterman and Jacquot and the Master are weakly plotted–but Jacquot is a strong character and when O'Brien moves his story into country village settings in Jacquot and the Angel and to the Côte d'Azur in Jacquot and the Fifteen, there is more depth to his storytelling. Truth be told, though, O'Brien never gets better in his plot resolutions, which leaves his stories in the second tier.

A better series choice would be Martin Walker's Bruno Courrèges series, set in the Périgord town of St. Denis. Bruno is a veteran of the war in the Balkans and is now happy to be in this backwater, living alone in a small cottage with his dog, Gitane, cooking for himself, simply but beautifully, and whiling away his evenings on his patio. But in the debut novel, Bruno, Chief of Police, St. Denis is soon the scene of the brutal murder of one of its longtime residents, a man of Arab descent who'd been a hero in World War II. For me, this first book and its successor, The Dark Vineyard, were pleasant visits to a charming village where everybody seems to be a gourmet cook and champion drinker. I haven't yet felt inspired to pick up the next two in the series, Black Diamond and The Crowded Grave, but next time I want to visit the Dordogne, I can imagine letting Martin Walker take me there.

What would a trip to France be without time spent in the City of Light? For over a decade, Cara Black has been escorting us all over Paris in the company of her protagonist, computer security consultant Aimée Leduc. There is plenty of gastronomic envy for the reader of these books, but you may also yearn for Aimée's vintage Chanel, agnès b and other couture clothing. Even better, each book takes us on an in-depth tour of a different neighborhood in Paris. It's the next-best thing to being there. If you haven't discovered these books yet, start with Murder in the Marais, the first in the series and a finalist for an Anthony and a Macavity award.

All the books I've described so far were originally written in English, and clearly by authors reveling in the French lifestyle. Open your horizons to translated books and you'll see the world of the native French. It might not be as pretty as the world seen by the Anglo Francophile, but a mystery fan always wants to see the real thing.

A bad old joke: "What do the Chinese call Chinese food?" "Food." Reading a French mystery written by a French native, as opposed to an English or American native, is sort of like that. Where the Anglo rhapsodizes about his protagonist's morning espresso and a warm and oozing pain au chocolat, the French writer's character just eats breakfast.

The best-known French mystery writer is, of course, Georges Simenon, whose protagonist is Inspector Maigret of the Paris police. Maigret doesn't wear designer clothes. He can invariably be found wearing a bowler hat and an overcoat and carrying a pipe. He works from a perpetually chilly office. The appeal of the Maigret books is in his style of detection. He is no Sherlock Holmes. He doesn't scrutinize physical evidence, have an encyclopedic knowledge of footprints or tobacco, or dazzle with his feats of deduction. Maigret is a patient observer of people, and his knowledge of people leads him to the truth.

Similarly, Fred Vargas's Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg relies on his understanding of the human psyche to solve crimes. He is shy, introspective and often unfathomable. A bit of a lady killer, but we tend to see little evidence of that. He doesn't spend much time sitting in cafés or restaurants. In Vargas's most recently translated novel, An Uncertain Place, Adamsberg's spare time is spent delivering kittens and getting chiropractic adjustments. Not much of a lifestyle book, then. When he and his team of detectives meet in a local bar, there is no loving description of vintages and bowls of olives. They just drink wine, period. Danglard, Adamsberg's second-in-command, drinks more than the rest, mostly from the bottle in his desk drawer. The only time I can remember Vargas waxing rhapsodic about food and drink is when Adamsberg pursues an investigation to Serbia.

Some French crime novels would have to be seen as anti-lifestyle books. Jean-Patrick Manchette wrote 10 standalone crime novels, three of which have been translated into English: Three to Kill, Fatale and The Prone Gunman. These books are violent, spare, detached and almost impossibly noir. You will not feel envious of the protagonists' lifestyles but, if you like noir, you should give his books a try. Two of his titles are even available in English in graphic-novel form, with Three to Kill published as West Coast Blues and The Prone Gunman published as Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot.

The first title in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy is Total Chaos, which is a pulsing neon clue that this is no travelogue. The next two volumes, Chourmo and Solea, drive home the point. Izzo's work is called Mediterranean noir. Unlike traditional noir, a genre in which the mean streets are usually gray and rainy, in Mediterranean noir the sun blasts down in a brilliant platinum white, illuminating the brilliant blue of the sea and the reds, yellows and greens of the buildings and billboards. Izzo's protagonist, police detective Fabio Montale is, like Izzo himself was, the son of immigrant parents and part of the ethnic and racial melting pot of Marseilles. Also like Izzo, Montale believes in a liberté, égalité et fraternité that he doesn't find much of in a racist, corrupt police department or in modern France as a whole, especially among the far-right supporters of the National Front, which was founded in Marseilles.

To the non-native author, France is like a lover. Sometimes the writer is in the first flush of infatuation and everything is transcendently wonderful. Sometimes it's a more mature love, with the writer aware of flaws but finding them charming or at least being willing to forgive them. To the native author, though, France is more like family; somebody the writer is indelibly attached to, somebody whose flaws are all too evident, somebody the author may even hate sometimes; but somebody the author is compelled to care about deeply, no matter what. For readers, being taken to either France is a trip to look forward to.

Other suggested French mysteries in translation:

Léo Malet was born in the far southern city of Montpellier, but he lived most of his life in and around Paris. He wrote 33 Nestor Burma novels, which are chock-full of colorful French slang. Nestor Burma has been called France's answer to Philip Marlowe and, in France, the novels featuring Burma have been adapted to film six times and into a seven-season television series. Malet intended to write a crime novel featuring each of Paris's 20 arrondissements and came tantalizingly close to his goal before his death. Malet's Nestor Burma crime novels available in English include: 120 Rue de la Gare, Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge, The Rats of Montsouris, Mission to Marseilles, Mayhem in the Marais, Sunrise Behind the Louvre, Dynamite Versus QED, Death of a Marseilles Man and The Tell-Tale Body on the Plaine Monceau.  Unfortunately, these books are very hard to find.

Pierre Magnan has written nine books in his Provençal series featuring Commissaire Laviolette, two of which have been translated: Death in the Truffle Wood and The Messengers of Death. Another series features Séraphin Monge and takes place after World War I. Both titles in that series have been translated: The Murdered House and Beyond the Grave. Magnan also has a standalone novel translated as Innocence.

Claude Izner is the nom de plume of two Parisian bookseller sisters who write a series about another Parisian bookseller, Victor Legris, set in the late-19th-century Belle Epoque. There are currently nine titles in the series, six of which have been translated: Murder on the Eiffel Tower, The Père-Lachaise Mystery, The Montmartre Investigation, The Assassin in the Marais, The Predator of Batignolles and Strangled in Paris.

Didier Daeninckx is a left-wing politician and leading French crime novelist. His novels often focus on France's poor record dealing with World War II Nazi collaborators and more contemporary bad behavior toward its Algerian residents and citizens. Novels available in English include Murder in Memoriam and A Very Profitable War.

Jean-François Parot writes the Nicolas Le Floch series, in which the protagonist is a Breton policeman working in Paris during the 18th century. Of the nine books in the series, five have been translated: The Châtelet Apprentice, The Man with the Lead Stomach, The Phantom of the Rue Royale, The Nicolas Le Floch Affair and The Saint-Florentin Murders.

Á bientôt!