Review of Fred Vargas's The Ghost Riders of Ordebec

The Ghost Riders of Ordebec by
Fred Vargas

A female author named Fred and a French protagonist named Adamsberg. These are your first clues that this series is a little off plumb, but more fly at you quickly in these books, and the seventh in the series, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, is no different. We begin with Commissaire Adamsberg of the Paris police detecting a murder just by following a trail of breadcrumbs.

Back at the station, Adamsberg rescues a pigeon whose feet have been bound together, and hands the nearly dead bird over to his team for rehabilitation. While he's hanging about outside the station, he's accosted by a timid Norman countrywoman who has been told that Adamsberg is the one man in France who may be able to help her.

Madame Vendermot tells Adamsberg an outlandish tale of a Furious Army of ghouls who periodically roam the old highways at night, placing a curse on evildoers that will cause their death within weeks. Mme. Vendermot's daughter, Lina, has seen the Furious Army, and in their company some men of their village, Ordebec. One of those men, Herbier, has disappeared and, although these men are mostly despised within Ordebec for various unpunished sins,  Mme. Vendermot wants Adamsberg to find him before he's killed––if he's not already dead.

Though Adamsberg is busy with a more conventional crime, that of the murder of one of France's preeminent industrialists, found dead in his torched Mercedes, he's intrigued by Mme. Vendermot's tale and can't resist a trip to Ordebec to look around. A country boy himself, from the South, he's charmed by Normandy's Ordebec, including the old woman, Léo, who offers him her hospitality––including Cuban cigars and Calvados––when he misses his train back to Paris.

When the Furious Army case becomes very serious, Adamsberg is called on to lead an official investigation. With two demanding active cases, he must allocate the resources of his team carefully. And what an oddball team it is, including his second-in-command, Danglard, a melancholy, walking encyclopedia with a bottomless thirst for white wine; Retancourt, a giantess whose size and weight do nothing to detract from her gift of being able to mesmerize people with hardly a word; Veyrenc, who is quite a sight, with the streaks and spots of red in his dark hair, and who has a penchant for reciting Verlaine at the most inopportune times; Mercadet, a narcoleptic; Froissy, a bulimic who stashes crackers, patés, sweet and other foodstuffs all over the detectives' office. You get the idea. Adamsberg's team also expands to encompass some irregulars, including his son, Zerk; his Spanish neighbor, Lucio; Léo and other Ordebec villagers; and even a prisoner-for-life whom Adamsberg was responsible for capturing in an earlier case.

Does all this make the Adamsberg series sound so whimsical as to be silly? It's definitely quirky, but the characters' eccentricities mesh well and even their weaknesses can sometimes be used as strengths. Just as Adamsberg's absent-mindedness and apparent ignorance conceal a great, though unpredictable, intellect.

A hostile policeman calls Adamsberg a peasant, cloud shoveler, lost in the mists. He's right, but what gives Adamsberg his ability to solve crimes is that he lives close to the ground and nature. He seems like he's absent-minded, and he is, but only because his mind has wandered off to replay what he's seen, heard and even smelled, and is putting it all together to tease out what it means.

Above all, Adamsberg is human and humane. He understands human nature, for good and ill. That's how he detects murder in a trail of breadcrumbs. That's why he saves that pigeon––and vows to find out who tortured the bird.

This series is unique and original, filled with imagination and a love of the land and people of France. There's a sort of magical spell that always falls over me when I read one of these novels, and I wish Fred Vargas would hurry up and become popular enough to get her novels translated into English a lot faster.

The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was published in the UK by Harvill Secker on March 7, 2013, and will be published in the US by Penguin Books on June 25.

Note: Versions of my review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my user names there.

Back to Square One

Have you ever wanted a do-over for some parts of your life? Or at least an opportunity to choose a different one of Robert Frost's paths? Many of us, if given the opportunity, can at least dream about it. But dealers in fiction have all the tools at their fingertips to create salad days in a well-established mature character, or at least present a more youthful portrait of their protagonist. Authors do this by writing a prequel.

The word "prequel" is of recent origin. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "prequel" first appeared in print in 1958. It was used by the well-known Anthony Boucher of mystery writing and Bouchercon fame. He used it in an article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction when he referred to a specific work. In the 1970s and 80s, it came into wider use when describing movies like The Godfather: Part II, which took place temporally before The Godfather. I knew this word was not listed for any spelling bee in my school.

I really enjoy prequels, because they give the readers an insight into the development of a favorite character. Some readers don't care if books in a series are read in order, but I prefer orderly progression of aging, relationships, and career development.

Undersheriff Bill Gastner is a favorite character of mine in Steven Havill's Posadas County series. In the more recent books, he has retired from law enforcement and Estelle Reyes is the new Undersheriff, but in One Perfect Shot, the eighteenth book in the series, Havill takes us back to a time before the first book in the series took place. We've gone back a decade or so earlier, when Gastner is Undersheriff. Gastner is called to the scene of Larry Zipoli's death, a county road in broad daylight, where Larry has been shot and killed while working grading a road. The case is one that fits Bill to a tee; a dead man in unusual circumstances, no apparent clues, but a puzzle for which the pieces are out there and he will find them and put them together.

In this case, he also has at his side Estelle Reyes, who is on her first day in the job of Deputy for the Posadas County Police. We learn she is gorgeous, which is something not focused on in other books in the series.

The story foreshadows her special intuition and very sharp eyes when it comes to incongruities at the scene of the crime. Bill Gastner is as solid and unflappable as ever, and he walks her through the initial points of good law enforcement.

Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell's solitary and somewhat morose Inspector is not exactly mysterious, but The Pyramid, which was written after eight earlier books in the series, tells the story of Wallander's beginnings and explains some things about Wallander that we might have wondered about in other books. This collection of five stories explores Wallander's early career as a rookie cop. It also details his relationship with the girlfriend who later became his wife. Some things were predictable: no one could have spent much time with that woman without coming to despise her. She kept Wallander under her thumb, but somehow he still loved her, years after their divorce.

It became easier for me to understand his relationship with his daughter, Linda, and the pattern of self-denigration when he mentions it in the books. One cultural tidbit I found interesting is that when his daughter went to college at 18 years of age, she was considered on her own financially. Really! Where was this man's head? Solving murders of course.

I consider The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas a prequel only in a sense. It was the first in the Chief Inspector Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg series, but it was published in the U.S. after five years and four other books.

Adamsberg is a very unusual but very engaging character. He is somewhat of a genius at getting to the heart of a pattern. He has a distinct intuition about weird events and people. On the other hand, he loves one woman deeply but treats her badly. His main mission in life––besides his work––is to find his Camille and then drive her away. He is now the head of the Paris murder squad.

In The Chalk Circle Man, we get to meet Adamsberg as he is leaving the small town in the Pyrenées where he spent his childhood as a barefoot boy running around the foothills, and where a police inspector once told him he was not cut out to be a policeman because there was no room for wild creatures like him. By this she meant his curious way of solving murder after murder by a combination of uncanny instinct and intuition.

Now, at the age of 45, he has the respect of those around him because of his intuition for solving crime, but as a newcomer to Paris he is still an outsider. His charm is insidious, though, and when strange chalk circles begin appearing on the pavements overnight––all of which encompass bizarre objects––his squad believes Adamsberg's assurance that one night the chalk will encircle a murder victim. And the search for the culprit is on.

Reading this book before the others adds a new dimension to the Adamsberg character that augments the enjoyment of the rest of the series.

Sometimes when I start a new series, I look at the website Stop, You're Killing Me! to check out the order the series' books are written in, and if there is a prequel I read it first. I did this with Cactus Heart by John Talton. In it, David Mapstone, who is a former history professor, has just been hired by the Sheriff's office in Phoenix. His job is to be related to the investigation of cases in which the history of the area is a factor.

His first case begins after the chase of a thug into a warehouse exposed the bones of a decades-old child murder that has little fingers reaching into the present, as well as to the past of some very important people in the city. This early story introduces us to a bit of Mapstone's past and lays a nice foundation for the future books, although they would have been fine without it.

Phoenix

There are history lessons in all of Talton's books that I find fascinating. They are mostly about the evolution of Phoenix from cattle town to the fifth largest city in the country, and about how Arizona has morphed to its present state.

If you were to write a prequel to the mystery that is your life, how far back would you go? I think a person's life in their twenties is the perfect place to start. There is still dampness behind the ears, but it's a decade of great change and usually a time when future paths are set upon. Mankell talks about these years. On the other hand, there are those who think that life begins at 40 (I never met one of these people, mind you)––in which case, some of these prequels are set in the right time.

Best Books of 2011

I read very few books hot off the presses, since I like to keep the best of what I read, so I wait for the trade paperback in most cases. With these, I can store more for future rereading. So my best reads for 2011 include only a rare 2011 publication. I have not separated books into mystery and nonmystery, because great books transcend genre. These are the books that hit the target:

The best I read: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

I started 2011 out in a good way when I read this book a year ago. The medical background of the book interested me, but I really was drawn in by the history of Ethiopia and I was even compelled to add to my knowledge of the geography and history of the area. I picked up Evelyn Waugh's Waugh in Abyssinia. I also read Verghese's book The Tennis Partner and highly recommend it.

Every Bitter Thing, by Leighton Gage, was another of my favorites. Mario Silva is at his best in this mystery. The title of the book is taken from the Bible: "To the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet" (Proverbs 27:7). There are bitter and sweet throughout this book: in the descriptions of Brazil, in the solving of the crime, as well as in the feelings one has when the last phrase is reached.

The book that swept me off my feet: In All My Sad Dreaming by John Caulfield.

This is a mystery set in Cape Town, South Africa, during a violent modern era. Captain James Black is a member of the Police Service and part of the serious violence unit. He is just leaving the hospital after having been there for a considerable time suffering from two gunshot wounds. The story is filled with musical references that go back to the '70s. The prose itself is musical in many ways. There is a tone of foreboding overlying In All My Sad Dreaming that reminds me of Alan Paton.

The best new-to-me series that I began in 2011: Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series, which begins with A Nail Through the Heart.

This series takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, and introduces us to a fine cast of characters who are making a life that is intended to obliterate all the poverty and evils of their past lives. At the end of the story, I felt I had a nail through my heart.

And coming in second is The Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. This book has some subtle, sly digs that perhaps take an adult to appreciate.

The book that best tickled my funny bone was Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel. This book has some broad, sometimes crude, humor but it was laugh-out-loud time for most of the story. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid came in second and I found Simon Brett’s Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King's Daughter hilarious.

My favorite character was Walt Longmire in the Craig Johnson series. I really looked forward to reading Junkyard Dogs and I was not disappointed.

The book I most looked forward to reading in 2011 and the only book I bought before the printing press cooled was Chris Grabenstein’s Rolling Thunder. You just can’t beat John Ceepak and his partner Danny Boyle for a solid mystery with a soupçon of humor.

The best book I read that I chose by its cover was The Definition of Wind by Ellen Block. It was a perfect summer read.

The best book I finally read years after publication: Beau Geste by P.C. Wren.

The book that took me the longest to read was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

The book that stirred me the most was Bamboo and Blood by James Church. At a time when we are celebrating holidays characterized by plenty of food I think of this book and the people in this country, North Korea, who treat each other to a cup of hot water––which they serve cold, because they have no fuel.

This is the third in the Inspector O series, but it is a prequel beginning in the winter of 1997. North Korea is in the midst of a famine that is devastating the country. The very young and the very old are dying and only people of strong will are likely to survive until the spring. The country is hiding its desperation from the rest of the world, so it is a great surprise to Inspector O when he is asked to play host to an Israeli agent who is able to come and go seemingly at will into society. Beautifully written by an author using a pen name, James Church is the pseudonym of a former member of a western intelligence organization.

The book that awakened my righteous spirit the most was Desert Wives by Betty Webb. The book begins: "What do you call a dead, sixty-eight-year-old polygamist? In the case of my thirteen-year-old client, you call him your fiancée."

The book that surprised me the most was one that seemed to land on my door by itself, and I loved it: The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras by J. Michael Orenduff. I immediately put all of his books on my wish list. The main character makes a living in the Southwest by finding native American pots that are salable. Hubert is a likeable protagonist who lives on huevos rancheros and margaritas and is studying Pythagoras in order to figure out how the ancient potters could manage to space 17 design elements evenly around a pot. This pot thief studies Ptolemy and other great scientists, so you can always brush up a bit on your science when reading Orenduff.

Since 2012 promises to be an excellent reading year, I am always on the look out for the special books. I would rather hear your opinions than look at any best-seller list. The date of publication is of no interest to me, because my feeling is that just because something is new that doesn't make it better!

Top Reads of 2011

There are certain subjects you know you shouldn't raise in company if you want to avoid unpleasantness. Politics, religion, how to raise children, just for starters. Among the Material Witnesses, one subject is guaranteed to prompt pained howls from Georgette Spelvin: best-books lists. For some reason, she just hates making lists of favorite authors and reads.

I enjoy looking back over the year and thinking about the books I've read and how they stacked up. I keep a notebook of the books I've read, but all I do is write down the author and title. If I really liked it, I put an asterisk next to it. One of my book club friends has a card file and has a comment card in it for every book she's read for the last 30 years or so. I'm not that organized, but I wish I did have a record of every book I'd ever read, except for the part where people would look at me like I was some kind of compulsive nutcase.

But back to the subject at hand. This is the time of year when the newspapers, magazines and websites tell us what were the best books published in the past year. I always look at those lists and consider myself lucky if I've read 20% of them. It makes me feel like a cultural deadbeat, but that somehow doesn't ever seem to result in my rushing out to get the books they rate the highest.

I'm going to list my top reads of this year, more or less in order, and ask our readers to do the same in comments. They don't have to be 2011 publications; just books you read this year and particularly enjoyed. I think I can guarantee nobody will feel like a cultural deadbeat after reading my list.

Top Mystery Reads

Louise Penny: A Trick of the Light (Maybe not quite as good as Bury Your Dead, but still terrific. Of course, the Armand Gamache series is my weakness.)

Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog (This entry in the Jackson Brodie series picks up shortly after the Masterpiece Mystery! dramatization left off. Atkinson is one of the best writers out there.)

Cyril Hare: An English Murder (A classic British country house murder mystery, but with incisive commentary on British attitudes about class, ethnicity and religion.)

Fred Vargas: An Uncertain Place (Yet another quirky title in the Inspector Adamsberg series.)

Jill Paton-Walsh: The Attenbury Emeralds (A continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey series.)

Peter Lovesey: Stagestruck (This book about murder in a theater in Bath is part of the Peter Diamond series.)

G. M. Malliet: Wicked Autumn (This is the first in a new series featuring a former MI-5 agent who is now an English country vicar.)

Robert Barnard: A Stranger in the Family (There's nobody like Barnard. This is his 28th standalone mystery and he's already published another one this year. Not to mention his three series and his four books written as Bernard Bastable.)

Alan Bradley: I Am Half Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce at Christmastime.)

Top Non-Mystery Fiction Reads

Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (Four big volumes telling the story of British society and the empire from the 1930s to the 1970s.  I was mesmerized by it and didn't know what to do with myself for weeks after I finished it.)

Muriel Spark: A Far Cry From Kensington (One of the most mordantly witty books ever.)

Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son (An tour-de-force about contemporary life in North Korea.)

Jane Gardam: Old Filth (Funny, sad, touching tale of the life of Sir Edward Feathers. Like A Dance to the Music of Time, it's as much about the British Empire as it is about the characters' lives.)

Stephen King: 11/22/63 (On one level, a time-travel book about trying to prevent the JFK assassination. On a deeper level, about connectedness.)

Chad Harbach: The Art of Fielding (A coming-of-age story about baseball and much more.)

Fannie Flagg: I Still Dream About You (Fannie Flagg is one of my guilty pleasures and this book was just as satisfying as the rest.)

D. E. Stevenson: Miss Buncle's Book (A real find.  Set in England in the 1950s and about a spinster who decides to write a book to make some much-needed money. She can only write what she knows, so she writes a thinly-disguised book about the people in the village. Complications ensue. This title has been issued by Persephone Books, which reprints neglected classics of 20th-century authors, usually women.)

Top Nonfiction Reads

Erik Larson: In the Garden of Beasts (Novelistic story of a college professor made ambassador to Germany in the 1930s Nazi era, and his adult daughter who accompanied him to Berlin, along with his wife and adult son.)

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies (A compellingly readable biography of cancer.)

Laura Hillenbrand: Unbroken (Astonishing story of Louis Zamperini, who went from juvenile delinquent to Olympic runner, to POW of the Japanese in World War II.)

Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich (You'd think there isn't any more that can be said on the subject, but Evans proves that wrong.)

Nella Last's War (Just before the outbreak of World War II, Britain established the Mass Observation Project, in which ordinary people were asked to write diaries and answer questionnaires about their views on contemporary events.  Nella Last, an ordinary housewife in a seacoast town, wrote a diary that is full of everyday detail, but also reveals her deepest feelings about married life, her children, the war, her country, her neighbors, the role of women and more.)

Now it's your turn . . .

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!