Climate change comes to crime by Martin Walker

 The international bestseller explores how the backdrop of climate change in France has become important to Bruno’s story in his latest Dordogne Mystery.

Sherlock Holmes had his fogs. Hercule Poirot had ‘the chill of an early autumn morning.’ Maigret had those magical April days in Paris ‘when the sun bounced off the Seine.’ And Raymond Chandler had those hot dry Santa Anas ‘that come down through the mountain passes...On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.’

We get climate change. Last summer the surface of the seas around the French and British coasts warmed by as much as five degrees, sending vast shoals of fish fleeing north to cooler waters. Evaporation soared and the westerly winds that carried the sodden air began to dump it as rain once as they reached high ground. And in France, that meant the Massif Central, the ancient volcanoes and sub-Alpine pastures that are the source of every French river from the Loire down to the Spanish border.

So, not for the first time, we had floods. Indeed, we now get them every year, cutting us off from the main road west to Bergerac and the vineyards. We cannot say we weren’t warned. Carved into the stone gateway at Limeuil, a town whose prosperity was built from the trade that boomed where the river Vezere met the much larger Dordogne, are the high points of floods in 1944, 1922 and 1898. They show us that the rivers were forty feet and higher than usual.

The last eighty years saw nothing like that, mainly because of the recurrent dams that have been built all the way up to the Massif, providing us with cheap electricity. But now, year after year, the dams are having to open the sluices to prevent overflows, so we get floods. We’ve had to remove the streetlamps along the quayside, and even evacuate the town’s famous aquarium.

And we get more and more forest fires, more and more days when you can smell them before you see the smoke and you keep an ear tuned to the radio for warnings. It’s almost too hot to stay outside and the water in the swimming pool starts to feel like a bath. Last year, it reached 43 Centigrade (108 degrees Fahrenheit) in my garden in the shade.

We also get hailstorms, so dense that within an hour the table in the courtyard is eight inches deep in hailstone the size of my thumb. We used to get them in late autumn, sometimes early enough to threaten the wine harvest. Now we get them in April and early May, viciously timed to devastate the young grapes on the vines. I have winemaker friends who lost two-thirds of their crop this spring. In the vineyards they say they used to reckon on one bad year in five, but in the last five years we had only one good vintage.

So more and more these days the weather has become a regular feature of my books, almost a character, just as the Perigord itself has become much more than a backdrop for the lives of Bruno, the chief of police of the small town of St Denis. I was hugely fortunate to stumble on this region, home to more prehistoric cave paintings and engravings than anywhere else on earth. Picasso came out of the 18,000-year-old art gallery of the Lascaux cave, saying, ‘We have learned nothing in all these thousands of years.’

The history never stopped. Julius Caesar’s legions fought the Gaul's here and captured a hilltop fort which then became a Roman oppidum, and then one of the guard posts Charlemagne built against Viking raids, and then the English and French battled over the castle for three hundred years. And then the French Catholics took up arms against the Protestants for another bloody century.

On top of all that, the region has become famous as one of the true heartlands of French cuisine, home to foie gras and the sublime black truffles, the confit de canard and the seven different types of strawberries, each protected by an Indication Géographique Protégée. ‘Great food and fine wines, this place is paradise on earth,’ said King Henri IV, the only French monarch to have given his name to a classic dish.

Naturally, therefore, Bruno is as much a cook as a policeman, and these days helps the volunteer firemen to control forest fires and organize evacuations from low ground and protect the town bridges from the floods. He’s not sure yet what he can do about the hailstorms but he’s working on it.

A Grave in the Woods by Martin Walker (Quercus Books) Out Now)

The long arm of history reaches into the present in Bruno's latest case when three sets of bones are discovered, buried deep in the woods outside the Dordogne town of St Denis. It appears that the remains have lain there since World War 2. Bruno must investigate who the bones belong to and whether their burial amounts to a war crime. Bruno has other concerns too. After weeks of heavy autumn rain, the normally tranquil Dordogne River has risen to record levels, compromising the upriver dams that control the Vezere that flows through St Denis, bringing the threat of a devastating flood. As ever, Bruno must rely on his wits, tenacity, and people skills to ensure that past wrongs do not result in present violence, and to keep his little town and its inhabitants safe from harm.

You can find Martin Walker on Facebook.

Two writers in Paris by Luisa Etxenike (Aka Antonia Lassa)

The idea of ​​creating a heteronym happened in Paris during one of those wonderful walks I like to take around the city. In a world that is tending more and more towards (re)building borders, my first impulse was linked to the desire to break them down, to go beyond them, to become an explorer of my own writing, a joyous, adventurous explorer. I wanted to have a go at a writing style and literary genre that were totally new to me.

My heteronym was going to be that of a Parisian woman. So, I immediately looked for a name: Antonia Lassa, which has its origins in my maternal grandmother's name. She also needed an address: Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, in Paris of course. And then a profession. She would be an oenologist, an expert in understanding wine, in interpreting it and “guessing” what was to be found in each glass. This knowledge was going to relate closely with her way of understanding literature.

In addition, I endowed her with one desire above all: to write crime novels.

And just like that Antonia Lassa was created; as an author she is different from me, so we were able to start a up dialogue. While we were walking through Paris, I asked her why she had chosen to write crime fiction. "Because”, she replied, “crime fiction is real life, or rather, life itself, with all its light and darkness. And since the genre focuses more on the darkness, it helps us appreciate the light even better.”

Antonia also told me the novels she was going to write would deal with societal issues in a close, detailed way. She would also focus on aspects of identity and intimacy in a political and ethical way. What she wanted to create, like a good wine, were stories full of multiple tones, aromas, flavours but well blended... and that contained mysteries to solve with our five senses. She wants to invite readers to get involved in this literary sampling: to see, hear, smell, savour the mystery... and get close to it. Then suddenly, with a big smile, she added: “Speaking of touch… I just had an idea for my first book. It has to do with the skin…”.

This was how our first walk together ended. But we continue to talk on a regular basis. Recently she told me that her first novel, Skin Deep, was finished, and she started to tell me all about it:

The mystery with which the story begins is closely linked to the notions of place and space. An elderly millionairess who is staying at a suite in the most luxurious hotel in Biarritz, just like every summer, appears brutally murdered in a shabby apartment she had rented. What reasons had led her to the underbelly of that elegant city, as Inspector Canonne who’s in charge of the crime investigation calls it? The first clues point to some sort of sexual motive, although the victim is more than eighty years, and identifying her lover then becomes the police’s number one priority.

This search will be the start of a mystery that will bring with it other enigmas that will be marked by the contrast between a world of light: wealth, power, art, elegant neighbourhoods, and a world of shadows, in life’s underbelly, where crime seeks out spaces where it will go unpunished. There’s also a strong contrast in the different lines of enquiry because it’s not only the police in Biarritz who deal with the case. Singular private detective Albert Larten (another who breaks down borders...) will also carry out his own investigation from Paris, which will force him to travel not only through the streets of that city with the meticulousness of a wine taster (wine is one of his passions and he writes about this is a blog entitled The Wine Detective), but he will also have to roam through different cities in France: Bayonne, Bordeaux, Arcachon...

Larten doesn't mind having to travel, on the contrary, he enjoys the constant movement. Because this singular detective’s specialty is being in perpetual motion and it’s why he has set up his office in a mobile home.

Skin Deep's intrigue moves relentlessly not only through Paris and other cities in the southwest of France, but also through the delicate contours of the body, through the silhouettes of desire and the complicated territories of prejudice, ambition, violence.

At the beginning of the novel, we learn that the murderer has drawn some strange signs and symbols on the skin of his victim, an elderly woman murdered in a shabby apartment, in Biarritz. To solve the crime, the investigators will have to decipher the meaning of these markings and to do so they must observe her skin in detail. For it is in the skin, with all its extraordinary expressiveness, that the answers lie.

Skin Deep by Antonia Lassa (Trans Dr Jacky Collins (Corylus Books) Out Now.

When police arrest eccentric loner Émile Gassiat for the murder of a wealthy woman in a shabby seaside apartment in Biarritz, Inspector Canonne is certain he has put the killer behind bars. Now he just needs to prove it. But he hasn’t reckoned with the young man’s friends, who bring in lawyer-turned-investigator Larten to head for the desolate out-of-season south-west of France to dig deep into what really happened. Larten’s hunt for the truth takes him back to the bustle of Paris as he seeks to demonstrate that the man in prison is innocent, despite all the evidence – and to uncover the true killer behind a series of bizarre murders.

More information about the author and her books can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @letxenike

Martin Walker on Finding your Roots

 

Every crime writer needs roots; a place that can become a character in itself. Sherlock Holmes had Victorian London: a hansom cab rolling through the fog; cheerful street urchins and opium dens in Limehouse. Maigret had his bistro and Donna Leon has Venice. Raymond Chandler had Los Angeles before it became Hollywood and Jack Reacher has his Greyhound bus. 

Before I knew it, the Perigord had taken over my work and become the core character that slowly but surely embraced everything. The painted caves of our Cro-Magnon ancestors and the ancient castles became essential props to the sense of time and place that define the region to this day. 

Wines seeped in at first to accompany the food but then the town vineyard was born in my mind and the splendid wines of the Pécharmant and of Montravel and Monbazillac became an amiable flood. Soon it was followed by the hunters and the wild boar and venison that they roasted for communal feasts. Then the horses became characters in their own right and the basset hounds began to steal the show, while the medieval fortresses began to clamour for their own special place in the stories I wanted to tell. 

The more I learned about the region the more it began to shape my novels, from the Abbot of Sarlat who who was murdered by a crossbow bolt while preaching at his own pulpit to the twelve centuries of the half-ruined castle of Commarque, founded in Charlemagne’s day and a direct descendant of that same first 8th century Count who eleven centuries later became a Resistance leader who was taken by the Gestapo to die in a concentration camp in 1944. 

Maybe a better writer could have withstood this constant, insidious pressure of the place where I was crafting my stories of Bruno, the local policeman of the small town of St Denis. But Bruno was never just a cop. He had served ten years in the French army, been wounded in Sarajevo while wearing the blue helmet of a United Nations peacekeeper. He spends his spare time teaching the local kids to play tennis and rugby, is a member of two local hunting clubs and relishes his extra duties as impresario of the free concerts his town presents on the river bank in summer. 

And here is the strange thing. Bruno was inspired by my friend and tennis partner Pierrot. Jean-Jacques, the chief detective of the department, was inspired by my neighbour Raymond, a veteran captain of Gendarmes. Jack Crimson, the retired British diplomat with intelligence connections, was inspired by another friend who had better remain nameless. Gilles, the journalist for Paris Match, was drawn from another friend and the mayor in my stories was inspired by the two splendid mayors of my town. From different political parties they each became friends. Hubert, who runs the local wine store, was drawn from my friend Julien Montfort, the wine merchant with his own vineyard with whom I make the Cuvée Bruno wine of which we are so proud. 

But the women in my novels have no such inspiration in real life. There is no ambitious Isabelle, building a magnificent career in French intelligence; no Pamela from Scotland with her disastrous marriage to an English banker behind her, to run the local riding school. There is no real-life model for Fabiola, the local doctor, nor for Florence, the divorced mother of twins whom Bruno rescued from a wretched job to become a respected teacher in St Denis. 

Somehow, the women I know are too elusive, too mysterious and unique ever to be drawn into the invented characters of my novels. There are women in my life; my mother, Dorothy McNeil from the Hebridean island of Barra; and Julia, my adored and beautiful wife of more than four decades, a mavellous food writer and magnificent cook. There are our daughters, Kate the Formula One journalist, and Fanny, the poet. But I’d never dare try to insert them into my novels. There are female relatives and friends whose company and intelligence I relish and admire, but they all remain unique to themselves, unfathomable in their privacy which I shrink from trying to invade. 

Finally, there is the town I call St Denis, which is mostly drawn from the small town to which we can walk on market day. But I have imported an ancient church from elsewhere. I have recalled into life a local café that used to make the finest croissants but which has long since changed hands. And I have invented a genial old priest who is wise, devout but utterly understanding of the various flawed and absent faiths of his neighbours. I have even dreamed up a local restaurant that I wish truly existed. But given all the gifts that my Périgord has given me, that might be too much to ask. 

To Kill a Troubadour by Martin Walker (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

It is summer in St Denis and Bruno is busy organising the annual village concert. He's hired a local Perigord folk group, Les Troubadours, to perform their latest hit 'A Song for Catalonia'. But when the song unexpectedly goes viral, the Spanish government, clamping down on the Catalonian bid for independence, bans Les Troubadours from performing it. The timing couldn't be worse, and Bruno finds himself under yet more pressure when a specialist sniper's bullet is found in a wrecked car near Bergerac. The car was reportedly stolen on the Spanish frontier and the Spanish government sends warning that a group of nationalist extremists may be planning an assassination in France. Bruno immediately suspects that Les Troubadours and their audience might be in danger. Bruno must organise security and ensure that his beloved town and its people are safe - the stakes are high for France's favourite policeman.

More information about Martin Walker and his books can be found on his website. You can also find him on Facebook.

The Threat from Within by Mara Timon

 

A man enters a café with his right hand dug deep into his trouser pocket. It’s the way my first book, City of Spies begins and the way that during WW2, a Special Operations Executive agent would silently let his contacts know that the Germans were onto him. They had turned the agent into an unwilling trap, waiting to see who would approach him, widening their net before making arrests.

On 27 August 1942, SOE agent Peter Churchill (code-name “Raoul”) was parachuted into the south of France to organise the “Spindle" network. It began to attract other Resistance members and SOE agents. In early spring ’43, SOE agent Francis Cammaerts (code-name “Roger”) briefly visited and assessed the network as likely to be penetrated by the Germans. He was right, as the network soon found out.

Churchill’s courier, Odette Sansom (code-name “Lise”) was approached by a man who called himself Henri. Over a civilised cup of acorn coffee, he pleasantly explained that he was working for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, but claimed he was disillusioned. He said he was working with a contact she had, André Marsac, and although Marsac had been arrested they were trying to bring about the end of the war. He even showed her a letter where Marsac seemingly urged her to work with him.

Sensing something was off, Odette politely declined Henri/Bardet’s offer, informed SOE headquarters on Baker Street.

She was right about that. Hugo Bleicher, a senior non-commissioned officer in the Abwehr had feigned disillusionment to get close to Marsac and Marsac’s associate Roger Bardet. Bleicher arrested Marsac and persuaded Bardet to work for him as a double agent (Henri).

Here Odette made a very brave but very large error: she disobeyed SOE’s orders to flee. Instead, she remained and waited for Churchill. Bleicher arrested them and both were tortured before being sent to concentration camps, Odette to Ravenbruck and Churchill to Sachsenhausen.

Bardet didn’t stop there. He betrayed the Inventor network, leading to the arrests in late ‘43 of its organiser, wireless operator, and courier (all of whom were executed), resulting in the collapse of the network. In ’44, betrayed the head of the Donkeyman circuit, whom Bleicher also arrested, and subsequently executed.

It might read like an espionage thriller, but this was a true story; one with tragic consequences.

Who can you trust, when you’re behind enemy lines?

This is the strapline for my second book, Resistance, which has an element of betrayal from within the Resistance. While the Germans might not have been effective with their agents sent to Britain (all were captured, some turned to work for the Allies), but German Intelligence networks were incredibly effective within France.

In City of Spies as well as Resistance, double agents infiltrated Resistance networks. While the people I described in my books were fiction, unfortunately people like Bardet who were willing to betray their country and their comrades were all too real.

And if a SOE agent or Resistance fighter couldn’t be turned into a willing double-agent through money or threats, they could be used as a trap to attract others. 

Or they could be tortured and perhaps give up a name of someone else.

Knowledge of the location of an allied drop, could result not only in arrests and executions, as well as the Germans taking custody of the goods or personnel involved in that drop.

So, imagine it’s 1943 and you’re a new agent for Special Operations Executive. Maybe you were recruited because you spoke French, or maybe you volunteered. On Day 1 of your training, you are told that only half of you are expected to survive. You look at the men and women around you. You’re apprehensive but remain in place. 

You spend the next months training. You learn weaponry and weaponless combat. You learn to blow things up, how to follow someone and how to hide in plain sight. You learn a number of skills that you never dreamed of, and then you’re sent behind enemy lines.

Maybe you went by ship, maybe you parachuted out of a plane, or maybe you landed in a Lysander or some other small aircraft. Regardless, you hope that the reception committee hasn’t been compromised. 

If you survive getting to France, you might start forging links with other members of the Resistance. Some you tentatively begin to trust.

But trust is a commodity you can’t afford.

Because who can you trust, when you’re behind enemy lines, and not all your enemies are German?

Resistance by Mara Timon (Bonnier Zaffre) Out Now.

Three women. One mission. Enemies everywhere. May 1944. When spy Elisabeth de Mornay, code name Cecile, notices a coded transmission from an agent in the field does not bear his usual signature, she suspects his cover has been blown - something that is happening with increasing frequency. With the situation in Occupied France worsening and growing fears that the Resistance has been compromised, Cecile is ordered behind enemy lines. Having rendezvoused with her fellow agents, Leonie and Dominique, together they have one mission: help the Resistance destabilise German operations to pave the way for the Normandy landings. But the life of a spy is never straightforward, and the in-fighting within the Resistance makes knowing who to trust ever more difficult. With their lives on the line, all three women will have to make decisions that could cost them everything - for not all their enemies are German.

More information about Mara Timon can be found o her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @MaraTimon and on Facebook.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her by Jérôme Leroy

 

Two or Three things I know about her is a film by Jean-Luc Godard, released in 1967. For those of you who haven’t seen it, this film tells about a young woman who is a mother and also an occasional prostitute.

She lives in one of those large suburban complexes around Paris, built in great numbers in the 1960s in France. This young woman is not really forced into prostitution because of poverty or that kind of thing. For her, it is just a way of spending time and meeting people in those places where people do not meet people anymore.

How can people react in a normal way when they are piled up one above the other in thousands? A British writer whom I admire a lot, JG Ballard tells about this phenomenon in one of his novels, Great Rise, published in the mid 70s. And there is no denying this phenomenon hit all of Europe. Capitalism arranged with authoritarianism all the aspects of daily life in order to increase workers’ cost-effectiveness while at the same time improving its means of control and surveillance.

In Two or three things I know about her, the ‘she’ both means the young woman but also the city and its spreading suburb. There is a sentence by Godard when he sums up his approach and which I particularly like ‘when the skirts of a city are lifted, the sex can be seen’.

That sentence also reflects perfectly, I think, the description of the work of the roman noir writer. The writer must be indecent: show what is hidden while everyone knows it is there.

Actually, who killed who? is not a question I am interested in. In Little Rebel, I lift up the city’s skirts and I show that in reality everyone kills everyone. This is the difference between what we call in France the detective novel on the one hand and the roman noir on the other. The detective novel acts as a sedative, a tranquilizer. At the end the reader is reassured. Everything goes back to normal. On the contrary, the roman noir shows that order doesn’t exist. Capitalism such as shown in Godard’s or Ballard’s work has led to a total, cruel and inhumane chaos which in a hypocritical way keeps the appearance of normality.

So the skirts of the city must be lifted. The writer must not be a tranquilizer, the writer must scare, cause unease even outrage the public. The writer must be of bad taste.

And yet the writer must make people laugh too.

In this regard, I have a master as far as the roman noir is concerned. His name is Jean-Patrick Manchette. I think his books are translated into English. He is the father of what we call in France the néo-polar, born after May 1968. But Manchette is above all a great writer because he understood that the néo-polar without humour becomes a boring, lesson–giver catechism. 

You must read Le Petit Bleu de la Côte Ouest (West Coast Blues) to understand for example the degree of alienation of the upper middle-class during the 70s

In Little Rebel, I am not a lesson-giver. I just give a snapshot of France in the 2010s-2020s. a paranoid country afraid of everything and sometimes rightfully: indeed, terrorism kills but each time antiterrorist laws limit more and more people’s liberties. Education, something we have been proud of for a long time, is now a wreck, except for the rich (one might think it is Britain). And my book is a direct tribute to Manchette, up to his behaviourist style.

However, I remain an incurable romantic in so far as I think poetry can save the world. Poetry you read, poetry you write or try to write. For me Rimbaud is as important as Marx or Guy Debord. Rimbaud’s motto is ‘ Change life’. And it is becoming an emergency right now, isn’t it? If life doesn’t change between viruses and climate change, soon there will be no more life…

Well, life is beautiful, isn’t it? Real life, I mean. Life where everyone can go to the beach, dance, listen to the Rolling Stones singing ’Time is on my side’ and write poems instead of romans noirs.

Little Rebel by Jérôme Leroy (Corylus Books) Out Now

Divided along so many social fault lines, a city in the west of France is a tinderbox of anger and passion.As the tension grows, things go badly wrong as a cop is killed and a terror cell is scattered across the city. A school on the deprived side of the city is caught up in the turmoil as students, their teacher and a visiting children’s author are locked down.
Making his first appearance in an English translation, Jérôme Leroy gives us a subtle and sardonic perspective on the shifts taking place in politics and society in this disturbing novella.

Martin Walker on his new Dordogne novel, ‘The Coldest Case.’

 

No crime writer could be more fortunate in a neighbour, and not only because we share each evening the sacred French ritual of the p’tit apéro; a glass of Ricard made cloudy with water, or a splash of crème de cassisin a glass of white wine, or from time to time a good malt scotch. Raymond, in his seventies, is a retired captain of gendarmes, who served a stint on the security detail of former President Jacques Chirac. He has endless stories about life as a young gendarme in Paris in 1968, or as a station chief in Lorraine, on the German border, or running a team of a hundred gendarmes in sight of the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. 

But there’s one story that nags at him, the case he never solved. A hunter out with his dog one day in the forest that forms the boundary between the Périgord and the Limousin found his dog scratching and pulling at the bones of a human hand. The body had been buried there for close to a year. It was wearing only a T-shirt and despite delving into the earth beneath there was no sign of a bullet. Decomposition meant that there was little the forensic experts, in those days before DNA, could say about the cause of death. The teeth were perfect so dental records could not help. There were no scratches on the ribs to suggest a stabbing.

Raymond secured the authorisation of a friendly magistrate, removed the head from the body, took it to the kitchens of the Gendarme HQ in Limoges, and cooked the flesh away. He was able to include that the man had been killed by a heavy blow to the head with an army surplus trenching tool, popular with campers. But the scent released by his efforts provoked outrage in the neighbourhood. The mayor came, followed by local shopkeepers, to complain. Armed with his magistrate’s order Raymond was able to persevere and to pursue his enquiries for months and even years, across France and elsewhere in Europe. But was never able to identify the man. A photograph of the skull, which he named Oscar, went with him to every new assignment and when we first met I asked Raymond about the photo that he kept, fixed with magnets, on the door of his fridge.

It was a very cold case and one that Raymond never forgot. But then one day, the nearby National Museum of Prehistory held a special exhibition on the work of a remarkable woman artist, Elisabeth Daynès, who specialised in recreating a face from a skull. The face she made from the skull of Tutenkhamen at the Cairo museum had made the cover of National Geographic. Her pioneering reconstruction of the faces of prehistoric Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon humans from caves in our valley of the River Vézère, made a considerable stir in France. And it inspired me to write ‘The Coldest Case,’ with a pupil of Daynès giving us at last a convincing image of Oscar’s face.

From there, I thought that at last DNA could give us a clearer time of death and help trace any living relatives. But then other questions arose. Why had Oscar’s disappearance never been reported? What was happening at the time of death in the forest region where the body was found? Was there a local festival or concert that might attract campers. One interesting point that Raymond recalled was that there were signs of other campers, a latrine and a buried rubbish pit at the site near where Oscar had been found. And it had been a long, hot and very dry summer, which had sucked all the moisture from the earth and made it easier for the dog to smell and unearth the body. We have had more and more such summers lately, bringing us forest fires that have our emergency services mounting regular exercises on evacuation and buying new aircraft designed to drop flame retardants. 

Little by little, and thanks to many conversations with Raymond over our p’tit apéro, the outline of the novel took shape. Some new characters were required, a fireman or two, the pupil of Madame Daynès who built up Oscar’s face from the bones, and perhaps the DNA might lead a modern investigator to a still-living relative of Oscar. 

And of course the key question is always what kind of meals might Bruno cook while pursuing his researches?

The Coldest Case by Martin Walker (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

Bruno Courreges is Chief of Police of the lovely town of St Denis in the Dordogne. His main wish is to keep the local people safe and his town free from crime. But crime has a way of finding its way to him. For thirty years, Bruno's boss, Chief of Detectives Jalipeau, known as J-J, has been obsessed with his first case. It was never solved and Bruno knows that this failure continues to haunt J-J. A young male body was found in the woods near St Denis and never identified. For all these years, J-J has kept the skull as a reminder. He calls him 'Oscar'. Visiting the famous pre-history museum in nearby Les Eyzies, Bruno sees some amazingly life-like heads expertly reconstructed from ancient skulls. He suggests performing a similar reconstruction on Oscar as a first step towards at last identifying him. An expert is hired to start the reconstruction and the search for Oscar's killer begins again in earnest.

More information about Martin Walker and Bruno Courreges, Chief of Police can be found on his website.

Picture © Martin Walker

BAD TURN: Charlie Fox is on the loose in Europe by Zoë Sharp

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about writing the Charlie Fox books is that they are not tied to one location. A part of me can see the attraction of a familiar locale and I know it might be a good idea to do this. After all, tours of Rebus’s Edinburgh, Morse’s Oxford, or Aimée Leduc’s Paris are undoubtedly popular.

But every time I sit down to write the next instalment in this series, deciding where she’s going to be heading off to is one of the things that keeps me hooked. The very nature of Charlie’s job in close protection means she has to be minutely aware of her surroundings. I take it as a challenge to try to weave in as much of the ever-changing dynamic between Charlie and her environment as I can into the fabric of the story.

For BAD TURN, number 13 in the series, I wanted a real European setting. I took Charlie to a bodyguard training school in Germany for one of the early books, HARD KNOCKS, and on a bikers’ fast trip around Ireland in ROAD KILL, but this time out I decided it was high time she made a return to mainland Europe.

I’d driven down to the southern area of France just before starting BAD TURN, and the scarcity of both people and other vehicles once we got away from the cities really set my imagination going. Tailing someone without other traffic to use as cover, for example, would present its own difficulties for Charlie.

The open agricultural land around the Midi-Pyrénées, with its open fields of sunflowers and occasional stunning pieces of modern architecture like the Millau Bridge, took my breath away.

There seemed to be a lot of half-derelict farmhouses that made my DIY fingers twitch to get stuck into them but provided ideal places of cover and concealment, as did the swathes of woodland.

But when I visited several of the magnificent local chateaux, including castles that had been in the same family line for a thousand years, I knew I’d found one of my main locations for the book. I borrowed aspects of a couple of them and created the Chateau de Bourdillon, complete with French aristocrat in residence. The fact he happened to have a somewhat unusual occupation was beside the point…

And then, of course, there was Italy. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Tuscany and Umbria and couldn’t resist BAD TURN visiting some areas that were very familiar to me, as well as others where I had to wing it a little more.

I borrowed the small island of Isole Minore on Lake Trasimeno, for example. In reality, the island is state owned and uninhabited but when you create your own version of the world, you are allowed to bend the rules. I made it the home of a wealthy Italian with a particular wish for privacy. I placed on the island a combination of abandoned monasteries and palaces for him to be restoring. Of course, there would be more reconstruction work to be done after Charlie left than there was when she arrived…

With her love of big motorcycles, Charlie’s no stranger to high-speed chases but I thought I’d take a different tack this time. It didn’t mean I couldn’t have some fun—as well as adding tension—by putting her in a small and somewhat underpowered vehicle like a Fiat Cinquecento. (And if you’re a fan of Fiat 500s, you’d better read that bit with your eyes closed. Let’s just say it doesn’t end well for that poor little car.)

Reintroducing Charlie to a European setting for BAD TURN was quite a ride and I’m already planning book #14. Where will she be next time around? Well, having spent a number of books working overseas, I think she might be ready to return home to the UK. The only question is, will the UK be ready for Charlie Fox?

Bad Turn by Zoë Sharp

Charlie has quit her job in close protection, been turned out of her apartment, and is apparently out of luck.  House-sitting in rural New Jersey has to be the pits—TV and TV dinners. A far cry from Iraq... Bulgaria... Afghanistan. Unlucky or not, she happens to be around at the right time to foil a violent kidnap attempt on Helena, wife of billionaire arms dealer, Eric Kincaid.  Kincaid offers her a job looking after Helena. The rumours about Kincaid’s business empire say he’s gone over to the dark side, but Charlie is in no position to be fussy. And protecting people against those who want to do them harm is what she’s good at. But when the threats against the Kincaids escalate, and then follow the couple over to Europe, Charlie’s really going to have to up her game. It’s time to take the fight to the enemy.  Charlie’s at her best putting an end to trouble. Now she must learn to strike first. And hope that the Kincaids don’t discover the secret she’s been keeping from them, right from the start.

Read the first three chapters of BAD TURN

https://www.zoesharp.com/books/bad-turn-opening-chapters/

BAD TURN is published in ebook, mass-market paperback, hardcover and Large Print editions on September 27 2019. For more information visit www.ZoeSharp.com

Exclusive Bruno Short Story

BRUNO AND THE CHOCOLATE WAR

A short story by Martin Walker

The prosperity of the small French town of St Denis in the Périgord had rested for seven

centuries upon its weekly market, the oldest and largest in the region. Its continued success and security were therefore a priority for the local policeman, Bruno Courrèges. He was usually to be seen patrolling the town’s two main squares and the long street that joined them shortly after seven each Tuesday morning when the stalls were being set out.

Bruno always enjoyed watching as the stalls were loaded with cheeses and salamis, fruits and vegetables, ducks and geese, fish, oysters, mushrooms and chickens. Between them were other stalls that measured the changes in French as well as tourist tastes. Only one still offered the traditional aprons and housecoats that once clad the farmers’ wives. But several sold comic T-shirts, miniskirts and the kind of metal-studded high-heeled boots that once were associated with particular tastes. More and more of them offered organic soaps and obscure teas that Bruno had never heard of, hand-carved wooden toys, used books and garish covers for mobile phones.

Bruno knew most of the stallholders well, and his patrol was punctuated by handshakes with the men, and the bise of greeting to women of all ages. And the stallholders usually bent down to stroke Bruno’s basset hound, Balzac, or offer the dog some tiny treat from their stalls. Sometimes in summer when the usual ranks of regulars were swollen by new merchants, there were arguments that Bruno had to manage over whose stall should go where, or challenges to the accuracy of Fat Jeanne’s tape measure. A woman of almost spherical shape with a booming laugh, she even referred to herself by the nickname by which everyone knew her.

Jeanne was la mère du marché, the town employee who collected five euros for each metre of frontage for every stall. She stashed the money in an ancient leather bag that she carried securely across her ample body. One centimetre over the metre was acceptable but anything over two centimetres was not and Jeanne would then demand payment for a second metre. Bruno recalled with a smile one salesman offering discount tools who used one of his own saws to carve off an excess sliver of wood no wider than his finger. Among Bruno’s various duties was to escort Jeanne to the bank just before it closed at noon and deposit the cash in the town’s account. On the busy days of the tourist season she would bank over a thousand euros. In the depths of winter, it fell to two or three hundred.

Bruno kept a watchful eye on Jeanne and her cash and on any strangers around the market. One morning in November he spotted an unfamiliar African youngster loading a trolley from a van he recognized. Bruno stopped, greeted the youth and shook hands.

‘Where’s Léopold?’ he asked.

‘He’s already at the stall,’ came the reply. ‘I’m his nephew, Cali, down here from Paris to learn the market trade.’

‘What are you selling?’

The square metal tins and boxes of small plastic cups were something new. Léopold usually sold cheap T-shirts and sunglasses, leather belts and bolts of African cloth.

‘African coffees and chocolate,’ Cali replied with a friendly smile. ‘It was my idea to try something new. Uncle Léo sells almost nothing this time of year.’

Bruno nodded. Léopold usually stayed until the last market before Christmas and then

flew home to Senegal for two or three months, visiting family and buying new stock for the next season. Bruno wished the young man luck and walked on to complete his circuit before seeking out Léopold’s stall, where an electric kettle was steaming behind the counter, plugged into one of the sockets that St Denis provided – for an extra fee.

Léopold was an old friend, a regular at the market years before Bruno’s arrival, and he’d once helped Bruno make an arrest during a brief period of trouble between Chinese vendors and the traditional Vietnamese food stalls they were trying to replace. The big Senegalese in his flowing robes opened his arms to hug Bruno and the two men brushed cheeks. Bruno could see that several tins of coffee plus three cafetières, plastic cups and sachets of sugar now took up a third of Léopold’s two-metre-wide stall. The tins carried labels to show the coffee inside came from all over Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Ghana. Against each tin stood a block of dark chocolate from that country. A hand-lettered sign announced that the coffee was one euro a cup, which was cheaper than the one euro thirty cents most cafés now charged.

‘None of your coffee comes from Senegal,’ said Bruno.

‘People have just started growing it there and I hope we’ll have some next month,’ said Léopold. 

‘Try a cup of one of the other brands.’

Bruno chose the Ivory Coast, since he’d been stationed there for several months while in the French army. He still remembered the taste of the coarse local coffee, the robusta version that he and most French people had grown up drinking before the finer arabica coffee began to take over the market.

‘On the house,’ said Cali, who had joined them.

Bruno grinned and shook his head, placing a single euro coin on one of the tins. ‘You know you have to give Jeanne an extra two euros if you’re using electricity,’ he said. ‘

‘And what do you do for water?’

Cali pointed to a large plastic bidon holding twenty litres that was stashed behind the stall. ‘And I’ll rinse out the cafetières at the public fountain. We have it all planned out.’

The complete Bruno and the Chocolate War story can be read here.

Football anyone?

Being a writer from a distant, remote island somewhere in the Atlantic, I often get asked about facts and myths regarding my country. I am in general very proud of my country as it is quite an accomplishment for Icelanders having been able to survive in such harsh elements throughout the ages. But that is nothing compared to how proud I was when our national football team qualified for the European cup almost two years ago. Not only qualified but also got really close to winning, as I prefer to look at it; ending up in the top 8 and beating England on the way, as some people may remember. This was a great triumph for such a small nation. I was of course “all in” right from the start. I spent the summer in France where the competition was held and I went to see the team. When we qualified for the last 16, I was back in Iceland so I had to fly back to France to see the famous England game. And then I had to fly to France for the third time to see Iceland play in the last 8, where we did eventually lose to France (but we actually won the second half 2-1, though). Everything was about football!  And then the unbelievable thing just happened! We qualified for the World Cup, the smallest nation ever to do so! I've already bought tickets for all of Iceland's matches there, so there you go…next summer I will be in Russia. Good luck trying to reach me regarding anything else than football!

Whiteout by Ragnar Jónasson published by Orenda Books

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kálfshamarvík.  Did she jump, or dd something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the old house on the remote rocky outcrop?  Wth Winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thór Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost teir lives in this same spot, twenty-five years earlier.  As the dark history and the secrets of the village are unveiled, and the death toll begins to rise, the Siglufjordur detectives must race against the clocks to find the killer, before another tragedy takes place.