![]() Fleur de Sel is number three, so I still have The Missing Corpse (#4) and The Killing Tide(#5) available in English. ![]() In the meantime, I’ve gone back and read the first of the Dupin mysteries, Death in Brittany, followed by Murder on Brittany Shores. The descriptions of the esoteric fleur-de-sel business were so palpable that I promptly ordered some of the handcrafted Guerande product online. Besides the displaced Parisian Dupin, there are a number of quirky characters and considerable attention paid to food and wine. In any case, these novels are redolent of the mini-Mediterranean climate in Finistère - the end of the earth, as the region is known. ![]() His books are translated not from French, but from German. Jean-Luc’s real name is Jörg Bong (no kidding), and he works at a German publishing house when he’s not visiting his beloved Brittany. A friend pointed out that “Bannalec” is a quintessential Breton name, and indeed it should be because it was handpicked by the German author who hides behind this pseudonym. It began for me with The Fleur de Sel Murders by Jean-Luc Bannalec, featuring the curmudgeonly Commissaire Georges Dupin, but most of all featuring the balmy environs of Brittany’s southwestern coast. There is a personal element of homesickness for me since I lived in that country for 11 years, but I think anyone confined to quarters and unable to visit one of the most-visited nations on the planet can benefit from these armchair sojourns. My own solution is binge-reading mystery series set in France. Many of the book lists are worthy - perhaps too worthy for the distracted state we find ourselves in. Betteredge: “…ere was our quite English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian diamond.The coronavirus lockdown has brought a cornucopia of lists for binge-watching on TV and a fair number of lists for books to read. The detective is invented to throw the light of knowledge on this crepuscular society, whose center is increasingly destabilized by trade, commerce, and financial exchanges with the other strange societies. The drug seems to shoot through the body of the work, and we see through a lurid haze the exoticized/eroticized world of Victorian interiors, landscapes framed by train windows, and night encounters on city streets. This is why the novel is so intoxicating, so atmospheric. Begbie said, Yes and Sergeant Cuff said, No.” Cuff’s passion for roses is much like Holmes’s passion for bees.Ĭollins, who was a close friend of Dickens, wrote the first detective novel, The Moonstone, while he was totally high on laudanum. In between working out the clues and observing suspects, he frequently stops to talk about roses with the gardener “…ith a bottle of Scotch whisky between them,” says Betteredge, “ head over ears in an argument on the growing of roses… As far as I could understand it, the question between them was, whether the white moss rose did, or did not, require to be budded on the dog rose to make it grow well. Like the detectives that follow him, he is eccentric. Sergeant Cuff must make sense of this mess. But the first detective novel, a novel whose essence is a crime and whose mode is the detection related to that crime-a whodunit proper-is Wilkie Collins’s 1868 masterpiece The Moonstone. The inventor of the pure detective form is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe, whose short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published in 1841 and featured an inspector, Dupin. I say almost because its core, its essence, is not a crime, but instead a broken heart. In a series of articles published around 1851 in the journal Household Words, the novelist Charles Dickens wrote about London’s first detective force, which had seven members, one of whom, Inspector Field, inspired the character of Inspector Bucket in what is almost the first detective novel in the history of mankind, Bleak House. ![]() For example, the detective-who in our time is a more common figure than the priest-is born in the 19th century. You will find very little of who you are-how you think, how you consume, how you get high, how you make money-in the world before this long century. If you want to see where your way of mind was born, go to the 19th century, which begins with the French Revolution and ends with the First World War.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |