Tangled Web UK Review June 2008
Bruno, Chief of Police by
Martin Walker
hbk out April 08
Published by Quercus
at £12.99
Martin Walker comes to crime writing from a distinguished career in journalism. Ex-bureau chief in Moscow and European editor in Washington for the Guardian, he has also written several non-fiction works. This book was written in response to a feeling about the area of the Dordogne where he lives, and the contrast between a rural France with all its timeless charms and traditions, and the growing sense of deep cultural, political and economic change in the country.
Benoit Courreges, known as Bruno, has settled into his post as Chief of Police Municipale in the Commune of St Denis easily. An orphan, he feels as though he has found a family. Now he spends his time organising the Liberation Day parade, and helping the locals keep a lookout for EU hygiene officials intent on stopping all those unhygienic traditional ways of producing food in rural France. His actions are not helped by the keen new local chief of the Gendarmerie, Captain Duroc. The commune is populated by the sort of eccentric characters you expect to find. There are two villagers who have refused to speak to each other for fifty years because during the war one joined the Communists and the other de Gaulle’s secret army. Running one of the cafés is a family of Algerian Muslims who fled the war in their own country. And of course, there is the obligatory mad Englishwoman - there are after all 500,000 Britons in rural France. The story could drift on in a Peter Mayle sort of way at this point, but reality intrudes sharply when Karim Al-Bakr’s reclusive grandfather is found murdered with a swastika carved on his chest. The old man fought with France in the Algerian War of Independence, and possesses the Croix-de-Guerre. Suddenly Bruno is faced with possible National Front sentiments rising in the commune, and violent reaction from the Muslim community. Bruno assists the local detectives, who arrive in the form of friend J J Jalipeau, and his new female Inspector, Isabelle Perrault. They begin to track National Front sympathisers back to a pretty blonde girl from Lalinde who Bruno has coached in tennis, and her boy friend Richard, drug taking son of the local doctor. But what finally emerges from the investigation is that all is not as it seems in St Denis.
The novel could be seen as a cynical attempt to press all the marketing buttons related to France all in one go - beautiful location, heart-warming characters, romance (Bruno is of great interest to all the ladies of the village), food and wine. And it is a sort of mixture of A Year in Provence and Inspector Morse. In fact, the opening chapters, as Walker introduces his characters, smacks more of Clochmerle than a crime story. However, he manages to pull it all off. The digressions into the joys of rural produce - even the seduction of Bruno’s palate with English food - do work alongside the more gritty look at long-standing resentments, and feeling of guilt dating back to Vichy France and the Second World War. I am sure Bruno, Chief of Police, will be appearing again soon in another readable tale of rural France.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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