Plus ça change, plus how I spent the hurricane

Léo Malet, it is said, could never quite take crime fiction seriously, and indeed Les Rats de Montsouris, part of his Nestor Burma series, is full of parodistic touches.

One of these is just as relevant today as it was upon the novel's initial publication fifty-seven years ago, and not just because I finished reading the book while waiting for Hurricane Sandy to have its way with the Mid-Atlantic States:

"The storm came to nothing, like a project for tax reform."

***

How did I spend the hurricane? Glad you asked:

"All public transportation was cancelled, all bridges were closed, and the paper put a bunch of us up at the Loew's hotel. So I spent the night high above Philadelphia, with a fine view down Market Street east to the Delaware River and beyond ("Beyond" is, in this case, Camden, New Jersey, but that couldn't drown out the moody tenor saxophone soundtrack playing in my head. Besides. I couldn't see much; it was nighttime.) My room had two beds and a day bed, perfect for lounging. All that was missing was a pouting babe.

"I felt like Bruce Wayne pensively regarding the twinkling lights of Gotham City waiting for the bat signal (and really: a hurricane would be a fine time for the Riddler and his gang to pull a heist, as long as they didn't plan to make their getaway by bus.) I could even have pretended that one of the two bathrobes that came with the room was a smoking jacket. Instead, I went down to the bar for a good gripe session with my colleagues."

To recapitulate: I had a drink (at my own expense; my company did not cover bar tabs or incidentals), I spent the night in a historic building, and I spoke openly with my colleagues, a welcome change from the cryptic remarks and raised eyebrows by which we communicate when non-copy editors are around. Could have been worse.

***

I can now happily report that the house is in good shape, at no risk of losing the coveted Good Mousekeeping Spiel of Approval ™.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Paris throught the eyes of Léo Malet and Nestor Burma

Léo Malet was a singer, a poet, an anarchist, a surrealist, a prisoner of war, a novelist. and a crime writer.

Perhaps his surrealist leanings gave rise on the first page of The Rats of Montsouris to the odd juxtaposition of

“It was one of those summer nights we don’t get often enough. Just the way I like them: dry and stifling”.

and

“The rue du Cange was damp and torpid. … No other sound disturbed the clammy quiet.”

Or maybe a spot of slapdash writing or mistranslation was responsible. But no matter; the lapse (or quirk) appears isolated.

The Rats of Montsouris (1955) is somewhere around the seventeenth of Malet’s many novels featuring the phenomenally popular Nestor Burma, a relatively rare private investigator in French crime fiction commonly called a counterpart to Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, or both. Something more than half the books were among what Malet called his "New Mysteries of Paris," each set in one of the city's districts, or arrondissements, the series a nod to Eugène Sue's nineteenth-century "Mysteries of Paris." (Cara Black continues the tradition today in her Aimée Leduc mysteries.)

Burma likes to wander the streets, sometimes with his beautiful secretary, sometimes into artists' studios and surrealists' ateliers. But the real attraction to far is the zest with which Burma carries out his wanderings, exclaiming with wonder at a part of the city he had never seen before despite his long residence or remarking, perhaps sardonically, about some monument or public square's best feature.

I'm along for the ride, and Malet must have done something right; Nestor Burma has enjoyed a sixty- or seventy-year career in novels, short stories, television, movies, and, more recently, graphic novel adaptations by Jacques Tardi. Has any fictional P.I. not named Holmes had a longer career?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Cara Black

The author of the Aimée Leduc series of mysteries, each set in Paris and named for a district of the city, posted a complimentary comment here last week. In return, I thought I'd investigate her work. Murder in the Marais, the first in the series, delves into ugly details of World War II and unsettling parallels in 1990s France.

I know that much from reviews of the novel, which I've just begun reading. What I know first hand, from the opening chapters, is that Black has a nice touch for atmospheric dialogue. Leduc's early encounter with the old man who hires her for the job that sets the plot in motion has an edgy intensity. She's reluctant; he never answers her questions directly, communicating the urgency of his request instead with appeals to the memory of Leduc's father. The indirection works, and it captures what many of us must have felt: annoyance at a persistent petitioner, and annoyance at ourselves for somehow being moved, despite ourselves, to hear the petitioner out.

I mentioned that each book in the series is named for a district in Paris: Murder in Belleville, Murder in Clichy, etc. I wonder if Black took her cue from the pioneering French crime fiction writer Léo Malet, who planned to set one book featuring his anti-hero detective Nestor Burma in each of Paris' arrondissements, or districts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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