My Bouchercon panels: Paul Charles, youse two perverts, and a question for readers

Paul Charles' Northern Ireland, or at least the version of it in his current novel, is different from the ones in much recent Northern Ireland crime writing, because its setting is a village with a population of 617, rather than Belfast's bleak, violent streets.

The book is The Lonesome Heart is Angry, and the opening chapters suggest that Charles loves his setting and knows how to create a convincing picture of village life.

Two brothers, farmers and twins, have reached their late twenties and have decided the time has come to marry. Times being hard, however, they can afford just one wife between them.  Here's part of the ensuing dialogue with the village matchmaker, explaining gently while that sort of thing is just not done:

"‘Maybe you’ll be introduced, find an excuse to say something, just make that vital connection. So next time you see her, no matter where it might be, you’ll have the confidence to talk to her a bit more. ... You might ask one of those hypothetical questions, you know, “Em, you know, so and so, well, em, I was thinking: do you know what would happen if I … There’s this friend of mine and he really likes her and he was thinking, and I said I would check for him, so do you think if he asked her out, you know, would she go, you know, out with him?” And the friend will probably answer, “Oh yes – where were you thinking of taking her to?” 

"‘Then you ask her out. You go for a walk, you talk a lot ... and maybe, just maybe, after a couple of years you will discuss marriage. ... But it’s important, vitally important, that the early stages are as natural as humanly possible. Do youse understand that?’ 

"The twins nodded. 

"‘So at what point in this procedure were youse two perverts going to tell the sorry lass that she’d be sleeping with both of you?’"

That reminds me a bit of Pierre Magnan's crime novels of rural France for its amusing sexual slant, but especially for the delicious, slow pace with which the scene builds up to its punch line (I omitted parts of the exchange for reasons of length.) I look forward to more.

What are your favorite recent crime stories with rural or village settings? And why? Does country life get a fair shake in crime fiction? Comments are especially welcome from readers familiar with village life. 

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Paul Charles will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The panel happens at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Pierre Magnan, R.I.P.

News has belatedly reached Detectives Beyond Borders that Pierre Magnan has died.

I've read three of Magnan's novels: Death in the Truffle Wood, The Messengers of Death, and The Murdered House, each an extraordinarily rich picture of rural French life. Here's a post I made about The Messengers of Death. Here's one about The Murdered House. And here's a third, about Death in the Truffle Wood.

Magnan was 89.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Sex and the country

A scene near the beginning of Pierre Magnan's The Messengers of Death nicely exemplifies an observation I made after reading his Death in the Truffle Wood. The observation concerned Magnan's convincing portrayal of rural life's human texture. Here's the Messengers of Death example that brought it back to mind:

"`Perhaps you could teach these things to me directly?' Prudence said.

"Rose's mouth fell open and stayed open. As it happened, for quite some time now she had regretted the fact that her enriching experiences still lacked an essential spice. ... [Prudence] was the one who dragged her, pushed her, willing and eager, towards the little bedroom behind the shop. And there, both of them had their first and definitive lesbian experience. After that it it was nothing more than a habit dependent on the whim of the moment.

"That's how you fight boredom in these sleepy villages."

I like the deadpan humor, the slow buildup to an unexpected punch line that you just know Magnan enjoyed as much as his readers will. (He uses the technique at least once elsewhere in the book's opening chapters, possibly to even better effect.)

I also like what the passage implies about the pace of life in Magnan's rural Provence. I'm not sure extra-marital liaisons are any more common in Magnan's work than in fiction set in cities, but they are far less fraught with anxiety, at least of the immediate kind. Consequences unfold slowly, if at all, and characters accept them stoically or with good-humored resignation or silent suffering or secret relief. The consequences are more like glaciers than volcanoes. Or maybe more like seasonal winds.

Hmm, why do I have this sudden urge to read the Book of Ecclesiastes?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pierre Magnan's country life, Part II

(Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912 Oil on canvas 36 3/4 x 29 1/4 in. The Art Institute of Chicago)

If this painting seems to you an odd choice to illustrate a comment about a crime novel of rural French life, you may be open to the appeal of Pierre Magnan's The Murdered House.

The book is more somber than Magnan's Death in the Truffle Wood, but it shares with that novel a careful study of mysteries and motives amid lives that move more slowly than those most of us are used to and probably would appear calm to those of us on the outside.

I'll have more to say later, perhaps about Magnan's unsurpassed handling of that crime-fiction staple, the long-ago act whose consequences unfold years later. For now, this:

"Then, as soon as Séraphin put his foot to the ground, the stranger who had been following the shepherds' retreat suddenly turned round, and Séraphin realized immediately why they had fled in disarray. He was a geule cassée: one of those men who had survived the war, but with a dreadfully disfigured face; one of those faces no one would raise a hand to, for fear that all those who had died in the war would rise in a body at such sacrilege.

"`Yes,' the man said, `there's a painter who does this now ... called Juan Gris. I could be a model for him.'

"When he laughed — and he laughed often — it was an unbearable sight."

I like that passage for its mix of compassion and horror, with no attempt to downplay or overstate either. But mostly I like the intrusion of an advanced, urban-based twentieth-century artist on a story of slow-burning rural life. Magnan's book is a reminder that the last century was more complicated than technology-minded potted histories give it credit for.

(Here's a chance to look inside a few of Magnan's books. Here's his Web site, in French.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Whom have you discovered?

I've raved recently about Pierre Magnan and José Latour, two authors I had not read until a few weeks ago. The excitement of discovery added to the pleasure of reading three wonderful books.

Tell me about some of your reading discoveries, recent or otherwise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pierre Magnan's country life

I once stayed at a campground in the Dordogne region of France. On an excursion into the local village, I was regarded with great concentration by some ancient men sitting around a small table outside a shop.

My first thought was that they were suspicious of outsiders. I later guessed that village life gave them time to cogitate at great length on all sorts of things, including ephemera such as passing tourists.

I'm strongly reminded of that encounter about halfway into Pierre Magnan's Death in the Truffle Wood. Magnan sets his book in a village of 900 people in the Basses-Alpes of France. A number of people have disappeared, but the investigation gets underway slowly. Far more to the fore are the mysteries and the hints thereto in the lives of the villagers and of the commissaire called in to investigate the disappearances. This novel, in other words, uses people to create a vivid, unfamiliar (to me) setting.

Though her orientation is generally more urban than this, I'd bet that Fred Vargas reads Magnan. And I'd bet that her readers would like Magnan as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009