We, here across the Channel (La Manche), think we know France and the French pretty well. We go on holiday there in huge numbers every year. If you speak a language it is probably French and you may even have been on an exchange at school. Your town or village is likely twinned with a charming little place on the Loire. We saw Amelie and sort of liked it. So French!
We all know about the wine and the cheese and the chic and the skis. It's an idealised, cliched view, but it's no more the real France than a pin-striped-suited man wearing a bowler hat carrying a copy of the FT represents Britain.
So the most immediately appealing aspect of Adrian Magson's excellent police procedural Death on the Marais is its distinctly unromantic and charged view of an entirely different France. This is rural France: Picardie, not far from the Channel ports. It is a France of introverted, suspicious and closed communities that seem to hold within them the secrets of the ages. It is agricultural, largely poor and just about as far removed from the brasserie society of the Boulevard St Germain as it possible to be and still be in 1960s France.
Unceremoniously dropped into the thick of this rural "idyll"- in the village of Poissons-Les-Marais - is Inspector Lucas Rocco, an independent-minded, if not insubordinate, investigator who may or may not have been sent to backwater purgatory because of authority issus.
Rocco, a veteran of France's Indo-China wars, is greeted with suspicion, but not hostility, by his new neighbours. He does not have a lot of time to worry about this. Before a week is past the body of a murdered young woman turns up in the Marais (the marsh). If this were not trouble enough, she is wearing the uniform of the Gestapo - reviving still fresh and bitter memories of occupation - and turns out to be the daughter of a leading French industrialist, who was a hero of the Resistance. When her body passes through the usual autopsy procedures with extraordinary speed, Rocco instantly recognises that he is moving into dangerous political waters.
His subsequent investigation uncovers strange goings-on both in Poisson-Les-Marais, where a local scrap metal merchant with an unhealthy interest in explosives is paying close attention to the inquiry and further afield where unseen forces try to pull a veil across the whole affair.
Rocco, however, is dogged and resourceful. Ignoring the potential dangers both to his career and life he delves deeper into the murky and corrupt that this crime has erupted from, a crime that threatens to open some of the community and country's most grievous wounds.
Death on the Marais is taut and atmospheric - the fog that settles over the marsh land seeps into every corner of the narrative with its cold and faintly menacing presence. Magson has a spare and unfussy writing style that perfectly complements both the story and the location and he controls the pace of the story well. In Rocco he has a convincing and interesting protagonist.
The one false note in the book is a bizarre series of quotations at the start of early chapters in which former colleagues, friends and acquaintances describe Rocco. They appear designed to give some insight into a detective who fits the cliche of the insubordinate "loner", a man "who gets results". First, they are completely unnecessary, the narrative brings Rocco to life more than well enough with this artificial device. Second, unless I am missing something, Rocco doesn't fit the profile the quotes describe. In this novel he is largely respectful of the pitfalls of crossing authority and the political classes; he works well with other colleagues and generally seems like a decent guy - certainly not the cliched police detective.
My suggestion therefore is to buy this excellent crime novel and skip the quotes. I'll be looking out for the next book of the promised series.
