
Bruno Courrèges is the Chief of Police of the Vézère Valley in the Périgord region of France. It is springtime in the little market town of St Denis. The genial Bruno does have a past, and it is somewhat darker than the constant sunlight if St Denis. He was raised in an orphanage and, as a young soldier, experienced the mind numbing brutality of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. When his friend Pamela, who runs a riding stables, returns to her house and finds her lodger, Josette Quirit, battered to death on the patio, he is informed, but is forced to recuse himself from the investigation due to his friendship with Pamela. Instead, an old friend Jean-Jacques Jalipeau from Périgeux attends, along with his colleague Fabien Panton.
There are two subplots. The gentler of the two is Bruno’s concern for the declining fortunes of St Denis in commercial terms. The weekly market is shrinking: stallholders are relocating to a nearby town, and shops are losing footfall. I realise that a picturesque Dordogne town is very different from where I live – a hard-scrabble town in one of England’s more deprived areas, but at least St Denis seems to have escaped the dubious pleasures of fake barber shops, nail bars, money laundering ventures posing as vape stores, and a proliferation of bookmakers. Bruno hatches a rejuvenation plan.
As to the second, we have a mysterious prelude, apparently unrelated to St Denis or the murdered woman. I am not keen on this literary device, and I think it is over-used, but that’s just a personal grouch. In an unidentified school, a young boy is made to stand for ages, holding heavy books on his outstretched arms. Then he falls, cracks his head, and all hell breaks loose. We come to believe that this is the same Catholic boarding school that Fabien Panton was sent by his parents. The mysterious prelude makes sudden – and rather grim – sense, when it is revealed that the school matron who inflicted the fatal punishment on the schoolboy was Joséphine Tauton, convicted of manslaughter. On her release from prison she became Josette Quirit.
Bruno and Fabien have another lead. Vehicles captured on CCTV in the vicinity of the murder site are connected to a Netflix crew filming a historical drama series in the area.In the end, it is a curious blend of of technical data – the readings from a FitBit watch – and Bruno’s very human intuition that brings the killer to justice, and the novel ends on a festive note, if not for the victim and her killer, but for the market stallholders of St Denis.
This is, of course, cosy crime, but of a superior nature. Bruno is a confirmed gastronome, and the book is full of descriptions of meal preparation, rural charcuterie delicacies and, of course, delicious local wines. Bruno”s world is, of course pure fantasy, albeit of a delightful kind. Despite its perceived decline, St Denis has a proper boulangerie and a shop where a Belgian chocolatier creates his own irresistible treats. There is, of course a high class butcher, from whom Bruno thinks nothing of ordering a 35 kilo lamb in order to treat his friends to an Easter méchoui. Even the rather reduced market has stalls selling proper farm-made cheeses, and the hills around the town are still peopled by small vineyards, each producing delicious – and affordable – wines. This is heady stuff, especially for British readers in provincial towns where genuine locally produced food is either hideously expensive, or completely unavailable.
Martin Walker writes of what he knows, as in 2013, he was made a chevalier of foie gras, in the confrérie of paté de Périgueux, and also an honorary Ambassador of the Périgord, which means he gets to accompany the traveling exhibition of the Lascaux cave as it goes on display at museums around the world. He also helps promote the wines of Bergerac at international wine fairs, and was chairman of the jury for this year’s Prix Ragueneau, the international culinary prize. A Murder in Springtime is as light as one of Bruno’s superior souffles, but very entertaining. It will be published by Quercus on 18th June.
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You might guess that a crime novel featuring an amateur detective called Gawaine St Clair is not going to take you down many mean streets; furthermore, were one to Frenchify its chromatic tint, then it would probably be nearer beige than noir. This being said, if you are a Golden Age fan, like dry humour, enjoy a clue-laden whodunnit and are never happier than when luxuriating in the follies and foibles of the English middle classes, then Cherith Baldry’s Dangerous Deceits will be a joy.
Gawaine may be too arch and precious for some tastes but he fits perfectly into the Home Counties landscape with its manicured village greens and faux Tudor dwellings. I thoroughly enjoyed Dangerous Deceits and Father Tom’s killer is unmasked not amid the dusty shelves of a country house library, but in the altogether more fractious atmosphere of an extraordinary (in the procedural sense) meeting of the Ellingwood PCC. The solution, as in many a whodunnit, rests with everyone – including Gawaine, the local coppers and, in this particular case, me – making a seemingly obvious assumption early in the piece.

Lock 13 features Chris Honeysett, a private detective whose cases I had never read before, despite this being the sixth in what is clearly a popular series. The previous episodes are Headcase (2005), Slim Chance (2006) Rainstone Fall (2008) An Inch of Time (2012) Worthless Remains (2013) and Indelible (2014). Honeysett, like his creator Peter Helton (more on Helton’s website
Sometimes a novel is so delightfully written that a reader can reach the last page with a smile and sense of contentment, despite the fact that nothing very dramatic or shocking, at least by the standards of some modern thrillers, has happened during the 200 pages or so which have made up the narrative. Lock 13 is one such book. Peter Helton (right) tells the story through the eyes of Chris Honeysett, and the style is fluent, conversational, occasionally erudite, often witty – but always very, very, readable. Established fans of the Honeysett series can feel duly smug that the amiable painter-sleuth has found another convert, and they can rest assured that I shall be working my way through the file of Honeysett’s previous cases. Lock 13 is published by 

I do love Operas, though – at least those written up to the death of Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (who would be just as wonderful even if he didn’t have six christian names.) I would add the personal caveat that for me it is sometimes better heard than seen, as stage productions can sometimes demand too much suspension of disbelief. Our chosen book, then, is Spur Of The Moment by David Linzee, and it is set around the St Louis Opera company as they prepare a performance of Bizet’s wonderful, preposterous, exhilarating four-act classic, Carmen.
David Linzee has himself been a ‘supernumary’ – basically the opera equivalent of a spear carrier – and he enjoys several digs at the way an opera company in a mid-sized city is run. I particularly enjoyed his jibes at the ubiquitous need for sponsorship. Linzee (right) explains that the SLO has to make sure that literally every brick in the building has corporate support. Thus we have the Peter J Calvocoressi Administration Building, the Charles Macnamara III Auditorium and – best of all – the Endeavour Rent-a-Car Endowed Artist. In this case it’s Amy Song, the woman playing Carmen.

Some historical crime fiction takes us back to times way, way before our own memories could have any validity. Then there are stories set in periods that many of us could reasonably have experienced at first hand. With the former, it is simply the author’s research versus the depth – or lack of – our own historical knowledge. The latter is a much more tricky enterprise, as someone who sets their book in the 1960s, for example, can be exposed to a more searching light – that of readers who actually lived through the years in question.