Martin Walker
BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE
262pp. Quercus. £12.99.
978 1 84724 507 6

Bruno Courrèges – Saint-Denis’s local (indeed, only) policeman, all-round sports coach, and the town’s most eligible bachelor – is called to the scene of a murder. An elderly, solitary ex-soldier whose children live in the village, has been found bound and eviscerated; a swastika has been carved into his chest. There are no clues; the victim is an Algerian immigrant who won the Croix de Guerre, and what is evidently a hate crime means that reinforcements from the two competing national forces are summoned. They attempt to shut the local man out of the investigation.

But, in addition to local knowledge, Bruno has connections of his own, as well as the support of an unusually savvy and powerful mayor, so by dint of goodwill, perseverance and luck, as well as the knowledge and help of a series of local inhabitants and incomers, more than one crime is solved. Along the way, Martin Walker explains and illuminates geography, sociology, politics, and the history of three wars with their resulting tensions and revenges.

A small town in the Dordogne, complete with the stereotypes one might expect from any celebration of an Englishman’s experience of rural France, may seem a risky setting for a crime novel. Walker, who is better known as a political journalist and commentator, has certain advantages which outweigh his cheery, deliberately charming, style of evoking la France profonde. He knows the Périgord, its food and its history; he has a good grasp of how corruption and insider trading by the elite of French regional and local government can sometimes function to check legal regulation and balance it with a semblance of humane justice. In addition, he understands how to use the conventions of light crime fiction to tell a story with unresolvable moral complexities. If he has a rose-tinted view of an essentially feudal regime, he uses his spectacles in a good cause.

Crime fiction is recognized as a place where, in the interests of realistic depiction, political correctness has no hold; what is less discussed is the way it recovers historical memory, unearthing contentious episodes which linger between oblivion and danger. Here Bruno discovers the last months of the Second World War, and the atrocities of the Milice. The enchanted countryside shows its darker side, as he explores motives which complicate the exposure of the criminals. Perhaps surprisingly, Bruno, Chief of Police has many of the characteristics of Golden Age novels, above all the apparently remote setting which reveals its involvement in wider events. Martin Walker’s Dordogne is worth a visit.

Ruth Morse is Professor of English at the University of Paris-Diderot. She has just completed Imagined Histories: Fictions of the past from Beowulf to Shakespeare.

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