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A new French crime novel (sort of)

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Under the Channel, by Gilles Pétel, joins a number of recently translated French crime novels with a decidedly quirky tone and structure, by writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette and Pascal Garnier. But Pétel's story is a police procedural that has little interest in the police or procedure. Under the Channel starts with a murder and moves quickly to a police investigation, but it's really about something else. Lieutenant Roland Desfeuilleres is the officer in charge, after the bungled discovery of a body on the Channel-Tunnel train from London to Paris. The reader has witnessed the victim's progress through his last day in London and the first part of his train journey in the first chapter. An English couple upon discovering the corpse in a first-class seat sets off a comedy of errors among train staff and police at the Paris station, a situation that Roland must confront along with the disastrous dissolution of his marriage. Seemingly to escape Paris and his wife, he tra...
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Timothy Williams, new and reissued

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Most dialogue in crime fiction moves forward smoothly, the speakers responding to one another and perhaps gradually revealing the truth of the events in the story. In the novels of Timothy Williams, though, the dialogue follows the patterns of life: the speakers are not really listening to each other and definitely not responding coherently to one another. The reader discovers, in the disconnected conversations, the truths that the speakers are hiding from each other, and even from themselves. His recent novel, The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe, follows this indirect method to its logical conclusion: has a crime taken place, and if so what crime? This is not a whodunit, it's a glimpse into the complex life of the citizens of a post-colonial, conflicted culture. Soho Crime, which published The Honest Folk last year, has recently been reissuing Williams previous series, featuring Italian Commissario Piero Trotti. Trotti, a spiky character with fewer social skills than Judge Anne M...
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Stuart Neville, Those We Left Behind

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--> [Since the reviews I published at the late, lamented site The Life Sentence, edited by Lisa Levy, are no longer on-line, I've decided to republish a few of them here. Here's the first one; I posted here a review of Neville's next novel, a sequel to Those We Left Behind, and it appears below.]   Stuart Neville is one of the most distinctive of the new crime writers from Ireland and Northern Ireland. His debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (2009), was a sort-of ghost story, featuring a former Republican hitman, Gerry Fagan, who is haunted by the 12 victims of his own political killings. In the UK, the novel was released as The Twelve — perhaps the memory of Britain’s own ghosts of Belfast dictated the change. Neville is among several current crime writers (Deon Meyer and Tana French, for instance) who use a rolling cast of characters, with a minor character in one novel emerging as the central character in the next. Gerry Fagan is still around for the second bo...
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