February 23

Paris Requiem – Chris Lloyd

‘You have a choice which way you go in this war…’

Paris, September 1940.

After three months under Nazi Occupation, not much can shock Detective Eddie Giral. That is, until he finds a murder victim who was supposed to be in prison. Eddie knows, because he put him there. The dead man is not the first or the last criminal being let loose onto the streets. But who is pulling the strings, and why?

This question will take Eddie from jazz clubs to opera halls, from old flames to new friends, from the lights of Paris to the darkest countryside – pursued by a most troubling truth: sometimes to do the right thing, you have to join the wrong side…

 

My thanks to Orion for the opportunity to read an review copy of Paris Requiem

 

In late 202o I listened to the audiobook of The Unwanted Dead. It introduced Eddie Giral, the police officer who was determined to investigate a crime which nobody else wanted him to investigate. I absolutely loved the story, raved about it A LOT on Twitter and I was delighted to see it win the CWA Gold Crown for best novel of the year.

I have been patiently waiting for Giral’s return (well quite patiently) and when Paris Requiem landed on my doormat it went straight to the front of my reading queue. I know I shouldn’t have favourites but as much as I loved The Unwanted Dead, I think Paris Requiem takes this series to greater heights. Paris Requiem – five stars and if I could give it more I would.

What’s it about then?

Detective Eddie Giral is a member of the Paris police force. It is 1940 and the Germans have occupied the city. The police are still to enforce the law but they must do so working alongside the Germans who have their own control over the city. It’s a fractious dynamic and Eddie is far from happy with the current state of affairs. Although we first met Eddie in the award-winning The Unwanted Dead. You don’t need to read the stories in order to enjoy Paris Requiem but as I adored The Unwanted Dead I would strongly encourage you to seek it out.

We meet Eddie in a closed down Jazz Club. He is a big fan of jazz but not such a big fan of empty clubs which house a dead body. Unfortunately for Eddie the reason he is in a closed down club is because there is a dead body which needs his attention. Bound to a chair and left to be found, the victim has had their mouth sewn shut with twine. A message? But who could it be for? And an even bigger headache for Eddie is that he knows the victim…he arrested him some months earlier and the man should still be in prison – so why is he dead in a club?

Eddie’s boss, Commissionaire Dax, has paired him up with the irritating Boniface. Potentially a decent cop but Eddie feels Boniface spends more time chasing women than he does chasing crooks. Together the pair try to find out why a convicted criminal was walking the streets before he met his untimely and unpleasant death. Worse still it seems he may not be the only criminal no longer serving their sentence – some of the crooks the pair helped capture will hold a grudge too.

Unfortunately for Eddie there are other matters to contend with. His son is trying to escape France, Eddie has not seen him for several months but someone else knows of his flight to freedom and is trying to use this knowledge to get some leverage with Eddie. Will Eddie be able to assist an enemy if it means safe passage for his son? There’s another son to worry about too – not his own but an old friend is looking for Eddie to help find her son. A soldier on the run and hiding from the German army will not have it easy, but when the soldier has black skin it gets even more complicated. Even Eddie’s connections with Major Hochstetter – the German officer who “assists” Eddie and the French police will not use his influential support to track down a missing soldier.

There’s a lot going on in Eddie’s life but Chris Lloyd manages to keep three or four different story threads constantly weaving around the reader. Even when there’s not a crime to occupy his mind Eddie can be found trying to encourage his local butcher to let him have a slightly larger cut of meat or begging his baker to give him a single loaf of bread despite Eddie not having his ration book. Life in occupied Paris still goes on and Lloyd shows the day to day problems all Parisians faced – sourcing fresh meat and bread being one of them.

It’s the wonderful blend of historical fact, crime fiction and sheer reading enjoyment which made me love the time I spent with Paris Requiem. Chris Lloyd breathes life into history and has created a compelling cast of characters. The murders, the escaped criminals, Eddie’s need to appease his boss, appease the Germans and keep himself safe while unknown forces try to kill him – you will be drawn into this story and will not want to stop reading. Especially when you hear about Capeluche – he’s a scary one.

Don’t miss these books. Get to know Eddie Giral. He’s having a rough old time of it but you’ll root for him from first page to last.

 

 

Paris Requiem is available now in hardback, digital and audiobook format. You can order a copy here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/paris-requiem/chris-lloyd/9781409190301

 

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November 12

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with S.G. MacLean

It is time to catch up with my Decades Library again. This week the Decades Curator Hat is passed to Shona MacLean who has selected five new books that she wants me to add to my ever-growing collection of umissable reads.

When making nominations for the books I must add to my Decades Library my guests cannot just pick their five favourite books. I ask them to follow two simple rules:

1 – You can select ANY five books
2 – When making selections you can only select one book per decade from five consecutive decades – this means choices can come from any fifty year span.

Flexing of the rules and name-checking books which narrowly missed out seems to be fairly common practice and Shona has thrown subtlety to the wind to give some nice bonus mentions.

Time for me to step back and let Shona take you through her selections.

 

S.G. MacLean (Shona) was born in Inverness and grew up in various small Highland villages where her parents were hoteliers. One of five children, she learned to appreciate the virtues of peace and quiet and taking to her room with a good book at a young age. Her own nest of 4 children is about be emptied, which will leave more time to concentrate on the world’s neediest dog. After an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Aberdeen University, she began writing historical crime novels while the children were bringing themselves up.

She currently has two series in print – The 4 book Alexander Seaton series, set mainly in the 1620s and 30s in the north-east of Scotland, and the 5 book Damian Seeker series, set mainly in the 1650s England of Oliver Cromwell. Her first book, The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (2008) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot award and shortlisted for the Saltire 1st Book award and the CWA Historical Dagger. All of the Seeker books have either been longlisted or shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger, 2 of them – The Seeker and Destroying Angel winning it, and two – The Bear Pit and The House of Lamentations also being longlisted for the Gold Dagger. The Bear Pit was also shortlisted for the Blairgowrie Festival Book of the Year award in 2020.

Amongst the framed photos on Shona’s bookshelves are two of her late uncle, bestselling novelist Alistair MacLean, who looks over her shoulder with a wry smile.

Instagram @iwritemybike2 Twitter @SGMacLeanauthor

Books available from all good bookshops and uk.bookshop.org/shop/S_G_MacLean

 

DECADES

Okay, here are my choices. This was extremely difficult because some of my favourite and most influential books were published centuries apart, and others crowding into the same decade. Anyway, I may sneak a couple of them in in the subtext. (There will be asterisks, thus: *). The one book I was absolutely determined to get in was published in the 2000s, so I’ve built my list around that, stretching back from there to the decade in which I was born (1960s). All of these books are high quality reads and well worth a place on the shelves.

So:

1960s: Ellis Peters, A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

 

What can I say about Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael Chronicles? I first discovered them in my late teens ad I couldn’t believe there were books which combined two of my greatest reading pleasures – History and Crime Fiction. I loved that canny, all-too-human Welsh monk and his wonderfully-recreated C12th world. I still listen to the radio programmes starring the inimitable Derek Jacobi. Ellis Peters was for me the absolute trailblazer of my genre. You’re supposed to pretend you don’t mind about winning awards, but when I started writing, it was my dream to one day win the Dagger that had first been instituted in her honour.

 

 

1970s: Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman.

Oh, Dalziel and Pascoe – mismatched, again thoroughly human, and brilliant. These books are so well-written, so intricate and intelligent, such consistent page-turners. But I would be lying if I said I’d read the books first. I saw the TV show first – was there ever anyone as magnificently right in a role as Warren Clarke? (although my friend Fiona, who urged me to read the books, assured me he was not disgusting enough). To me, Andy Dalziel has at last found his heir in Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb.* quietly sneaking in another favourite. In my first year at Harrogate, I was introduced to Reginald Hill. I could hardly believe it, and had nothing remotely sensible to say to him. What a lovely gentleman he was.

 

 

 

1980s: Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses

I think Tartan Noir is a lazy term, and does none of us any favours, apart from to allow for a comforting kind of kinship when Scottish crime-writers find themselves away from home. Having said that, for me, Ian Rankin broke a mould I hadn’t known existed; several moulds, in fact. Here was well-written, intelligent crime fiction set in Scotland (I’d somehow missed Macillvanney as a crime writer, but happily got him the next time around, and again was lucky enough to meet him at my first Bloody Scotland. “Hello, I’m Willie,” he said, as I tried not to pass out.  Another absolute old school gent.) Rankin’s ‘place’ – Edinburgh, and his character John Rebus, breathed reality, breathed authenticity, and were absolutely engaging for it. With no disrespect intended to any predecessors whose work I might have missed, I have the sense that from then on, Scottish crime writing began to build, to be taken seriously, and for that many of us need to be grateful.

 

 

 

1990s: Ali Smith, Like

Oh, do I love Ali Smith! Oh did I go up to her at Ness Book Fest a few years ago and completely fan girl and burble at her about how much I loved her writing and how much it meant to me, and how of all her work it was Public Library and Other Stories that meant the most to me, because it reminded me of my childhood, and our village library in Muir of Ord, and my Dad and all sorts of things? And she told me that her first novel, Like, was the most her, the most about growing up in Inverness. And so I bought it and I read it and I loved her even more. Which is why my choice for the 1990s isn’t, after all, James Kelman and How Late it was, how Late. * see what I did there?

 

 

 

2000s: James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

Practically any one of James Robertson’s books is the kind of book that makes me think I should give up writing, because I have not a hope of coming anywhere near him as a writer. His ear for dialogue, for the Scots tongue, is perfect. His characters, at times, are the heirs of the finest characters in Walter Scott; Baillie Nicol Jarvie would not find himself out of place in a James Robertson novel. The Testament of Gideon Mack being longlisted for the Booker Prize brought this brilliant writer to greater prominence.  I think had the judges understood Scottish literature better, had they read Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner* or Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae*, then Robertson, with this deep, C21st century dive into the Scottish psyche, would not have stopped at the longlist. I stalked him out of an event at Ullapool once, and thrust the book at him to be signed. We are both on the programme for the Blairgowrie festival in a few weeks time, so I fervently hope he has forgotten this.

 

 

 

Five wonderful books which I am thrilled to add to my Decades Library. I also read the Cadfael novels in my late teens and Dalziel and Pascoe were not far behind. As I worked in the largest bookshop in the Highlands at the time Shona was reading her way through the Ellis Peters books I would like to believe there is a possibility I may have sold her some of the books which helped influence these Decades choices.

Also Muir of Ord Library was MY library when I was a teenager – how lovely to have it remembered all these years later. I can still remember the smell of books which hit you as you pushed open the library door.

DECADES WILL RETURN

 

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