Toulouse: Murder in the Pink City

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Toulouse – aka Ville Rose – France’s fourth largest city sits on the banks of the Garonne River. On anyone’s liveability index Toulouse has to be pretty high – a nice old town, great public transport, a hi-tech centre (Airbus etc) and all in the South of France. Less than 500,000 people on the city proper, a million so in the surrounding area. A university town and a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s also home to the Polars du Sud literary festival and a couple of specialist bookshops dealing in crime, thrillers, and graphic novels. And, naturally, there’s some local crime fiction.  

From the 1970s onwards, the “néopolar”, or “new crime novel” was all the rage in France and Toulouse was one of its homes. However, some of Toulouse’s best néopolar authors are not in English translation…yet. Pascal Dessaint whose 1999 thriller Du bruit sous le silence is set in the world of rugby (played enthusiastically in the area). Dessaint has won a bunch of French crime writing prizes, been translated into a number of European languages and Arabic, but not unfortunately into English. The same is true of Josiane Saint-Laurent, a Toulouse born writer who worked as a painter and medical assistant at the Toulouse University Hospital before turning to crime writing in retirement. She is the author of three detective novels, the last two of which feature Captain Lise Candel, assigned to the SRPJ’s Families Brigade in the Ville Rose. And, perhaps most maddeningly, there are yet to be English translations of the work of Christophe Guillaumot, whose La chance du perdant (2017) follows an investigation through the back streets of Toulouse. If you hadn’t already noticed this is a plea to get these three authors in translation…please. 

However, we do have author Bernard Minier, who grew up in south-west France, in the foothills of the Pyrenees before going to university in Toulouse. He now lives near Paris, but his character, Commandant Martin Servaz, is a Toulouse city cop. The Servaz novels did really well in France – well enough to get a lot of translations and a Netflix series named after the first book in the series, The Frozen Dead (2014). On a winter morning, in a small town nestled in the Pyrenees, a group of workers discover the headless body of a horse, hanging suspended from a frozen cliff. When DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of a nearby asylum is found on the corpse the case takes a darker turn…and then first human victim is found. Servaz returns in A Song for Drowned Souls (2015). Marsac is another quiet town in the Pyrenees (a stone’s throw from Toulouse), best known for its elite university. But when one of the professors is found drowned in her bath, it becomes clear that the tranquil surface is a lie. Commandant Servaz is assigned the case and finds it has very personal dimensions for him. 

Servaz returns in Don’t Turn Out the Lights (2016). Servaz is faced with his nemesis, the psychopath Julian Hirtmann and finds himself in a clinic for depressed cops. One day, he receives a key card to a hotel room in the mail; the room where an artist committed suicide a year earlier. Someone wants Servaz back on his feet and investigating. And finally, in Night (2019) – a No.1 bestseller in France – Servaz leaves his normal turf and heads to Norway to hunt Julian Hirtmann. 

A Scottish author who moved to France, Peter May’s The Enzo Files features, Enzo Macleod, formerly one of Scotland’s top forensic scientists, in his early fifties, half-Scottish, half-Italian. He now works as a university professor in Toulouse. The six books in the series jump around France, from Paris to the West and invariably at some point back to Toulouse. The series starts with Extraordinary People (2006) through The Critic (2007), Blacklight Blue (2008), Freezeframe (2010), to Blowback (2011). After May was picked up by Riverrun (part of Quercus) the Enzo Files were reissued and he added to more – Cast Iron (2017) and The Night Gate (2021), the latter set in the autumn of 2020 as France enters Covid lockdown.

A few other Toulouse-set crime novels:

Prix Goncourt-winner Pierre Lemaitre has had great success in France and in translation with the Commandant Camille Verhoeven series. In book 2, Alex (which won the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in 2013) Verhœven is running against time to find Alex Prevost who is kidnapped, savagely beaten, and suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse in a wooden cage. Though the series is set largely in Paris, there is a subplot around the murder of a hotel owner in Toulouse.

Belgian author Didier Daeninckx is not much read outside France, but when it was first published his Murder in Memoriam (1984) was a cult hit, controversial in more conservative French circles, and much discussed in European crime writing circles. The novel is set against the backdrop of a demonstration in Paris in 1961, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Algerians at the hands of the police – an event based on many similar and largely covered up demonstrations and police killings in Paris at the time. In Daeninckx’s fictional telling of this event a young French history teacher is also mysteriously killed during this demonstration. Twenty years later his son is murdered in Toulouse while on holiday with his girlfriend. To find the connection between the murders, Inspector Cadin must delve into the secret history and devastating compromises of wartime politics. 

A brief side trip of fifty or so miles from Toulouse to nearby Carcassone, famous for its medieval citadel, La Cité, with numerous watchtowers and double-walled fortifications and a 12th-century castle within the Cité. This is the setting Jack Duval’s The Man from Carcassonne (2020). The novel, a multiple murder tale, splits the action between Carcassone, Toulouse and Paris

And finally, a classic – The Return of Martin Guerre was the smash hit European film of 1982. Directed by Daniel Vigne, starring Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, it was based on a case of imposture in 16th century France. Martin Guerre leaves his young wife in a small French village to go fight in a war, and to travel. Eight or nine years later, in 1560, Martin returns, initially acknowledged by his wife, family, and friends because he knows the intimate details of his former life. But others doubt his true identity. No spoilers but the trial was in Toulouse, the climactic height of the movie. The book inspired a study by a Princeton historian of early modern France, Natalie Zemon Davis, who also advised on the film and helped with the screenplay. Her book, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) was translated into 22 languages and is still an incredible tale. 

So, as you can see, Toulouse has got some history – in fact when you include Carcassonne and the Pyrenees this is a beautiful and almost overwhelmingly historic area of France….and it’s got its fair share of crime novels too.

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