Bordeaux, City of Wine and Crime Fiction

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Sitting majestically on the Garonne River in southwestern France, capital of the country’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, with approximately a million “Bordelais” (masculine) or “Bordelaises” (feminine) in its metropolitan region. A city and region of castles and wine, that likes to think of itself as the world capital of wine. And wine also happens to appear in rather a lot of Bordeaux crime novels too…

So let’s start with that most Bordelais of crime fighters – the winemaker –detective. Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noël Balen’s Bordeaux region set series of crime novels now numbers 22 books (14, and counting, of which are available in English). They all feature the world-renowned winemaker turned gentleman detective Benjamin Cooker and his assistant Virgile Lanssien. While wine is a luxury to be savoured and appreciated it is also a world, so Alaux and Balen’s novels suggest, of dodgy money, deceit, death, crime, inheritance, and jealousy. The books are massively successful in France and spawned a series hit TV show too. The opening book of the series is Treachery in Bordeaux (2014). When some barrels turn at the prestigious grand cru Moniales Haut-Brion wine estate, Cooker and Virgile start to investigate. Is it negligence or sabotage?

Moving through the series Cooker and Virgile encounter ingenious heists of Grand Cru, a serial killer stalking Bordeaux leaving clues that relate back to wine, feuding over inheritance of a Cognac dynasty, sabotaged vineyards. Though mostly set in Bordeaux there are side trips to Sauternes, Paris and Gascony but it’s all wine all the time with Cooker and Virgile. Read the series and you could easily qualify to be a sommelier. 

Patrick Hilyer’s Broke the Grape’s Joy (2012) is a little cosy crime trip into Bordeaux viticulture too. English widow, Jean Valeix, is the owner of a fabulous vineyard in the French wine village of Saint-Emilion. But her cherished chateau is struggling to sell its produce. All she needs to do to save the vineyard from bankruptcy is solve a murder.

Wine is rationed and kept hidden away in cellars in Alan Massie’s terrific (I devoured them all in a long weekend) World War Two set tetralogy. Massie was a Scottish journalist who spent time in Bordeaux and wrote of its wartime history before launching into his crime-espionage blend tetralogy. The series starts with Death in Bordeaux (2010). In the spring of 1940, the mutilated body of a gay man is discovered in a street near the Bordeaux railway station. The case goes to Superintendent Lannes who sees a political motive for the murder. But the authorities are not keen he investigate it. More bodies appear as Lannes deals with the fact that his eldest son, Dominique, is at the Front, his wife, Marguerite, is depressed, and when the Battle of France breaks out, Bordeaux is filled with refugees fleeing the war. Soon Bordeaux becomes an occupied city and Lannes’ chief suspect is untouchable, protected by a relative in the Vichy government. Dark Summer in Bordeaux (2012) is set amid the grim reality of Vichy France and a series of unexplained murders. Cold Winter in Bordeaux (2013) see Lannes still trying to balance finding murderers with not being seen to collaborate too closely with the Vichy Government and occupying Germans. 

The tetralogy ends with End Games in Bordeaux (2015). By now it is the summer of 1944, France is in turmoil, D-Day has occurred, the Vichy regime is in its death throes. The revenge against collaborators is beginning, the Resistance on the march. Atrocities are committed on both sides, and justice is blind. Lannes searches unofficially for a missing girl and investigates cases of historic sexual abuse in Bordeaux as the war comes to its final end, Franc is liberated and all accounts must be settled.

I should also mention some great Bordeaux-written and set crime that hasn’t yet been translated from French into English. It’s always frustrating to know that there are best-selling writers out there who have hit series that haven’t been translated. Bordelais Emmanuel Moynot is a graphic artist who has authored more than forty graphic novels published in France since the 1980s, including several featuring detective Nestor Burma, and based on the crime novels of Léo Malet. The stories are great and the graphic images wonderful and he’s much loved in France, Spain and Germany but nobody has picked his work up yet in English. 

Similarly so with the original Nestor Burma novels by Léo Malet, a popular French crime writer (he sadly died in 1996) originally from Montpelier and with a distinctly surrealist bent. Nestor Burma is a cynical anti-hero in a dozen or more novels that have become, as above, graphic novels and a couple of movies. But Malet doesn’t have an English translator. Neither does Alexander Oetker, a German writer who created Luc Verlain in a series of novels set in the Aquitaine region around Bordeaux and among the region’s beaches and vineyards. Verlain fled Bordeaux as a young man for the bright lights of Paris, but now he’s back in his hometown. There are seven Luc Verlain books, but sadly none in English (only French and German). 

Still, if you’re lucky, you can find the TV show Mongeville created by Jacques Santamaria. Santamaria is a prolific French radio and TV dramatist with a penchant for crime. He adapted several Guy de Maupassant and Patrick Modiano novels for French TV and created the popular French TV detective show, Mongevile. Antoine Mongeville is a former investigating judge turned investigator who works with a young police judiciaire detective on cases in and around Bordeaux. It’s on DVD or, if you’re in America, via Amazon Prime. 

And finally, as ever, something a little different and special, Marie NDiaye’s Vengence is Mine (2023). NDiaye is a French novelist, playwright and screenwriter with French-Senegalese heritage, a Prix Goncourt (France’s most prestigious literary prize) winner who grew up in Paris. She has written novels, short stories and, when she was just 21, Comédie classique, a 200-page novel made up of a single sentence. She left France to live in Berlin in the Sarkozy years finding him and his administration ‘monstrous’. 

Praise in France was fulsome for La vengeance m’appartient (originally published in French in 2021) and has also been strong for the English translation. The New York Times wrote that ‘In Vengeance Is Mine, NDiaye circles a familiar configuration of ideas: trauma and memory, class anxiety, isolation and otherness, the warped savagery of domestic life, the rupture between parents and their children.’ The heroine of the novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack. One critic called the novel a blend of Elena Ferrante and Patricia Highsmith. It is definitely rather unsettling and Bordeaux provides a fantastic background. 

And as the rather and predictable end to this column – why not pour yourself a glass of good Bordeaux, sit by the fire and read one of the novels above?

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