Before anyone takes me to task for offering a French novel translated into English – and I fully agree that all of us living here ought to keep working on our French – let me quote the Translator’s Note: “In the original French, a large amount of Marseille slang is used. No attempt has been made to imitate its probably inimitable presence.” This called to mind an incident when on an early trip to France I came across a secondhand paperback copy of a French version of David Dodge’s To Catch a Thief, the novel on which the famous Hitchcock film was based.
I should have been warned about the perils of translation by the French title, La Main au Collet, which conveys nothing of the sense of the apt original. However, it struck me that, since I knew the original book well, it would make reading the story in French easier. I bogged down early on when the hero goes to see his former underworld contacts, who spoke throughout in an impenetrable argot. For anyone who cares to accept the challenge that Ian Monk ducked, the title of the French version is La Première Empreinte – but of course you’d worked that out already, hadn’t you?Xavier-Marie Bonnot is a documentary film-maker, with an academic background in history, sociology and French literature. He also comes from Marseille which, along with Aix-en-Provence, provides one of the settings for this story. If you know either of these towns well, be warned that the author cheerily admits to having ‘intentionally altered places … (and) a number of official procedures’. This is Bonnot’s first novel and is declared to be the start of a series featuring Police Commandant Michel de Palma, also known, for no very clear reason as the Baron.
Commandant de Palma is a complex figure, capable of being both suave and vulgar, charming and brutal, tough and vulnerable. Like Inspector Morse, he likes his opera, and he has uneasy relationships with both his superiors and his sidekicks, in this case two of them: the glamorous Capitaine Anne Moracchini and the somewhat reserved Lieutenant Maxime Vidal. These two become increasingly concerned and disapproving of their chief in the course of this story as he treats innocent witnesses with unnecessary aggression and casually roughs up the petty criminals he encounters. It will be interesting to see, as the series develops, whether de Palma becomes a more attractive personality, since readers are unlikely to put up for long with an unsympathetic hero.
What distinguishes The First Fingerprint from countless other romans policiers is the positive evocation of its settings and an aspect of them that is uncommon. For, although this is yet another instance of the current crime-writing obsession with serial killers, this one has strong links to prehistoric times, the academics who interpret them and, particularly, the implications of the chance discovery by a scuba diver of the underwater entrance to a cave full of Lascaux-style wall paintings in one of the calanques (fiords) to the east of Marseille. (Such a discovery was, in fact, made in recent years). Some aspects of prehistoric dating, necessary to the analysis of the crimes, are deftly explained by the university experts without any sense of force-feeding. The plot turns on de Palma’s ability to discern the links between otherwise apparently unconnected murders and to pursue them, despite the wishes of his superiors and the different jurisdictions involved. Inevitably there are moments of melodrama, notably in the denouement, but there is plenty to keep the reader’s interest alive and the pages turning until the mysteries are resolved in a confrontation inside the underwater cave. This book will appeal to anyone who likes detective stories with a difference. Although this is technically a ‘police procedural’, the maverick nature of de Palma’s approach makes it a far cry from the scrupulous reflection of actual police methodology of such as Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. It is a surprisingly confident debut novel, but it remains to be seen whether the degree of originality demonstrated here will be maintained by its sequels.
Published in hardback by Maclehose Press, 2008, 341 pages
ISBN 978 1 84724 352 2 (hardback; for paperback last numeral 9) £16.99
