PARIS IN JULY: CRIMES OF WINTER BY PHILIPPE GEORGET

With their enigmatic titles the first two Inspector Sebag stories - Summertime: All the Cats are Bored, and Autumn: All the Cats Return - drew me into this series some time ago, and so I was delighted to find this latest instalment in a charity shop.

Philippe Georget is a news anchorman for France-3; he has written several novels. Like its predecessors, Crimes of Winter is set in Perpignan (where the author himself lives.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Georget writes well; it's obvious that his day job has trained him to meet word counts and cut through the waffle. Crimes of Winter is fast moving and easy to read; I was never bored. The various detectives of the Perpignan Police Department, some older and cynical, some young and keen, are well drawn and interesting, the crimes themselves are unusual and their eventual solutions make sense. 

In Crimes of Winter Christmas is approaching, but Sebag is in no mood for celebrating; he has finally found proof of his suspicions that his beloved wife Claire has been unfaithful. His attempts to come to terms with this situation frame an external story in which someone is informing men that their partners have cheated on them - with sometimes deadly consequences. 

Who is this person? Where is he getting his information? And why is he using it to cause misery and even death? The police need to find out before he strikes again. Superintendent Castello, however, like all modern managers, has costs and clear-up rates at the top of his agenda; he wants results and he wants them quickly, so if the detectives don't come up with the goods, the case will simply be shelved.

Each case of infidelity that Gilles and his colleagues investigate shows us a different cause of relationship breakdown, and a different reaction to its discovery. For Gilles, many of the victims' stories ring horribly true. Claire is desperate to rebuild their marriage in any way she can - but will Gilles ever trust her again? He drinks too much, smokes too much, and has almost reached rock bottom when help appears from an unlikely source.

Meanwhile the police are sifting through suspects. Could the perpertrator be a security guard? A telecoms engineer? A private detective?

The settings here are, as ever in Georget's books, almost as interesting as the plot itself; he makes it easy to visualise the ancient alleyways of the old city, the shuttered empty shops, the stunning beauty of the coastline, the majesty of the Palace of the Kings of Majorca and the 'gentle winter light' of the Roussillon. He shows us the everyday lives of Catalans, and even a little of their history, but never makes us feel like we are at school.  I could picture Gilles' house in Saint-Esteve,

'The big room faced south and looked out onto the sunlit terrace. The wind was blowing dead leaves from the apricot tree onto the blue tarp that protected the swimming pool from November to April.'

And everywhere, the howling of the 'cold dry breath of the tramontane' blowing in from the north west.

And of course, these police officers are French - not for them the sandwich at their desk. Instead, every day Gilles and his two closest colleagues decamp to Carlit, the little restaurant across the street, to lunch on such delights as eel with aioli, galtes (pork cheeks) cooked with Banyuls (a red dessert wine local to the Roussillon), salt cod fritters, calamari, and Iberian ham. Catalan native Jacques Molina is most put out when the plat du jour is coq au vin; it may be French, but Catalan it is not.

Galtes du porc. Image: http://www.viscalacuina.com/

After many false starts, Gilles realises that the perpetrator may be hiding in plain sight; the end of Crimes of Winter was, at least to me, unexpected but entirely convincing. The perpetrator's insistence that they were 'only the messenger' conveys all we need to know about their delusional state of mind.

Unfortunately, the big problem - and it really is a big problem - with this book is the absolutely terrible translation. It's clunky and jarring throughout; the dialogue reads like nothing anyone would ever say, and after a very short while the poor use of words dominates one's reading experience. 

For example, when Gilles is chatting with a fellow officer who is also a friend, she apparently says;

'I didn't understand very concretely how that works.'

On another occasion, a colleague comes out with;

'Decidedly, you'll always astonish me.'

And here's Gilles' boss Castello;

'I'm glad to see that you're feeling better and that you're recovering your effectiveness.'

And there are endless mentions of buttocks. No one sits down without putting his/her buttocks on the chair. 

'He rose from the box on which he had perched one of his buttocks.'

'Claire made him turn around until his buttocks were resting on the edge of the table.'

Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of French can see how literal this translation is.  The translator here is American, but his translation would be painful in any version of English.

I think the problem is that a second translation is needed - I know very little about this, but I've read that sometimes one person provides a literal version then another puts the work into colloquial English. This would have improved the translated version of Crimes of Winter so much. 

In the end I was enjoying the plot and the incident room banter too much to abandon ship, but at times it was a close call. If Georget ever writes another Inspector Sebag book - and I really hope he does, but it's been some years since this one was published - his publisher really needs to find him a better translator. 

So a fairer rating from me would be, for the book 4*, but for the translation 1*

Crimes of Winter by Philippe Georget is published by Europa Editions, New York, as part of its World Noir collection.  It was originally published by Editions Jigal as Mefaits d'hiver.