Aimée Leduc Investigates
Last Wednesday, 11 August, I finished the second of the four books (so far; the fifth book, Murder in Clichy, is due next March) of Cara Black's Aimée Leduc mystery series. Anyone who bothered to wade through my book meme of 24 July might recall that I'd mentioned the first novel in the Aimée Leduc series, Murder in the Marais, as well as my intention to read further in the series in the hopes that Ms. Black's writing would show improvement.
Unfortunately, after reading the second book, Murder in Belleville (yes, the same Parisian neighbourhood of the animated movie The Triplets of Belleville which was nominated for a couple of Academy Awards in 2003, as well as the home of the [according to Ms. Black, dwarfish] chanteuse Edith Piaf which has become, since the mid-1960s or so, a Muslim ghetto), I have to conclude that my misgivings about Ms. Black's style have not been laid to rest.
For a comic book nerd -- specifically for a Marvel Zombie (TM), either current or recovering -- there will be certain not entirely welcome moments of recognition in Ms. Black's series. Aimée Leduc is a private investigator specializing in computer security in Paris in the 1990s who has a dwarf partner, René, who is a martial artist and a computer hacker par excellence. (If you're a current or former Marvel Zombie [TM], this description of René probably reminded you vaguely of Puck from John Byrne's Alpha Flight series -- at least, before Bill Mantlo took over the scripting chores and threw in a half-baked "comic book magickal" explanation for Puck's dwarfism. Thankfully, René has yet to turn cartwheels so that he looks like a hockey puck spinning on its side.) A former flic (French slang for "cop;" it appears to be non-derrogatory, like "cop" is in the U.S., since the police themselves use it in Ms. Black's books). Leduc quit the force when her father, also a flic, was blown up in front of her in the surveillance van he was sitting in. Her father's murder has never been solved, and it clearly haunts and drives her; it also serves as an underpinning to the series, a kind of "home base" reminder of how the repurcussions of violence and murder do not end with the victim's life, but reverberate through time, often inspiring an unintentional and unforeseen chain of events. Aimée Leduc is half French, half-American: her American mother, rather a free spirit, casually disappeared one day when Aimée was eight years old. (This disappearance is apparently more fully explored in the third book, Murder in the Sentier.) Ms. Black has said that she opted for this background for Leduc because she felt that she couldn't convincingly write a character who was entirely French; apparently Aimée Leduc reads as American to Ms. Black's French readers and as Parisian to her American ones. More than computer security (which is really René's forte), Aimée Leduc's métier is in investigating crimes stemming from tangled political violence in France's past.
If this sounds like an intriguing premise for a mystery series -- perhaps with the black belt, super-hacker, hot rodding and musical connoissuer dwarf sidekick downplayed a bit (and to be fair, his appearances in the first two books are minimal, almost as if Ms. Black realized how precious René could come off as if he was used too much) -- give yourself a pat on the back for your good taste. Each Aimée Leduc book comes with a detailed street map of the Parisian neighbourhood in which that book's case takes place; you might go blind trying to follow the action on the map without a magnifying glass, but it is possible to do so, and it gives the novel's events an extra jolt of frisson; it's rather like an anti-travel book -- "Don't dare go here! For God's sake, you could be killed!" -- and you have to wonder why other mysteries set in real locales don't include sectional maps along with their texts. I'd be willing to bet that any halfway-competently written mystery with such a map would draw a certain number of extra tourists to that city; maybe a truly savvy author would make some kind of arrangement with the chamber of commerce of the city they set their novels in, as well as with the major travel agencies: package tours of Paris for fans of Aimée Leduc and Inspector Jules Maigret; it could work.
The delving into the more sordid aspects of the French socio-political past, and the bits of French and Parisian trivia that Ms. Black seasons her narratives with are far and away the strong points of the Aimée Leduc novels. The city of Paris is the most compelling character; Aimée Leduc seems pleasant enough, but almost to the point of vapidity, while the less said of René -- who is really there only to advance the plot when Leduc runs into a cul-de-sac, and keep Leduc Investigations up and running since the titular partner is often wrapped up in one sordid case or another (if she weren't, there would likely be no books) -- the better. The plots of the first two books are somewhat less than stellar, certainly no patch on some of the puzzlers that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Dashiell Hammett concocted; and Ms. Black has an unadorned style (with a couple of disturbing exceptions that will be addressed shortly) that makes one pine for a Hammett, or a James M. Cain, a Loren D. Estleman -- hell, I'd settle for a W.R. Burnett.
Murder in the Marais was published in 1999, but takes place in November 1993, shortly after the reunified Germany set up their new capitol in Berlin; to cite the blurb on the back cover, a rabbi hires Leduc to "decipher a fifty-year-old encrypted photograph and deliver it to an old woman in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter [apparently now a thriving gay hotspot]. When she does so, she finds a corpse on whose forehead a swastika has been carved. With the help of her partner, a dwarf with extraordinary computer skills, she sets out to solve this horrendous crime and finds herself in the middle of a dangerous game of current politics and old war crimes."
Murder in the Marais has Leduc working undercover quite a bit -- something sadly lacking from Murder in Belleville -- primarily to infiltrate a French white supremacist group, Les Blancs Nationaux (LBN), to get a line on the woman's murderer. Not so coincidentally, a German delegation is in Paris to help advance stricter immigration controls for the European Union, controls principally aimed at excluding would-be immigrants of a duskier hue than "native" Caucasian Europeans. While Murder in the Marais clicks along to a very cinematic, zippity-pow finish, the biggest disappointment for me was the fact that the neo-Nazi whom Aimée beds, when working undercover, turns out to be a "white hat" who was also working undercover; this rather too neatly solves Leduc's dilemma of tumbling into the bed of the first hunky guy she meets even though his entire weltanschauüng is diametrically opposed to hers. It would've been far more interesting if her bunk buddy really was a neo-Nazi: how Leduc dealt with this, how she answered the question of "Should I stay or should I go?," would've gone a lot further towards developing her character, to making her a believable person instead of some noble, absurdly lucky archetype.
Murder in Belleville harkens to a more recent development in French history than the Nazis' occupation of Paris and the pro-Nazi Vichy government's assisting the Nazis in rounding up French Jews to be transported to the concentration camps: the French-Algerian War of 1954 - 1962 (the recent re-release of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 movie The Battle of Algiers to the art-house circuit, following on the heels of the Department of Defense's holding several private screenings of it for the Iraq war planners baffled by the strength of the resistance to U.S. occupation of that country, have made this event somewhat more prominent in the mind of the average American), and the vicious wholesale tortures and murders perpetrated by French paramilitaries on Algerians in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as by the various Algerian factions upon each other, right up to the military junta in Algeria cancelling the 1992 elections there due to the overwhelming popularity of the fundamentalist Islamic party. Hired by an old friend now married to a high-ranking government minister, Leduc and her friend barely escape being killed in a car bombing that claims the life of a mysterious woman her friend had met with; Leduc is retained to find this woman's murderer, and finds herself drawn into a volatile mix of street-level violence tacitly sanctioned at the highest levels of government and black bag politics carried out without the benefit of any oversight whatever.
Murder in Belleville is a weaker book than Murder in the Marais, partly because Leduc doesn't work undercover as much, partly because its ending is even more à la Hollywood than its predecessor (not only does Belleville have a "high production" finish as did Marais, but there's a second climax as well, as has been typical of nearly every Hollywood-produced action, thriller, or horror movie since at least the 1980s), partly because Leduc's character suffers from a lack of development and some less-than-stellar writing.
Even more than Marais, Belleville evinces sporadic tics that are uncomfortably close to those of Chris Claremont, the writer who took Marvel Comics' X-Men to unprecedented heights of popularity and, ultimately, ridiculousness, when he proved unable to grow as a writer: he repeated the plots and stylistic quirks he'd developed so often that they became unwitting farce. Two of the lines in Belleville that struck me with their "Claremontesqueness" are when Leduc addresses her bichon frise puppy Miles Davis (pronounced, as Ms. Black notes in Marais, as "Meels Daveez" [p. 9]), prior to leaving him in the care of René, "'Mind your manners, furball;" (Belleville, p. 240); and when Leduc remonstrates with her friend Anaïs, who has hired her to track down the killers of a woman who was apparently an old mistress of her husband's and possibly his blackmailer, "'It's like you gave me half a deck and want me to play cards!'" (ibid, p. 246). These bits of "Claremontiana" would only leap out at someone who grew up on Claremont's first run on The Uncanny X-Men and has since become almost allergic to the man's writing. Still, anyone with even a passing acquaintance with his work would note the resemblance with the basic premise of the Leduc series -- strong-willed and competent female character with an exotic background, issues with both parents, a dire tragedy almost too painful to contemplate, a plucky and unusual sidekick who's even more exotic than she is and a life lived on the edge, whether or not she wills it so -- to his preferred set-up. There's another, more unfortunate congruence between Ms. Black's Aimée Leduc and Claremont's strong heroines (that he delighted to tear down and transmogrify beyond all recognition; happily enough, Ms. Black has yet to "go there," although she does have Aimée blinded at the beginning of the fourth novel, Murder in the Bastille; hopefully that's not the first sign of her deeper plunge into "Claremontville"): Leduc's lousy, apparently entirely glandular taste in men.
In Belleville, Ms. Black explicitly states that Aimée prefers the "bad boy" type -- a preference made all-too-obvious in Marais, but resolved in deus ex machina fashion by Ms. Black's decision to have the neo-Nazi stud Aimée did the horizontal bop with prove to be on the side of the angels (to resort to yet another favourite Claremont phrase) -- and Yves flits in and out of Belleville, a sweet distraction (or, as Ms. Black puts it, in terms that Claremont might well envy, "A soul shaker and troublemaker;" Belleville, p. 42). Aimée's preferences are explicated further by her dismissal of Anaïs' husband Philippe: "...but for a fleeting instant she saw Philippe's vulnerability. She saw how it could appeal to women. Some women -- not her" (ibid, p. 116). If Ms. Black doesn't quite plunge with both feet into the Claremont wading pool by having Leduc exclaim "Yum!" whenever she ogles an attractive male, she comes perilously close by writing of Yves, "He wore black jeans, a black leather jacket, and looked good enough to eat" (ibid, p. 340). Perhaps a greater flaw is when Ms. Black, who takes some pains to keep Aimée Leduc's liberalism front-and-center, has her liberalism verge into the twee, being at once paternalistic and politically correct:
"She turned to face Kaseem Nwar, smiling beside her at the counter. Several men and women stood there, and for a moment she couldn't place where she'd met him. Then she remembered. He was more handsome than she recalled, in a long wool coat over a djellaba [italics in original]. As if it had been designed for him. The way he dressed revealed a pride in his heritage. She liked that."
-- Belleville, p. 206
Aside from Leduc's unexplored, questionable tastes in men -- her attraction to Yves, despite some veiled attempts of Ms. Black, never plays as anything more than sexual, the moreso as Aimée apparently cannot abide holding any conversation with him that doesn't lead directly to some form of (offstage) sexual congress -- Belleville is marred by some infelicitous passages that the editors have let slip through, the most irksome of which occurs towards the end, during a hostage situation, when a militant would-be Algerian immigrant straps high explosives to his body and holds an elite elementary school hostage in an attempt to force the French government to accept his political demands, and the government responds by deploying France's equivalent of a U.S. SWAT team, complete with strategically positioned sharpshooters to surround the school; Ms. Black writes:
"Aimee gasped, 'Please God [sic] keep the children and Anaïs away from the windows! What happened?' she asked, turning to Sardou."
-- Belleville, p. 324
Such clunkers do considerably deflate whatever suspense Ms. Black had previously manage to build up -- rather like a sabot hurled into the works.
Still, there are pleasurable, interesting and informative bits to glean from the Aimée Leduc books, particularly, I suspect, if one isn't terribly familiar with French political history of the last sixty-odd years and current police procedures; as Belleville reminds us, France has been fighting its own "war on terror" for a number of years longer than the United States has, to the point where "The paramilitary RAID was notorious for blazing its way in, fudging the body count later in hostage situations, only intent on neutralizing its target" (Belleville, p. 295).
A sampling of some of the choice bits of trivia from the two books that may allow readers to decide whether to follow along on Leduc's cases:
"She'd always thought the crimes investigated by the Commissariat of Police in the Marais rarely matched the division's elegant accommodations. High-tech weapon sensors hid nestled in brass wall sconces of this Second Empire style nineteenth century mansion. Rose lead-paned windows funneled pink patterns across the marble walls. But the dead cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays, greasy crumbs, and stale sweaty fear made it smell like every other police station she'd been in.
"This palatial building neighbored Napoleon's former barracks and the 4th arrondissement's Trésor public, the tax office on rue de la Verrerie. But Parisians called it flics et taxes, la double morte -- cops and taxes, the double death."
--- Marais, pps. 27-8
Rather ominously in light of the growing rate of anti-Semitic vandalism and violence in France, Ms. Black writes that Aimée "knew that ever since uniformed French police had rounded up Jews for the Nazis during the Occupation, no Jew trusted them" (ibid, p. 31). On a lighter note, Aimée, working undercover, calls a hapless fax/copy shop manager "Fifi" (ibid, p. 65), which is a disparaging remark against someone's masculinity; see the 1953 Jacques Becker movie Touchez Pas au Grisbi (originally released in the U.S. as Grisbi, the title can be loosely translated as "Don't Touch the Loot").
A conversation that Aimée has with her father's old partner, Morbier, sheds some interesting light on how France's police are set up:
"She shifted the conversation's focus. 'I'd like to see the forensics report.'
"'Me too.' Morbier scowled. 'Somehow it's lost in the shuffle between the Brigade de Recherches et d'Intervention, the Brigade Criminelle, and the Commissariat,' he said. 'You know, the usual rivalry in our three-pronged justice system. Either of the other two would sooner let someone escape than let us at the Commissariat grab them.'
"To avoid him venting his frustration on her, she tried being sympathetic. She sighed, 'Why don't the branches work together?'
"'Our squad car radios can't even communicate with each other. Napoleon's theory of divisiveness still prevents us from ever getting together to overthrow the government.'
"She grinned. 'An interesting idea that makes for lousy police work.'"
-- Marais, pps. 78-9
A bit later, we learn more of the peculiarities of the French police:
"She wondered why a Paris flic would carry a Beretta .765. Flics she knew didn't carry this kind of hardware. They weren't even issued firearms."
-- Marais, p. 216
And:
"She had the firearms permit but not the license to carry her Glock. Drawing an unlicensed gun on anybody spelled trouble. French firearm laws, still enforced by the Napoleonic code, didn't allow her the right to bear arms. Even in self-defense or equal-force situations."
-- Marais, p. 197
The other most interesting/surprising bit from the first novel comes when Aimée is questioning a man about the possible neo-Nazi leanings of his son:
"'Would you say, Monsieur Rambuteau, that your son's upbringing was in a politically conservative vein?' she asked.
"He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged, 'Let's say we served sucre à la droite, not sucre à la gauche.'
He referred to white and brown sugar, the metaphor for right-wing conservatives and leftist socialists. She knew that in many households political leanings were identified by the kind of sugar sitting in sugar bowls."
-- Marais, pps. 212-13
Given this, it should come as no surprise that Aimée takes brown sugar in her coffee drinks, in both books.
In Murder in Belleville, we learn such oddments as the fact that the number four is considered unlucky by the Japanese (p. 71); that the word "beur," which is "the masculine form of butter," is "applied to second-generation North Africans, French born," and is a word used in "verlan, the language developed in the suburban housing projects" (p. 77); that Duplo plastique is "'an English cousin of the cheaper Czech Semtex'" (p. 86); that the French police and media were quick to blame any bombings in France on the Arabes (p. 92; I'm not sure if this still obtains in France today, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did); and it's apparently not uncommon for many Algerians, particularly Berbers, to believe in magic, in djinn, and in "the Aïcha qandicha, who, as everyone knew, had goat's feet and one eye in the middle of her forehead" (p. 103).
I certainly don't mean to scare any potential readers away from the Aimée Leduc books; I certainly don't regret the time I've spent thus far with them; but I can't help being a bit frustrated and disappointed that Ms. Black didn't have editors who paid as close attention to her prose as Ms. Black evidently paid to the historical and cultural details that make her Paris a more fully realized character than any of her human ones.
Unfortunately, after reading the second book, Murder in Belleville (yes, the same Parisian neighbourhood of the animated movie The Triplets of Belleville which was nominated for a couple of Academy Awards in 2003, as well as the home of the [according to Ms. Black, dwarfish] chanteuse Edith Piaf which has become, since the mid-1960s or so, a Muslim ghetto), I have to conclude that my misgivings about Ms. Black's style have not been laid to rest.
For a comic book nerd -- specifically for a Marvel Zombie (TM), either current or recovering -- there will be certain not entirely welcome moments of recognition in Ms. Black's series. Aimée Leduc is a private investigator specializing in computer security in Paris in the 1990s who has a dwarf partner, René, who is a martial artist and a computer hacker par excellence. (If you're a current or former Marvel Zombie [TM], this description of René probably reminded you vaguely of Puck from John Byrne's Alpha Flight series -- at least, before Bill Mantlo took over the scripting chores and threw in a half-baked "comic book magickal" explanation for Puck's dwarfism. Thankfully, René has yet to turn cartwheels so that he looks like a hockey puck spinning on its side.) A former flic (French slang for "cop;" it appears to be non-derrogatory, like "cop" is in the U.S., since the police themselves use it in Ms. Black's books). Leduc quit the force when her father, also a flic, was blown up in front of her in the surveillance van he was sitting in. Her father's murder has never been solved, and it clearly haunts and drives her; it also serves as an underpinning to the series, a kind of "home base" reminder of how the repurcussions of violence and murder do not end with the victim's life, but reverberate through time, often inspiring an unintentional and unforeseen chain of events. Aimée Leduc is half French, half-American: her American mother, rather a free spirit, casually disappeared one day when Aimée was eight years old. (This disappearance is apparently more fully explored in the third book, Murder in the Sentier.) Ms. Black has said that she opted for this background for Leduc because she felt that she couldn't convincingly write a character who was entirely French; apparently Aimée Leduc reads as American to Ms. Black's French readers and as Parisian to her American ones. More than computer security (which is really René's forte), Aimée Leduc's métier is in investigating crimes stemming from tangled political violence in France's past.
If this sounds like an intriguing premise for a mystery series -- perhaps with the black belt, super-hacker, hot rodding and musical connoissuer dwarf sidekick downplayed a bit (and to be fair, his appearances in the first two books are minimal, almost as if Ms. Black realized how precious René could come off as if he was used too much) -- give yourself a pat on the back for your good taste. Each Aimée Leduc book comes with a detailed street map of the Parisian neighbourhood in which that book's case takes place; you might go blind trying to follow the action on the map without a magnifying glass, but it is possible to do so, and it gives the novel's events an extra jolt of frisson; it's rather like an anti-travel book -- "Don't dare go here! For God's sake, you could be killed!" -- and you have to wonder why other mysteries set in real locales don't include sectional maps along with their texts. I'd be willing to bet that any halfway-competently written mystery with such a map would draw a certain number of extra tourists to that city; maybe a truly savvy author would make some kind of arrangement with the chamber of commerce of the city they set their novels in, as well as with the major travel agencies: package tours of Paris for fans of Aimée Leduc and Inspector Jules Maigret; it could work.
The delving into the more sordid aspects of the French socio-political past, and the bits of French and Parisian trivia that Ms. Black seasons her narratives with are far and away the strong points of the Aimée Leduc novels. The city of Paris is the most compelling character; Aimée Leduc seems pleasant enough, but almost to the point of vapidity, while the less said of René -- who is really there only to advance the plot when Leduc runs into a cul-de-sac, and keep Leduc Investigations up and running since the titular partner is often wrapped up in one sordid case or another (if she weren't, there would likely be no books) -- the better. The plots of the first two books are somewhat less than stellar, certainly no patch on some of the puzzlers that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Dashiell Hammett concocted; and Ms. Black has an unadorned style (with a couple of disturbing exceptions that will be addressed shortly) that makes one pine for a Hammett, or a James M. Cain, a Loren D. Estleman -- hell, I'd settle for a W.R. Burnett.
Murder in the Marais was published in 1999, but takes place in November 1993, shortly after the reunified Germany set up their new capitol in Berlin; to cite the blurb on the back cover, a rabbi hires Leduc to "decipher a fifty-year-old encrypted photograph and deliver it to an old woman in the Marais, the old Jewish quarter [apparently now a thriving gay hotspot]. When she does so, she finds a corpse on whose forehead a swastika has been carved. With the help of her partner, a dwarf with extraordinary computer skills, she sets out to solve this horrendous crime and finds herself in the middle of a dangerous game of current politics and old war crimes."
Murder in the Marais has Leduc working undercover quite a bit -- something sadly lacking from Murder in Belleville -- primarily to infiltrate a French white supremacist group, Les Blancs Nationaux (LBN), to get a line on the woman's murderer. Not so coincidentally, a German delegation is in Paris to help advance stricter immigration controls for the European Union, controls principally aimed at excluding would-be immigrants of a duskier hue than "native" Caucasian Europeans. While Murder in the Marais clicks along to a very cinematic, zippity-pow finish, the biggest disappointment for me was the fact that the neo-Nazi whom Aimée beds, when working undercover, turns out to be a "white hat" who was also working undercover; this rather too neatly solves Leduc's dilemma of tumbling into the bed of the first hunky guy she meets even though his entire weltanschauüng is diametrically opposed to hers. It would've been far more interesting if her bunk buddy really was a neo-Nazi: how Leduc dealt with this, how she answered the question of "Should I stay or should I go?," would've gone a lot further towards developing her character, to making her a believable person instead of some noble, absurdly lucky archetype.
Murder in Belleville harkens to a more recent development in French history than the Nazis' occupation of Paris and the pro-Nazi Vichy government's assisting the Nazis in rounding up French Jews to be transported to the concentration camps: the French-Algerian War of 1954 - 1962 (the recent re-release of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 movie The Battle of Algiers to the art-house circuit, following on the heels of the Department of Defense's holding several private screenings of it for the Iraq war planners baffled by the strength of the resistance to U.S. occupation of that country, have made this event somewhat more prominent in the mind of the average American), and the vicious wholesale tortures and murders perpetrated by French paramilitaries on Algerians in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as by the various Algerian factions upon each other, right up to the military junta in Algeria cancelling the 1992 elections there due to the overwhelming popularity of the fundamentalist Islamic party. Hired by an old friend now married to a high-ranking government minister, Leduc and her friend barely escape being killed in a car bombing that claims the life of a mysterious woman her friend had met with; Leduc is retained to find this woman's murderer, and finds herself drawn into a volatile mix of street-level violence tacitly sanctioned at the highest levels of government and black bag politics carried out without the benefit of any oversight whatever.
Murder in Belleville is a weaker book than Murder in the Marais, partly because Leduc doesn't work undercover as much, partly because its ending is even more à la Hollywood than its predecessor (not only does Belleville have a "high production" finish as did Marais, but there's a second climax as well, as has been typical of nearly every Hollywood-produced action, thriller, or horror movie since at least the 1980s), partly because Leduc's character suffers from a lack of development and some less-than-stellar writing.
Even more than Marais, Belleville evinces sporadic tics that are uncomfortably close to those of Chris Claremont, the writer who took Marvel Comics' X-Men to unprecedented heights of popularity and, ultimately, ridiculousness, when he proved unable to grow as a writer: he repeated the plots and stylistic quirks he'd developed so often that they became unwitting farce. Two of the lines in Belleville that struck me with their "Claremontesqueness" are when Leduc addresses her bichon frise puppy Miles Davis (pronounced, as Ms. Black notes in Marais, as "Meels Daveez" [p. 9]), prior to leaving him in the care of René, "'Mind your manners, furball;" (Belleville, p. 240); and when Leduc remonstrates with her friend Anaïs, who has hired her to track down the killers of a woman who was apparently an old mistress of her husband's and possibly his blackmailer, "'It's like you gave me half a deck and want me to play cards!'" (ibid, p. 246). These bits of "Claremontiana" would only leap out at someone who grew up on Claremont's first run on The Uncanny X-Men and has since become almost allergic to the man's writing. Still, anyone with even a passing acquaintance with his work would note the resemblance with the basic premise of the Leduc series -- strong-willed and competent female character with an exotic background, issues with both parents, a dire tragedy almost too painful to contemplate, a plucky and unusual sidekick who's even more exotic than she is and a life lived on the edge, whether or not she wills it so -- to his preferred set-up. There's another, more unfortunate congruence between Ms. Black's Aimée Leduc and Claremont's strong heroines (that he delighted to tear down and transmogrify beyond all recognition; happily enough, Ms. Black has yet to "go there," although she does have Aimée blinded at the beginning of the fourth novel, Murder in the Bastille; hopefully that's not the first sign of her deeper plunge into "Claremontville"): Leduc's lousy, apparently entirely glandular taste in men.
In Belleville, Ms. Black explicitly states that Aimée prefers the "bad boy" type -- a preference made all-too-obvious in Marais, but resolved in deus ex machina fashion by Ms. Black's decision to have the neo-Nazi stud Aimée did the horizontal bop with prove to be on the side of the angels (to resort to yet another favourite Claremont phrase) -- and Yves flits in and out of Belleville, a sweet distraction (or, as Ms. Black puts it, in terms that Claremont might well envy, "A soul shaker and troublemaker;" Belleville, p. 42). Aimée's preferences are explicated further by her dismissal of Anaïs' husband Philippe: "...but for a fleeting instant she saw Philippe's vulnerability. She saw how it could appeal to women. Some women -- not her" (ibid, p. 116). If Ms. Black doesn't quite plunge with both feet into the Claremont wading pool by having Leduc exclaim "Yum!" whenever she ogles an attractive male, she comes perilously close by writing of Yves, "He wore black jeans, a black leather jacket, and looked good enough to eat" (ibid, p. 340). Perhaps a greater flaw is when Ms. Black, who takes some pains to keep Aimée Leduc's liberalism front-and-center, has her liberalism verge into the twee, being at once paternalistic and politically correct:
"She turned to face Kaseem Nwar, smiling beside her at the counter. Several men and women stood there, and for a moment she couldn't place where she'd met him. Then she remembered. He was more handsome than she recalled, in a long wool coat over a djellaba [italics in original]. As if it had been designed for him. The way he dressed revealed a pride in his heritage. She liked that."
-- Belleville, p. 206
Aside from Leduc's unexplored, questionable tastes in men -- her attraction to Yves, despite some veiled attempts of Ms. Black, never plays as anything more than sexual, the moreso as Aimée apparently cannot abide holding any conversation with him that doesn't lead directly to some form of (offstage) sexual congress -- Belleville is marred by some infelicitous passages that the editors have let slip through, the most irksome of which occurs towards the end, during a hostage situation, when a militant would-be Algerian immigrant straps high explosives to his body and holds an elite elementary school hostage in an attempt to force the French government to accept his political demands, and the government responds by deploying France's equivalent of a U.S. SWAT team, complete with strategically positioned sharpshooters to surround the school; Ms. Black writes:
"Aimee gasped, 'Please God [sic] keep the children and Anaïs away from the windows! What happened?' she asked, turning to Sardou."
-- Belleville, p. 324
Such clunkers do considerably deflate whatever suspense Ms. Black had previously manage to build up -- rather like a sabot hurled into the works.
Still, there are pleasurable, interesting and informative bits to glean from the Aimée Leduc books, particularly, I suspect, if one isn't terribly familiar with French political history of the last sixty-odd years and current police procedures; as Belleville reminds us, France has been fighting its own "war on terror" for a number of years longer than the United States has, to the point where "The paramilitary RAID was notorious for blazing its way in, fudging the body count later in hostage situations, only intent on neutralizing its target" (Belleville, p. 295).
A sampling of some of the choice bits of trivia from the two books that may allow readers to decide whether to follow along on Leduc's cases:
"She'd always thought the crimes investigated by the Commissariat of Police in the Marais rarely matched the division's elegant accommodations. High-tech weapon sensors hid nestled in brass wall sconces of this Second Empire style nineteenth century mansion. Rose lead-paned windows funneled pink patterns across the marble walls. But the dead cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays, greasy crumbs, and stale sweaty fear made it smell like every other police station she'd been in.
"This palatial building neighbored Napoleon's former barracks and the 4th arrondissement's Trésor public, the tax office on rue de la Verrerie. But Parisians called it flics et taxes, la double morte -- cops and taxes, the double death."
--- Marais, pps. 27-8
Rather ominously in light of the growing rate of anti-Semitic vandalism and violence in France, Ms. Black writes that Aimée "knew that ever since uniformed French police had rounded up Jews for the Nazis during the Occupation, no Jew trusted them" (ibid, p. 31). On a lighter note, Aimée, working undercover, calls a hapless fax/copy shop manager "Fifi" (ibid, p. 65), which is a disparaging remark against someone's masculinity; see the 1953 Jacques Becker movie Touchez Pas au Grisbi (originally released in the U.S. as Grisbi, the title can be loosely translated as "Don't Touch the Loot").
A conversation that Aimée has with her father's old partner, Morbier, sheds some interesting light on how France's police are set up:
"She shifted the conversation's focus. 'I'd like to see the forensics report.'
"'Me too.' Morbier scowled. 'Somehow it's lost in the shuffle between the Brigade de Recherches et d'Intervention, the Brigade Criminelle, and the Commissariat,' he said. 'You know, the usual rivalry in our three-pronged justice system. Either of the other two would sooner let someone escape than let us at the Commissariat grab them.'
"To avoid him venting his frustration on her, she tried being sympathetic. She sighed, 'Why don't the branches work together?'
"'Our squad car radios can't even communicate with each other. Napoleon's theory of divisiveness still prevents us from ever getting together to overthrow the government.'
"She grinned. 'An interesting idea that makes for lousy police work.'"
-- Marais, pps. 78-9
A bit later, we learn more of the peculiarities of the French police:
"She wondered why a Paris flic would carry a Beretta .765. Flics she knew didn't carry this kind of hardware. They weren't even issued firearms."
-- Marais, p. 216
And:
"She had the firearms permit but not the license to carry her Glock. Drawing an unlicensed gun on anybody spelled trouble. French firearm laws, still enforced by the Napoleonic code, didn't allow her the right to bear arms. Even in self-defense or equal-force situations."
-- Marais, p. 197
The other most interesting/surprising bit from the first novel comes when Aimée is questioning a man about the possible neo-Nazi leanings of his son:
"'Would you say, Monsieur Rambuteau, that your son's upbringing was in a politically conservative vein?' she asked.
"He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged, 'Let's say we served sucre à la droite, not sucre à la gauche.'
He referred to white and brown sugar, the metaphor for right-wing conservatives and leftist socialists. She knew that in many households political leanings were identified by the kind of sugar sitting in sugar bowls."
-- Marais, pps. 212-13
Given this, it should come as no surprise that Aimée takes brown sugar in her coffee drinks, in both books.
In Murder in Belleville, we learn such oddments as the fact that the number four is considered unlucky by the Japanese (p. 71); that the word "beur," which is "the masculine form of butter," is "applied to second-generation North Africans, French born," and is a word used in "verlan, the language developed in the suburban housing projects" (p. 77); that Duplo plastique is "'an English cousin of the cheaper Czech Semtex'" (p. 86); that the French police and media were quick to blame any bombings in France on the Arabes (p. 92; I'm not sure if this still obtains in France today, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did); and it's apparently not uncommon for many Algerians, particularly Berbers, to believe in magic, in djinn, and in "the Aïcha qandicha, who, as everyone knew, had goat's feet and one eye in the middle of her forehead" (p. 103).
I certainly don't mean to scare any potential readers away from the Aimée Leduc books; I certainly don't regret the time I've spent thus far with them; but I can't help being a bit frustrated and disappointed that Ms. Black didn't have editors who paid as close attention to her prose as Ms. Black evidently paid to the historical and cultural details that make her Paris a more fully realized character than any of her human ones.