Interview on Murder in the Rue de Paradis

BP: Being American and writing in English about Paris- this is the first surprise, when we approach your book. What is your relation to France and to Paris?

CB: I’ve had a long affair with France. Blame it first on my father, a Francophile, who loved good food, good wine and made me watch Jacques Tati’s classic films constantly when I was growing up. I attended a Catholic elementary school and our teachers were old French nuns who taught us archaic French. My uncle went to Paris after World War 2 and studied art on the GI bill and drank lots of red wine.  Dinner conversation at home was often full of my uncle’s tales of Paris and it really intrigued me.

BP: Why did you decide to set your novels in Paris?

CB: A In a way, Paris chose me. It’s hard to explain. There’s a saying ‘write what you know’ but I had a writing teacher who told us ‘forget that, write what you’re passionate about’ and I took those words to heart.

BP: “Murder in the Marais” is dated 1990: was it your first novel? Why did you choose the genre of the detective novel? Reading both this novel and “Murder in the Sentier” which will be published next in Italy, we sometimes feel your main interest is not the detective side of the story…

CB: Actually the book is set in November 1993 but you’re right Maria. I like the structure of a detective novel because it’s a great framework to hang a story. These books, I like to think, are novels with crime at the core. My books are about people and what happens to them confronted with extraordinary circumstances…let’s face it, most of aren’t involved in a murder. I’ve always loved Georges Simenon’s Maigret books and those of Leo Malet another French detective writer who’s not as well known. I’m interested in telling the stories of les petits gens, the everyday people of Paris, touched in the past by the war, the Algerian conflict and particularly in Murder in the Sentier, the effects on people who’d been radicals in Europe in the 70’s and were in hiding for the crimes they’d committed in their youth. For example the Baader-Meinhof gang and intellectuals on the fringe in Paris when the Wall came down in Berlin and East Germany opened the Stasi files.

BP: The titles of your novels (how many are there in the US of this series?)

CB: A Seven novels in the Aimee Leduc Investigation series published in the US.

BP: anticipate the district in Paris where the story takes place: did you sit down at a table to decide where each story would be set before starting the first book?

CB: The latest, Murder on the Ile Saint Louis, is the seventh book in the Aimée Leduc investigations and the eighth, Murder in the Rue de Paradis comes out in March 2008. I wander Paris, explore, get lost and look for an arrondissement, a quarter that speaks to me. Then I read the newspapers, talk to police, take my friend a detective out for coffee and explore what kinds of crime would happen here. And why.

BP: And does it mean that each district has a different characterization and a different and quite unique history, so that “that” story could take place nowhere else?

CB: Exactly. Paris is really a collection of villages. For example, the Bastille was noted for the artisans and woodworkers who traditionally had small shops and ateliers there and once it was the center of furniture making and the renowned site of the Ecole Boule which made furniture for Versailles. In Murder in the Bastille that’s very much a part of the story. But getting back to your question, over the centuries each ruler incorporated villages; for example, Montmartre, in the 19th century, to build their power. Paris just expanded over history. The kings built walls and fortifications then the next king and later the government knocked them down and expanded Paris into the 20 arondissements which it is now.

BP: In “Murder in the Marais” you deal with the dark chapter of WWII in France upturning stereotypes- usually Germans are the villains of history, you show that each country had its villains and not all Nazis were bad. Without referring openly to the book not to ruin the readers’ suspense, was there some news in the papers which gave you the idea for the story?

CB: Murder in the Marais is really about the grey areas of history, the past, the collaborators and how people survived during the German occupation. What choices did they have and what compromises did they make if they had children to feed, family to take care of? I thought a lot about that and about the repercussions fifty years later in the present day that could come back to haunt them. At the time I started writing Murder in the Marais, I had a young son and had returned to Paris for a visit…it made me wonder what I would have done if I’d lived there during the war, what options I would have had and what I would have done to protect him and put a roof over his head. And it’s about people, people in the wrong time the wrong place in that slice of history. The story comes from a true one that happened to my friend’s mother, a young 14 year old Jewish girl living in the Marais during the Occupation. She lived with her family on the rue des Rosiers and came home from school to find her family gone. This was 1943…she lived in the apartment by herself waiting for them to return, going to school after all what else could she do? The concierge, unlike my story, helped my friend’s mother giving her coupons for food, rations for coal in the winter. In 1944 at the Hotel Lutetia at Liberation she searched for her parents every day – it was a terminus point organized by the Red Cross for deportees and camp survivors returning after the war – she never found them. One day a woman who’d lived on her street saw her and came back from a camp said ‘I saw your sister get off the train at Auschwitz’ so that’s how she knew her family were gone. Nothing more and that’s the only closure she ever had. Regarding the love affair; let’s just say that a woman who was also a hidden Jewish girl during the war who I met and interviewed told me that some of the young German soldiers were just boys, and as much as she tried she couldn’t hate them, they were her age, forced into the military and just boys…after all it’s about people she said. And when we forget we’re all just people, the same under the skin, that’s when war happens.

BP: There is a detail in the punishment for collaborationists which was new to me: the swastika marked on the forehead of Germans’ friends. As far as I know in Italy the women who had slept with the Germans were shaved. How did you come to know about the swastika tattoo- if it is a real detail?

CB: Yes, women collaborator’s in France were also shaved but I read historical accounts, there were quite a few, that in some areas in the countryside the feelings were so strong that villagers tarred swastika’s on women’s foreheads. Hangings too when people took the law in their own hands. France was venting it’s spleen after years of the Occupation.

BP: What went into the making of the character of Aimée?

CB: I knew I couldn’t write as a French woman…I can’t even tie my scarf in the right way. I’m convinced French women were born with that savoir faire in their genes. But, as I mentioned before, I grew up in a Francophile household and felt a strong affinity and familiarity with France even before I first went there. For Aimée to be half-American and half-French made sense. She’s neither fish nor fowl. And in the detective mold of Chandler, a lone wolf, involved in danger in her search for justice that most of us, at least me, wouldn’t probably attempt. I interviewed three female detectives in Paris who ran their own detective agencies and met several policewomen. I took a lot of qualities from them and traits. Practically speaking, I learned how they ran a business, managed the aspects peculiar to a detective agency, dealt in a ‘man’s world’ and figured Aimée could wear a lot of disguises.

BP: One of the motives for which I read the following novel in English- apart from the fact that I wanted to keep company with Aimée- was that I was curious to know more about her and her parents. My curiosity was only partially satisfied: is it part of your strategy as a writer, keeping the suspense also about the main character herself

CB: That’s kind of you to say. I like the word ‘strategy’ but I can’t say I planned this or to write a series set in Paris. It happened. I wanted to write the story of my friend’s mother and what happened to her during the Occupation in Paris and after I wrote Murder in the Marais I hadn’t planned to write any more. But the publisher wanted more so I got to work. Aimée’s parents are a thread in all the books, I don’t know a lot until the characters tell me so it unfolds in each book.

BP: Certainly Aimée’s “double”, the dwarf René, is a unique character in detective literature. Why did you choose to make him so, a dwarf?

CB: It’s about looking past the surface. If one sees a dwarf perhaps on the street, in a shop the first thing in many people’s mind is his/her size, or perhaps the disability in not being able to reach for a high shelf, a difficulty in climbing stairs or such but what about their ability?  René is talented, a computer whiz and hacker extraordinaire so I thought his size would play against stereotypes and give him depth. The other day I had lunch with an actor who happens to be three feet and nine inches tall (don’t know the metric equivalent in Italy) but he refers to himself as a little person, not a dwarf, After talking to him for five minutes his physical characteristics faded and we just ate and I heard all about is auditions, and lack of them and he complained like every other struggling actor.

BP: Also in your following novel, “Murder in the Sentier”, the story has its roots in the past, even if in a more recent one- no longer WWII but another sort of war, terrorism in the 70s. It was the Werewolves in “Murder in the Marais”, it is the Haader-Rofmein gang (a name under which we can easily recognize the Baader-Meinhof gang) in the second book. Do you think that Time is a continuous and that more or less everything happening in the present is a direct consequence of what happened in the past?

CB: Yes, the past informs the present. No matter what we think we’re influenced by it whether by our family background, the place we live, and the people we know. The influence may be subtle or overt but it’s imprinted on our psyche and in the cases of Marais and Sentier, impacting present day Paris and those living there. There’s a saying by a famous British writer who said ‘the past is a foreign country,’ and I love that because it’s a past that I feel compelled to explore. And there’s another saying ‘those that don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

BP: It will take us a long time before we can read all the books which have Aimée as the main character. Can you partially satisfy our curiosity and tell us shortly what is in her future? Will she ever meet her long lost mother? Will she fall in love at last with Mr. Right and marry him?

CB: Hmmm….good questions. I don’t know Aimée’s future as each book reveals it to me but she does get more information about her mother in the next book…and it influences her. She’s attracted to bad boys in leather jackets, what more can I say? The girl so far is unlucky in love but who knows…She’s a contemporary Parisian, a young woman, like many of my friends in Paris, who have trouble finding and keeping a relationship. She’s got a detective agency to run, a dog, a 17th century apartment that’s terrible with upkeep and a drive to find what happened in her own family’s past that won’t let her rest.