Category Archives: Culture

A (Fictional) Trip to Japan

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The art, architecture, and traditions of the Land of the Rising Sun have always fascinated me, which gives the backdrops of these stories added pleasure.

The Puzzle Box by Danielle Trussoni

How you feel about puzzles will likely color your reaction to Danielle Trussoni’s new thriller, a follow-on to her well-received 2023 book, The Puzzle Master. I love puzzles, included a puzzle box in my mystery-thriller, Architect of Courage, and thought I’d found the perfect read.

Mike Brink is a New York City puzzle creator who suffered a brain injury that left him with the extremely rare “acquired savant” syndrome. Savants have extraordinary cognitive abilities in a single field. For Mike Brink, it’s solving puzzles, along with the supporting mathematics. Life and relationships aren’t easy for him and, interestingly, Mike would prefer to be less “special.”

The Imperial family has asked a US-raised young Japanese woman, Sakura Nakamoto, to convince Mike to try to open the Dragon Puzzle Box, a feat attempted in secret only every twelve years. Renowned puzzle experts have tried and failed, and failure is fatal.

In Japan, a woman named Ume is training a small cadre of young women to be warriors as ruthless as herself, female samurai. They believe whatever is hidden in the Dragon Puzzle Box can restore the samurai to power. Meanwhile, another powerful antagonist also wants the Box’s contents, in order to pursue one of those “fate of the world hangs in the balance” missions that strain my credulity. Even if Mike can open the Box without dying in the process, the dangers will be only just beginning.

I like the elements of Japanese culture that Trussoni includes in this tale. She lived several years in Japan and the story environment certainly carries the feel of authenticity. A “foreign” setting is almost always extra exciting, simply because the rules are different there, and they are very different indeed in the Imperial court setting!

The Labyrinth House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

No doubt Christie, Chandler, Sayers, Hammett, and their brethren would be quite comfortable reading this story, inspired by Golden Age traditions, the fourth of the author’s Bizarre House Mysteries.

The house of prominent Japanese mystery writer Miyagaki Yōtarō was constructed as a giant labyrinth (maps are helpfully provided to the guests—and readers). For his sixtieth birthday, he plans a celebration involving talented young writers he has mentored, his editor/critic Utayama Hideyuki, and mystery fan Shimada Kiyoshi.

The arriving guests meet Miyagaki’s secretary who makes the astonishing revelation that their host, dying of cancer, has committed suicide. Miyagaki’s posthumous instructions ask them not to call the police for five days and not to try to leave. He also asks the four authors to use the days to write the best detective story they can, which Utayama and Shimada will judge. The winner will receive half of Miyagaki’s considerable estate. Initially nonplussed, the writers quickly rally and commit to the project. Thus, you have a classic locked-room mystery. It doesn’t tax your imagination to guess the partygoers will begin dropping like flies.

Utayama and Shimada take the lead in investigating, but neither can be sure the other isn’t the mysterious killer. Most puzzling is that the positioning of each body and the cause of death mimics the newly deceased’s draft story.

I learned less about Japanese culture than I might have expected and quite a bit more about the personalities of ambitious authors than I might have wanted. Miyagaki well understood what he was dealing with when he set up this unusual challenge. Each murder necessitates a lengthy deconstruction of the surrounding events, the location of other guests at the probable time of the crime, and its relation to the story begun on their word processors. It begins to feel like an overlong unravelling, but all points to a classic fair-play conclusion. Will you figure it out before Utayama and Shimada do?

“Big Chief Wears a Golden Crown”–Take 2

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Masking Indian

In 2018, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts hosted a panel discussion with two leaders in the tradition of New Orleans Black Masking Indians. Darryl Montana, great-grandson of one of the tradition’s founders, and Demond Melancon, whom Montana calls the “world’s best beader” described masking’s origins and modern significance. This is a post I wrote a few days after the event, reprinting it now, as so timely—and colorful!—for Mardi Gras.

Masking—familiar to viewers of the television series Treme, (to my regret, only four seasons long!) in which Clarke Peters played Big Chief Albert Lambreaux—is a nearly two-hundred-year-old tradition that has various origin stories. In part it may have begun as resistance to early rules prohibiting negroes from wearing feathers, in part as a shout-out to the Native Americans who helped runaway slaves, and in part as a strong expression of individuality and pride in an era of repression.

The Chiefs of New Orleans’s nearly 40 black masking tribes make one suit a year. Each suit has multiple parts, can weigh up to 150 pounds, and takes about 5000 hours to construct. Because masking is a “competitive sport,” Montana said, the costumes are generally made in secret, their design and significance revealed only when the Indians come out on Carnival Day (Mardi Gras).

In recognition of Melancon’s artistic skills, in 2012, the elders of the Mardi Gras Indian community dubbed him Chief Demond Melancon of the Young Seminole Hunters, with his very own tribe in the Lower Ninth Ward. Increasingly, the creation of suits is considered a significant contemporary art form, and its best practitioners keep pushing the envelope of creative possibility. Melancon’s suit on display at the Lewis Center tells the story of an enslaved Ghanian prince brought to New Orleans in the 1830’s. He lost an arm after a dispute with police, and was thereafter called Bras Coupé. Every beaded element of this stunning suit carries symbolic significance.

Montana is the Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas Hunters Black Masking Indian Tribe and made the lavish lavender suit pictured. Completion often involves family members and select friends.

Montana explained that he does not want “to take what I learned from the Chief to the grave with me,” and now makes a concerted effort to engage the next generation in the masking tradition. “You have to keep (young people) busy,” he said, and he believes that through the intensity of the suit-making process, the time commitment, and the camaraderie of working on a culturally meaningful project, he’s found a way to do that.

Cocktail Party Conversation Stopper

In case this slipped by you, the Big Chief mentioned the massive amount of Mardi Gras beads deviling New Orleans’s storm drains. Last fall 93,000 pounds-worth were excavated from merely a five-block stretch of St. Charles Avenue! Of course, they were wet, which must have contributed to the weight!.

Intrigued? Here’s More + Pictures!

The House of Dance and Feathers: A Museum by Ronald LewisMardi Gras Indians by Michael Smith
From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square: Kongo Dances and the Origins of the Mardi Gras Indians – Joroen Dewulf’s new theory about the origins of the black masking Indian tradition
For a short story about the Indians and their costumes, see this post from yesterday: https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11344

With Our Bellies Full and the Fire Dying

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I must have gained ten pounds reading this collection of short stories by Debra H. Goldstein. Though she was raised in New Jersey and Michigan (and is an alumna of my alma mater, the University of Michigan—Go Blue!), she spent much of her career in the South, which has definitely seeped into her story-telling. It’s a south of pie auctions, bar-b-cue, fatal seafood casseroles, and corn pudding recipes over which deadly fights can erupt. She corrals these culinary delights under the broad heading: “Tales of Sinning and Redemption,” and a particularly luscious cake is the recipe for redemption in one of them.

What’s most fun about reading this collection is how varied the stories are, even with the frequent appearance of something delicious. They’ve appeared in many collections, some not widely distributed, so it’s a new and invigorating experience to read them. One that’s particularly apt for Mardi Gras tomorrow is “Who Dat? Dat the Indian Chief?” about the Mardi Gras Indians and their elaborate and in this case, unexpectedly valuable, costumes.

A number of the stories feature children, precocious ones for the most part, like the son of the sheriff who not only discovers a body, but analyzes the crime scene based on his Magic of Forensic Science book. One I especially liked was “The Girls in Cabin Three,” made up solely of letters home from a teenage camper, whose reports must have horrified her parents!

Although the stories are short, Goldstein loads in some compelling surprises, as in her story about a homeless encampment, “So Beautiful or So What,” where characters aren’t necessarily what they seem. Do they all get redemption? The lucky ones do.

Overall, Goldstein’s writing is clear and entertaining, capturing her characters and their outlook on life—good, bad, self-centered, or magnanimous—most convincingly. Very possibly, her years as a judge trained her to see through people’s outer presentation to their core, which skill she now uses to great effect in these entertaining stories. Or perhaps that skill made her a good jurist—whichever, her readers are now the beneficiaries.

Order the collection here.

Delicious UK Crime Fiction

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What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close

Ajay Close’s new crime thriller is inspired by the notorious 1970s Yorkshire Ripper case, which prompted a massive and massively inefficient manhunt. In that case, the police eventually identified the killer, but were severely criticized for many aspects of their investigation.

Close’s fictional treatment contains elements of a police procedural, as the authorities stumble along almost completely devoid of clues and full of misplaced emphases. What sets this book apart, though, is the equal, if not greater, attention to the cultural milieu in which the crimes occurred. In that respect, it is a scathing social history.

Close has achieved an inspired juxtaposition here, using as her principal protagonist young police constable Liz Seeley, attached to the task force investigating a series of prostitutes’ murders. She knows firsthand about mistreated women, and, to escape her abusive boyfriend, she has moved to a communal house in Leeds, occupied by six feminists who hate the cops.

The attitude toward women that Liz experiences in the police department—condescending, salacious, misogynistic—is a dark side of male behavior. They don’t take much interest in the dead and engage in victim-blaming until the murder of a middle-class girl who is most definitely not in the sex trade. Liz is trapped between two behavioral and attitudinal extremes.

While male readers might want to give themselves a pass, because they don’t share those extreme beliefs or behaviors, they undoubtedly have seen it, may have tolerated it, and very possibly laughed it off, even if uncomfortably. In susceptible minds, endemic disrespect and hostility end up where Close’s investigators find them.

It’s a bit of a difficult read in the beginning because Close uses the street language and slang of Yorkshire residents of fifty years ago. But it is well worth the effort. It’s an important book, especially when we still receive too-frequent reminders of how willing some people (people who ought to know better) are to trot out the old prejudices and gender slurs, half a century later.

The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay

Now, escape the 21st c. for a romp in late-Victorian London. In this entertaining historical crime novel, Quinn le Blanc is the Queen of Fives, head of a once-large and notorious group of female con women, now reduced to her, her major domo, Mr. Silk, and a few loosely connected paid confederates of dubious loyalty.

Quinn’s actions are guided by a Rulebook created by her predecessor Queens, which lays out the rules for any number of confidence schemes, all of which follow a prescribed path and have in common the goal of obtaining something of value. Preferably a lot of value.

Quinn has selected an aloof young duke from the richest family of England as her quarry, and through an elaborate set of stratagems and disguises, sets out to trick him into marriage. It isn’t only his money she’s after; she’d like to derail his do-gooder step-mother whose charities are bent on tearing down old houses, including the traditional seat of the Queen of Fives.

But if the course of true love never did run smooth, neither in this case does the course of false love. A mysterious man, the duke’s suspicious sister, the duke’s secret love all conspire against the Queen. What’s most fun are the clever plots and quick-change artistry of the characters. Pure fun and mischief.

So, Who Was St. Valentine, Anyway?

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Alumni of Catholic schools probably know this, but I’d forgotten any details, if I’d every known them, about the Old World St. Valentine, who lived in the third century—that is 1700 years ago. (You may be tempted to ponder who, today, will be remembered, at least in a positive way, in the year 3725?)

For a thousand years, the saint has been associated with “courtly love,” but don’t overlook his role as patron saint of epilepsy (not so romantic), beekeepers (honey is sweet, after all), and the Umbrian city of Terni (?). February 14 commemorates the day in CE 269 that the saint was martyred in Italy.

The link with courtly love is tenuous and might have grown from the saint’s practice of marrying Christian couples, whose marriages would otherwise have been prohibited. Poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his friends are often credited with bringing to light the legend of the saint’s love connection, which begins with Chaucer’s Parliament of Birds: “For this was on Seynt Valentynes day, Whan every foul (fowl) cometh there to chese his make (make his choice of mate).”

In the 1840s, St. Valentine’s Day was practically reinvented to become the glorious celebration of hearts, flowers, and chocolate we know today. Love the Jane Austen-y vintage-lookiing valentine!

Flickr photo credit: Adair733, Creative Commons license.

Not Paranormal, Just Different

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An interesting recent discussion between two indigenous American authors got me thinking about the issue of paranormal. (And, not for the first time, wondering what’s “normal,” anyway, in these times?) Some elements in the books of Ramona Emerson of the Diné (Navaho) tribe and Marcie Rendon, a member of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa (Ojibwe)—both multiple literary award-winners, by the way—might fit into a broad paranormal category, but they reject that characterization.

Emerson is the author of two books in her series featuring Rita Todacheene a forensic photographer, able to see in her mind the circumstances of the crimes she is meticulously documenting. (Find her remarkable books here and here.) Rendon, who is also a playwright and poet, writes the popular Cash Blackbear crime series, featuring a young Ojibwe woman, whose guardian is a sheriff, which brings her into occasional contact with violent crime. The fourth book in Rendon’s series, Broken Fields, will be available March 2025. Blackbear’s visions and intuitive abilities help in solving crimes, and the author explores the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women. In both authors’ books, you find a rich source of information and perspective on the protagonists’ cultural milieu.

In a recent webinar, Emerson interviewed Rendon, and they mentioned the “paranormal” issue. Publishers and agents when musing about what they’re looking for in manuscript submissions today increasingly mention their attraction to paranormal elements. It’s not clear exactly what they have in mind. But it is something both women claim to not write. They haven’t decided to paste on some not easily explained or supernatural element. “It’s just part of who we are,” Rendon said, “a different belief system.” In it, dreams are important, she said, and they discuss them each morning. In my dream last night, I was looking for something I couldn’t find—typical!

Her character Cash Blackbear’s visions let her see beyond objective reality. In the Ojibwe culture, such thinking is part-and-parcel of daily existence. In part, that’s because the wisdom of the ancestors guides them through life, and people talk to and “see” their ancestors frequently. And not only because they are “surrounded by spirit houses” (little houses built atop graves mounds). Despite these frequent contacts, interactions with ancestors or the spirit world are done within certain parameters, certain specific rules. Personally, I’d like to understand more.

Naturally, because this is such a different way of thinking, acceptance is hard for people raised in a culture that emphasizes rationality and scientific proof as the keys to understanding the world. From the inside, as Emerson portrays Rita Todacheene, this different way is also hard to simply dismiss.

Another recent book that draws on this type of thinking is Jennifer Givhan’s 2023 novel, River Woman, River Demon. Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous author whose story weaves together the otherworldly and the everyday swirling around a murder. It isn’t a novel I would ordinarily gravitate to, but Givhan made it a powerful story, and I’m glad I read it.

Reaching for my more comfortably familiar analytic hat, I can’t help wondering whether stories like these are achieving resonance in this era when the rational seems to have flown out the window. Maybe people are seeking a little wisdom from unconventional sources to help them get through. But that would be selling these books short. These are compelling tales from a less conventional point of view that deserve to be read and thought about in any time period.

“So you think THAT’s funny?!”

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You ever wonder what is the world’s funniest joke? You aren’t alone. In its 19 August issue devoted to stories about humor, The New Yorker resurrected Tad Friend’s 2002 coverage of the efforts of UK psychologist Richard Wiseman (not wiseguy, note) to identify the world’s funniest joke. (You can read about his team’s work here.) Not so easy, it turns out.

Tackling this conundrum led him to think about why we find certain things funny, or not. Friends have probably asked you to recommend a good movie, and you may have learned the hard way that your suggestions about dramas and crime stories work out pretty well, but it’s practically useless to recommend a comedy—people’s senses of humor are too different.

In fact, Friend notes the many unanswered questions about what makes us laugh. There are esoteric issues and basic ones, like “whether any woman, anywhere, ever, has appreciated the Three Stooges.” Friend’s line made me laugh, though, because I’m a charter member of the Three Stooges Unappreciators. Nor do I like Neil Simon-type comedy where I can see the next one-liner barreling my way. Duck! And, mean-spirited sitcoms, arrrgh!  

One thing the UK researchers did notice is that, if you tell the same joke about a talking animal, and switch out the animal, the funniest one will turn out to be a duck. Maybe it’s the letter “k” there, a reputedly sure-fire staple in comedy lore. Now, feel free to proceed with your day, having learned something, or two somethings, completely useless.

Apparently, our humor processing system is complicated. Electric stimulation of various parts of the brain can make a person smile or cry, but Wiseman says it’s very hard to make them laugh. A different set of researchers has learned that some types of humor (the kinds of stuff you need to think about) are processed on the left side of the brain, some on the right. It’s as if the left side sets up the joke, and the right side—the emotional side—“gets it.” Or, “While the left hemisphere might appreciate some of Groucho’s puns, and the right hemisphere might be entertained by the antics of Harpo, only the two hemispheres united can appreciate a whole Marx Brothers routine.” Says Friend, neither one, apparently, “thinks much of Chico.” (I laughed again.)

Among many other attractions, this issue of the magazine also has nostalgic short bits about Robin Williams and Richard Pryor early in their stand-up careers, and a lovely reminiscence by Zadie Smith. Pieces that make you smile and sigh at the same time.

Last week, our local movie theater showed 1942’s The Palm Beach Story, a classic screwball comedy starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, and Rudy Vallee. Princeton English professor Maria DiBattista gave a short pre-film talk. Her book Fast Talking Dames is about a type of cinematic character she calls an American original. The Palm Beach Story has two of them and, DiBattista says, every kind of comedy imaginable—slapstick, one liners, mistaken identities, double entendre. We loved it!

If you can tolerate a little ethnic humor, here’s a quick joke, courtesy of the entertaining Netflix program, Somebody Feed Phil:

A nine-year old boy rushes home from school, calling, “Mom! Mom! I got a part in the school play!”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, darling! What part did you get?”
“I play the Jewish husband!”
Waving him away, she says, “Go back and ask for a speaking part.”

To end on contemporary note, Emma Allen a New Yorker cartoon editor, reports that “One of the few things A.I. can’t do well is write a joke—a fact that we can all cling to when we’re sent into the mines by our robot overlords.”

The Serpent Dance

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With Sofia Slater’s latest crime mystery, you have not only an intriguing whodunnit, but, although it’s set in contemporary times, The Serpent Dance feels like a trip back in time to the era when Cornish midsummer revelries first involved bonfires, iconic music, river offerings, and the creation of wicker animals, later consumed by the ritual fire. Slater draws on the persistence of these ancient practices, mixing the traditional and the modern in ways that occasionally baffle her protagonist.

London graphic designer Audrey Delaney’s boyfriend of ten months, Noah, has planned a surprise getaway for them. She’s convinced herself (and prematurely told all her friends) that he’s taking her to Paris. When it turns out they’re headed to the fictional Cornish village of Trevennick, she tries not to show her disappointment, but Noah realizes he’s missed the mark.

From there, their situation goes from bad to much, much worse. Their B&B is a modern, glass-walled home overlooking the river. Inside, it’s open-plan carried to an extreme. Their landlady will be staying in the master bedroom, with just a wisp of separation between her and the guest bedroom.

Their hostess is a renowned television personality, and Noah takes to her with unexpected enthusiasm. Something isn’t right. Why this place? What’s Noah’s real agenda? Why his interest in this older woman? The twisting lines of the eponymous serpent dance itself can’t compare to the secrets Audrey is about to discover.

No need to worry be jealous of their hostess, though, because before morning she lies dead in a pool of blood, a knife to her throat. The police initially consider it a suicide, but elements of the crime scene simply don’t add up. Since Audrey and Noah are the only other people in the house, and since anyone else padding about could not do so without risking being seen (all those glass walls), police attention is on them. On Noah, particularly.

The town is preparing for the midsummer Golowan festivities, masks and wicker obby orses everywhere. It’s a deeply local tradition and outsiders aren’t especially welcome, especially when the shadow of murder has fallen on them.

Though Noah is tucked away in jail, their hostess’s isn’t the only body to turn up. Audrey tackles her predicament in the way she tries to work through any difficult circumstance, by drawing, and the realism of her depiction of Stella’s corpse, among other local characters is inevitably misunderstood. It’s a classic case of being out of one’s own element. This profoundly unsettling atmosphere makes Audrey anxious about the wrong things, so that she doesn’t recognize the danger to herself.

I found the mix of past and present, culture and calamity quite captivating. Nice job, Sofia Slater! Order your copy here.

“Tell Me What You Think the Problem Is”

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French Windows by Antoine Laurain

This unconventional short novel by French author Antoine Laurain, translated into English by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, proves once again that delving into another person’s psyche is tricky business. You know from the cover that the book is a murder mystery, but what is this murder? When and where does it occur? And when the event finally appears in the story, the victim and perpetrator are a surprise. What the book has been up to in reaching that point is a trip through the richly imagined garden of a psychiatric patient’s mind.

Parisian psychiatrist Dr. J. Faber relates his encounters with a new patient, Nathalia Guitry, a beautiful young woman who is a successful photographer. But she’s stopped taking pictures. In fact, she says the last photograph she took was of a murder. Shocked, Faber ends the session. Nathalia returns for a second appointment and reveals that she spends her days observing the people in the flats opposite hers. Observing is what she’s good at, after all.

To get their conversations started, he suggests she write down what she thinks she’s seeing—the stories of these other people’s lives. He hopes her written words will be a window into her own thoughts. She agrees, and she writes interesting and clever stories from these other people’s points of view, which become chapters in the book. Some of these stories become so engaging, you may wish they weren’t so short. They also capture many aspects of daily life in Paris, deconstructing French people’s attitudes and preoccupations. I felt as if that apartment building revealed an entire world through its residents’ friendships, regrets, ambitions, and longings.

But what about that murder? You just have to wait for it

Order a copy here.

Jack & I

Laury Egan’sJack & I is the dark tale of a 16-year-old New Jersey boy growing up in a succession of foster homes offering varying degrees of sympathy and exploitation. Most of his problems result from undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder – what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder.

Sometimes, Jack is his painfully shy and socially inept self, but when his alter ego takes over he is brash, aggressive, and predatory. The unpredictable emergence of this other Jack (whom I’ll call Jack2 for this review) is one of the reasons foster families don’t keep him long. Egan states up-front that her depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder takes a few liberties for fiction’s purposes, but the condition usually originates in early childhood trauma. Jack has learned not just to seal off this trauma, he also hides the existence of Jack2. He has only fragmentary memories of Jack2’s misdeeds, and sometimes none at all, though he has to bear the punishment and social exclusion that result.

While Jack is a sympathetic character, Jack2 is not, and with a story involving the sexual exploitation of minors Jack and I is a difficult read. The depravity of the adults involved is shocking, but Jack2 is completely complicit and is disdainful of Jack, upon whom his whole existence depends. But don’t despair. At last, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

The previous book by Egan reviewed here, The Psychologist’s Shadow, also featured a significant psychological component, and the author handles these issues with great sensitivity.

Itʼs an extreme case study, yes, as well as a reminder of how badly the world treats the most vulnerable among us and how high the stakes are.

Order a copy here.

Another Taste of France: Bruno: Chief of Police

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Now that we’re all Frenchified from watching the Olympics and their stunning opening ceremonies, which showed the Paris at its best, we can take a breath and turn to some of the country’s many other charms.

Millions of UK and US readers have basked in the sunny French countryside via the books by the late Peter Mayle, author of 1989’s A Year in Provence. If you’re one of them, Martin Walker’s more recently written detective series will transport you to a similar, simpler time and place. A place where a meal is something to be lingered over (and described in mouth-watering detail) and a glass of wine is savored, even if it’s the not-all-that-delicious small batch created by your hillside neighbor.

Martin Walker’s series of seventeen mystery novels, published beginning in 2009, retains the witty, warm-hearted, utterly charming feeling Mayle exemplified. Bruno, Chief of Police, is the series opener. The chief’s actual name is Benoît Courrèges, but to everyone, he’s Bruno. His beat is the small town of Saint-Denis and surrounding countryside, located on the Vézère River in the Dordogne—some 450 miles west and a bit north of Provence.

Bruno uses a cell phone, relies on DNA testing, and uses other up-to-date forensic methods, but his real skill is understanding the psychology and behavior of Saint-Denis’s residents. His understanding of what methods will and will not work in getting to the bottom of crimes committed there is acute. Big-city police authorities and the head of the local gendarmerie are ever convinced they know best how to handle situations that arise. But, faced with Bruno’s local intelligence, they’re usually defeated in a most gratifying, often amusing, way—such as a gendarme’s attempt to arrest a boy for possession of a potato (on market day, no less!), which runs quickly aground.

Walker weaves significant contemporary concerns into his rosy descriptions of markets, cafés and wineries. For example, market day offers the opportunity for rule-obsessed EU inspectors to search out cheeses, pâtés, and meats that, despite new restrictions, continue to be produced and sold just the way the sellers’ parents and grand-parents did. A woman cited for selling eggs without the required date stamp actually buys her eggs at the supermarket, washes off the dates, and packages them up with a bit of straw and (don’t think about it) to sell to tourists as real country eggs. And tourists there are, with all their agendas and cultural mishaps.

Intruding on this idyllic existence is the occasional murder, rare for the area, but perfect for Bruno’s particular skills Some stories’ strong political undertow allows the author to explore residents’ attitudes about immigrants, social cohesion, wartime behavior, and the like, which give the stories considerable weight.

Bruno is more than the town’s chief of police. For one thing, he coaches the town’s children who want to play tennis. He thinks it’s A good way to get to know the next generation, whose members soon will enter the risk-prone years of adolescence. He travels the area’s indifferent roadways to visit farm families, keep tabs on their concerns, making numerous friendships among them. When he needs them, they cooperate.

Good food too is a preoccupation. Bruno is an excellent, if unfussy cook, and partakes of the best his region has to over, including the truffles found in the woods behind his house. (I’m salivating.) Naturally, he has a loyal basset hound, Gigi, to keep him company and manage his hunting expeditions.

Bottom line: Walker’s mysteries are a pleasant way to spend a few hours. More than that, the investigations he’s designed dig into many facets of rural life as it has been and as it changes. Not all of them are pretty, and the appearance of simplicity is only on the surface. Along the way he introduces you to interesting local characters and captures a few idyllic moments. You’re very likely to want more of both.

Walker is a former foreign correspondent for The Guardian, has written a number of nonfiction historical and political books and lives in France’s Périgord region.