What I'm reading 'I Came Out of France'

I'm reading Cecily Mackworth's journey from Paris as the German's took over France in her book, I Came Out of France,  published in 1941. Her story reads like a thriller. Even more is that it's heart poundingly true. Cecily lived this. Her account mirrors what many women experienced during the war that was rarely, if ever, talked or written about then. Or now.

TS Eliot read it and invited her to tea in Russell Square, interested to meet her. She worked for a spell with the Free French in Carlton Gardens in 1940. In her life, Cecily was a poet, critic, novelist, biographer, journalist and globetrotter. 
But I knew Cecily when she'd slowed down and was in her 90's in Paris - what a wonderful character - a grand Dame who was totally down to earth! I'd been introduced by a friend who lived in the same building in the Marais (blue double doors). 

Cecily's ground floor apartment - a small treasure box - was full of bits of her life journeying in the middle East and North Africa and all over working as a journalist and exploring. Plus it held the most wonderfully soft blue and white sofas with matching blue Ming vases nearby.  'From my husband, the Comte you know, I'd never have gone with Ming,' she would say. For all her British mannerisms - she was born in Wales -  she was very French having lived in France since 1936 and marrying first a Belgian, was widowed then a titled Frenchman.

An afternoon with her on the comfortable blue and white sofa, a fire burning and the view onto the 17th century courtyard - was just about perfect and became more so when Cecily would talk. She was in Berlin for the burning of the Reichstag, an account she wrote up but could not get published. One time she spoke of that nasty Henry. Henry as in Miller. I never totally understood that relationship in the 30's. In 1937 she met Henry, then living at the Villa Seurat, in his studio in the Rue de la Tombe Issoire. He took to her and she became part of his Paris circle. Through Miller she met Lawrence Durrell, newly arrived from Corfu. "Send me everything in your jam cupboard," Durrell once wrote on a scrap of paper he slipped under her door.  Miller and Durrell below and always good pals.

At that time she wrote poetry and Henry Miller published her poems in a short lived arts magazine I think it was Picasso who she referred to as an ugly toad or that might have been Jean-Paul Sartre.  Pre-war she'd hung with the artistic and writing crowd - expats and locals - which steered her writing from poetry to fiction.

Reading I Came out of France now - which imho should be titled - I Walked out of France - makes me wonder why any one in the British government didn't heed or note any of her observations. Was it because she was a woman?

If you can find it - libraries might have a copy - please give yourself a chance to go on an amazing ride out of Occupied France joining in the footsteps of Cecily.
Cara - Tuesday

Patrick Modiano winner of the Nobel for literature who you've never heard of

Patrick Modiano publishes his books consistently in France and yet, only two so far have been translated into English. He just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'd never heard of him until, years ago after the publication of Murder in the Marais, the University of California Press asked me to review his forthcoming book 'Dora Bruder'. In the UK it was published as The Search Warrant. I guessed it was because Marais dealt with hidden Jewish children during the Occupation and that's what Modiano had written about. Dora Bruder comes from a single newspaper clipping Modiano/the narrator finds.

What ever happened to her -  this young Jewish girl who disappears? The whole book is the search and historical evidence he finds. The book touched me. Here's the beginning:

Eight years ago, in an old copy of Paris Soir dated December 31 1941, a headline on page three caught my eye:

PARIS

Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy-blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.

I had long been familar with the area around the Boulevard Ornano. As a child, I would accompany my mother to the Saint-Ouen flea markets. We would get off the bus either at the Porte de Clignancourt or, occasionally, outside the 18th arrondissement Town Hall. Always, it was a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

I am writing these pages in November 1996. It seldom stops raining. Tomorrow we shall be in December, and 55 years will have passed since Dora ran away. It gets dark early, and it is just as well: night obliterates the greyness and monotony of these rainy days when one wonders if it really is daytime, or if we are not going through some intermediary stage, a sort of gloomy eclipse lasting til dusk. Then the street-lamps and shop windows and cafés light up, the evening air freshens, contours sharpen, there are traffic jams at the crossroads and hurrying crowds in the streets. And in the midst of all these lights, all this hubbub, I can hardly believe that this is the city where Dora lived with her parents, where my father lived when he was 20 years younger than I am now. I feel as if I am alone in making the link between Paris then and Paris now, alone in remembering all these details. There are moments when the link is stretched to breaking-point, and other evenings when the city of yesterday appears to me in fugitive gleams behind that of today. 

 After reading Dora Bruder I did retrace those steps of Dora's that Modiano/the narrator so meticulously traced.  Call me a groupie. One of the locations I only found a few years ago, where Dora had been hidden in a Catholic sisters refuge, proved the most elusive. Why? It had been torn down and was now an elementary school that I'd walked by several times.  A French person once said 'Oh Modiano, he writes the same book every time.' But no, I think Modiano is obsesssed by that era, his place in it and France's and writes on this theme in every book but with a totally different voice. He's a detective of his own past,  product of a Jewish father who collaborated with the Germans and hid from them. His father remained a shadowy figure in Modiano's childhood. Modiano wrote about his search, it's a theme in all his books, and France's dark past in the Occupation. His work explores in micro the macro of that time. 

Alexandra Schwartz writes about Modiano wonderfully in the New Yorker. Here's part of her article:
"Who is this writer, and what are the ungraspable human destinies he has uncovered? Modiano was born near Paris in July, 1945, to a Flemish mother and a father from a Jewish family with roots in Salonika. He worked his way to the Lycée Henri-IV, the top preparatory school in France, but his formal education ended at seventeen. Europeans born in 1945 share a certain liminal condition. They escaped the threat, but not the taint, of the war. They were born into freedom but conceived in turmoil; they grew up looking over their shoulders... Modiano’s first novel,  involves a ...kind of projection into the narrowly escaped past. Set in 1942 in a phantasmagoric Paris (Proust, Freud, Hitler, and Dreyfus all make appearances), it is called “La Place de l’Étoile”—a reference to the rotunda at the head of the Champs Elysées that circles the Arc de Triomphe, but also to the yellow felt star worn by Jews during the Occupation. “La Place de l’Étoile” appeared at a moment when the core tenet of French postwar identity—“the myth of France as a nation of resisters,” as the French writer Clémence Boulouque put it to me when I called her to discuss Modiano’s win—was beginning to crumble. (The book was published in May, 1968, the same month that the famous student protests in Paris began; General de Gaulle, the President of the Republic and the living symbol of French heroism during the war, fled to a military base in Germany to wait it all out.) Modiano knew the soiled truth firsthand. His father had refused to wear the star and did not turn himself in when Paris’s Jews were rounded up for deportation to concentration camps; he spent the war doing business on the black market and hanging around with the Gestapo stationed on the Rue Lauriston. Boulouque, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that in his three dozen or so novels Modiano has returned again and again to the same themes: the pull of the past, the threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, “the dark side of the soul.” Modiano, she told me, believes that “the novelist has an ethical duty to record the traces of the people who have vanished, the people who were made to disappear.” It will not have escaped the attention of the Nobel committee that Modiano’s win comes at a time when anti-Semitism in France is on the rise, as is the rate of French Jews’ emigration to Israel. The fear that French Jews are not safe in their own land, that French Jewish culture may vanish, is once again palpable. (Photo overlooking rue Saint Honore with surrendering German soldiers 1944)

The French magazine Nouvel Observateur says this in their BiblioObs section. There's a map below and quotes, sorry from a badly Google translated article on Modiano. It has a map of where his books take place in Paris.

Among all, a book in Paris plays a part it is "Dora Bruder." Street names abound, from the apartment of the parents of little Dora, located at 41 Boulevard Ornano and the nearby cinema, Ornano 43 But gradually crumbles a series of names that no longer the same affect, religious boarding of 62-64 rue Picpus (Which has been torn down) echo roundups  12 Quai de Gesvres (head of social assistance of the Police, where his father was believed to be reading a passage), haunts almost all the books away Modiano, at least all those who for Paris headquarters for investigation. Dora Bruder replaced the dizziness of the reference of the abyss of accuracy. Paris has closed on the little Dora. Halfway between "New Mysteries of Paris" Leo Malet and "Attempt to exhaustion of a Parisian place" Perec's novels Modiano lead for nearly fifty years a survey of Paris, Paris instead of a crime. But these thrillers holes / white thrillers investigating oblivion  making the same trajectory flesh for his crimes.Modiano archivist, very sick, with all these addresses as a skin fever. Until regret, always, to say too much, not having been able to shut up. Private Detective writer merges with the real estate agent-writer.
Ok the long and short is they call Modiano a mystery writer who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Take heart blogmates!
Cara - Tuesday

Paris quiz time

The other night I was at a 'mystery bookswap' at a great local indie bookstore - lots of fun! For a finale to the evening the owners conducted a 'pub quiz' on the swapped books series and characters. This inspired me to come up with a quiz for Murder in the Lanterne Rouge which pubs today!

1) Which building is the oldest in Paris?

a- the Nicholas Flamel house on rue Montmorency
b- the timbered building on rue Volta
c- both of the above
If you answer c you're right - historians continually argue over which building is the oldest - it's a toss up but records in the archives list both as the oldest remaining building in Paris



2) Square du Temple gets it's name from
a- a flower seller in the district named Temple
b- the Knights Templar
c- the Jewish synogogue nearby
If you answer b you're right - the square du Temple - now a park - is on the site of the 14th century Knights Templar former fortress

3) Where is the boulevard du Crime?
a- by the Seine
b - near the police Prefecture
c- none of the above
If you answer C you're right - at the turn of the century the boulevard du Temple was referred to for awhile as the blvd du crime because of the many theatres playing crime dramas on the stage

4) Aimée Leduc keeps all of these items in her purse except for:
a- Chanel Red lipsitck
b- computer encryption manual
c - red hightops for escape work
d - dog biscuit for her bichon frise Miles Davis
e - handkerchief
If you answered e you're right she wouldn't be caught dead with a handkerchief

5) Aimée Leduc has never driven
a - a moped through the Metro to escape
b - a bicycle
c- René's classic Citroën
d - a Segway in Montmartre

If you answer d you're right - she'd never be caught dead on a Segway. either.

This book takes Aimée back to the Marais, investigating in the oldest and smallest Chinatown in Paris set among 14th and 17th century buildings. I'll write more about the quartier next week meanwhile I'm getting ready for the road and hope to see you at a book event -
http://www. carablack.com/events.html

Cara - book launch Tuesday

Bouchercon Hiatus: Reprise !st Books and How I got started

Bouchercon Hiatus:
If you're unfamiliar with what Bouchercon is, you can learn all about it by going here: http://www.bouchercon2011.com/
In case you don't know it already, the only one among us who isn't attending is Dan (We'll miss you, Dan) and we're all pretty busy with preparations and travel. We have, therefore, agreed that two posts from each of us, in succession, will be drawn from our archive.
This is from January 10 this year

1st Books How I got started



Murder in the Marais, my first book in the Aimée Leduc Investigation series, just came out in a tenth anniversary edition. I'll be getting back from the ALA midwinter Library conference in San Diego when you read this so I'm posting a blog post I wrote for Meg Waite Clayton on her Stories of How Writers Get Started (megwaiteclayton.com/1stbooks/) last year. Meg's a great fiction writer btw check out her blog and her books even though she doesn't do murder but writes wonderful literary fiction. This is what I wrote for her blog and it reasonates for me right now because writing, like life, is a journey and I can't believe in less than two months Murder in Passy, Aimée's 11th investigation will come out.

Here's the dirty, dark secret of starting my life of crime.
When I began writing I never thought I’d finish a book much less set it in Paris, even get published or write a series.
I wasn’t a doctor, a policewoman, a sketch artist or with the FBI. I was a mom, a preschool teacher and had old friends in Paris. The total sum of my qualifications apart from reading and loving mysteries.
I did grow up in a Francophile family in the SF Bay Area and attended a French Catholic school. My father was a Francophile and loved good food and wine. In the 50’s my uncle went to France and studied with the artist George Braques, so talk at our dinner table was a lot about France. Later, I lived in Europe, mostly Switzerland and France and did every kind of black market job under the European sun.
But it was the story of my friend’s mother, a hidden Jewish girl in Paris during the German Occupation, that drove me to write. I’d heard this story when I visited the Marais with my friend and just felt somehow, someway I had to write this. As I told Meg before, this led to three and a half years of writing what became Murder in the Marais.
During the process I’d discovered I couldn’t write as a French woman, I can’t even tie my scarf the right way. But I began spending more time in Paris in the mid-1990’s to develop Aimée Leduc, my PI turned computer security sleuth. I interviewed three female detectives in Paris who ran their own detective agency and took qualities from each. It became important to me that my character Aimée be half-American, half-French be a young, contemporary woman like the Parisian women I know, have a strong fashion sense and be fierce in her pursuit of justice. The justice that eludes people sometimes in daily life. And that she know much more about computers than I do.
But when my editor accepted the first manuscript (Marais) she asked...”Where’s Aimée going next?” I hesitated. “What do you mean?” “Well, where’s she going to discover crime next. Which part of Paris?” Long pause. “You are writing the next book aren’t you...this is a series?”
“Of course,” I lied.
“You’ve started I assume?”
“Matter of fact, the story takes up right after the Marais.” I said the first thing that came into my head while running to my computer.
“Good a continuation, her next case, the next part of her life...that man she met..what about him?”
My editor was feeding me ideas and I wasn’t going to ignore them. “Yves the journalist, yes, the relationship will go somewhere and she’s going to Belleville.”
My bright idea since I’d just stayed in that district with my friend, a single mom who’s daughter was the same age as my son. I slept on her couch, took her daughter to school, paid her gas bills and saw another side of Paris in doing so.
“Belleville...where’s that?”
Ok this was before the movie Triplets of Belleville.
“But that’s where Edith Piaf lived, she sang on the streets.”
“Fine,” my editor said.
And there I was powering up my computer, searching for my notes, napkins from the Belleville bistro, my photos and I had a goal. Aimée was going to Belleville, murder somehow would be involved, a problematic relationship with Yves, the man she got involved with in the Marais, would ensue and I was off.
And that’s how it’s been with each other book. Aimée’s got office rent to pay, a business to run, upkeep on a crumbling 17th century Ile Saint Louis townhouse flat with archaic plumbing, a bichon frise named Miles Davis to walk on the quais of the Seine and a penchant for bad boys. In part Aimée’s journey; her progression in life and investigations mirror what I discover in Paris, the society, immigration issues, in that book about Belleville corruption in the government and it’s a flow streaming into politics. We meet Aimée in November 1993 and now eleven books later (in the forthcoming Murder in Passy) it’s November 1997 - only four fictional years have passed. But the background setting she experiences are the seasons, the current scandal, Princess Diana's death in the car crash. Each book is a long snapshot of the time, Aimée's life in this era in the 90’s when people still paid in francs, smoked in the cafe's, Google was still an idea in the head of two guys at Stanford. And the Paris I rediscovered visiting often for research.
But to get the details, the stories, the insight from the ‘experts’ I needed and still need help.
Friends have friends, and their introductions in Paris open doors. In my case doors to private detectives, police, and local cafe owners. Over the years I’ve built up these connections, nourished them with bottles of wine over dinner and running possible scenarios by these experts, some of whom have become friends.
“I want you to get it right,” a retired Commissaire once told me, “if you’re writing a book set in Paris, a real city, you need to get the police system and all the details correct.” I appreciate that and the time he takes meeting with me and talking. He was in charge of the Princess Diana investigation and has provided a wealth of details.
Ok so many crime writers kill people on the page for a living but in my case it pays for my habit. Going to Paris and doing research. There’s so much I don’t know, I tell my husband, so I have to visit the archives, libraries, interview computer hackers, go in the sewers, visit the Morgue etc. he just nods. “I know.” In Paris on the cobblestones, in the metro I get a spark of a story, a detail, overhear a conversation I’d never hear otherwise. My novels aren’t set in the beret and baguette Paris, or the tourist areas, but off the beaten track, the backstreets and courtyards of quartiers not often seen. More like a sociological slice of life in the darker side of the city of light. The areas Aimée explores from the quarries underground in the Latin Quarter to her decaying elegant 17th century apartment on the Ile Saint Louis. It’s a trip to Paris without the airfare to an area you probably haven’t seen before.

Over the course of the books Aimée’s developed, I’ve gotten to know her more. It’s been an organic process, certainly not one I expected. So in beginning a book, I think back to my editors words, start with a particular part of Paris that intrigues me, of a story that could only happen there and feel driven to tell it. This district of Paris is a character. The murder, while important and propels the plot, isn’t the focus, it’s how the murder impacts Aimée and why she would investigate, the family and friends surrounding the victim, the community and this little part of Paris that's affected. A way to explore moral ambiguities and the grey areas when murder isn’t black and white.

Cara - Tuesday

of excavations and au revoir Chabrol

I guess it's returning to my 'roots' but it feels strange. Like going back in time, excavating the past; as I imgaine the workers who dug below ground for a parking lot and found this section of the Phillipe August wall dated 1200 AD. My wonderful publisher Soho is re-issuing my first book, Murder in the Marais, in all formats, and said 'now's the time if you want to go back and change anything you've always wanted to.' It scared me at first, I wrote that book in the mid-nineties and written ten since but it was a chance to go back and clean up mistakes.

I had buried Baudelaire in the wrong cemetary, realized I'd gotten a street wrong in Paris that only went one way instead of two, and given away my heroine's exact age. Something a French women would never, never do. It also presented challenges - should I age her, did I have to? Wasn't she's ageless, as I think of her, yet she'd gone through a lot of physical abuse in these books. But it gave me a perspective, re-reading the Marais, I realized how Aimee and her cohorts have grown, changed and lived through events, their perspective and attitudes deepened in the books. A surprise to me since I never knew I'd write a series, let alone get my first book published. The first book gives one freedom, you have no boundaries, no rules except the one you make up. And no complicated family tree, work and romantic relationships which you need to remember seven books down the road. Shoot your wad, go for broke, as you can in the debut book because that might be the only shot you get - I took that to heart.
Now that I'm going back, checking details on googleearth which didn't exist when I wrote the book - google was just an idea in two guys heads down at Stanford, I can change that peron's name to the proper French spelling and make someone the friend of Aimée's father which I'd meant to do quite a few years ago.
Now I'm excavating and it feels like finding part of the oldest wall left in Paris, like I did, in an underground parking lot.
You might have parked here. Or walked over this above at Odeon.




This weekend Claude Chabrol, a founder of the new wave cinema who made over 80 films, passed away. When Chabrol made his first film, Le Beau Serge, in 1958, using a small inheritance of his first wife's, he shot it in black and white, on location in his home town of Sardent. It became the first feature film of the new wave, a critical and commercial success, enabling Chabrol to act as "godfather" to his friends, who were also eager to make their first films.
His friends, film buffs at the Cinémathèque Française and at the Ciné-Club des Quartiers Latins, where they chewed the fat and argued over the finer points of film technique. The "gang", all of whom became film-makers in their own right, included Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

Squat, bespectacled and rotund, Chabrol played the joker, resembling nothing so much as a startled owl. Though his films ie La Grande Bouffe pilloried the bourgeoisie – its foibles and petty cruelties – he was himself bourgeoise and shared many of its values: property, wealth and domesticity. What I liked best about this bon vivant was how he made fun of himself and his 'class' because as he said 'only some one who's a bourgeoisie, can truly show them'. Years ago I walked in the courtyard of 22 Place des Vosges looking for clues to Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret, who'd once lived there and discovered that Claude Chabrol lived here. I wish I'd seen Chabrol, been able to express my appreciation for all his films. But I only saw his 17th century townhouse in the courtyard in the throes of renovation. A jewel.
So au revoir and merci Monsieur Chabrol,
Cara - Tuesday