The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau: An Inspector Gorski Investigation

This was a fascinating but disturbing read. A notion of “psychosexual Kafka” kept coming to mind. The book almost seems like a cautionary tale, a morality tale: the dangers of living too much in one’s head, conversing only with one’s own thoughts – the existential abyss of ultimate self-consciousness. It completely de-romanticises any appeal one might imagine of a solitary life, of loneliness, of isolation. What utter detachment and alone-ness does is depicted with perfection in the main character, Baumann, but also in his antagonist, Gorski. As I just finished the book, I am relieved to be liberated from dwelling in their heads and thoughts; at the same time, I am very impressed with the author’s skill and talent in the telling of this tale. In the cliché of book and movie reviews, it was gripping.One small point of grammar that annoyed this reader and seemed jarring given the caliber of the writing otherwise: several times the author or translator used the wrong form for the object of a preposition. An example is on page 206 of the paperback edition when it reads, “what had occurred between he and Adele.” rather than “him and Adele” or even “between them.”I reckon I am either not sophisticated enough to discern what is happening or I have missed reading background of the author or both, but I am a little confused by the Afterward to this book in which there is lengthy discussion about a Raymond Brunet’s life and its similarities to the novel by Burnet – or is it? I don’t know if readers are being fooled or if there is some reality here that I am ignorant of or what, but that was confusing. Now I see there is another book by this author, Graeme Macrae Burnet, and its subject is a person with surname Macrae. So Macrae, Brunet, Burnet, autobiographical, novels only or something else…..no idea! This book, presumably 100% fiction, was a good read, very tense without sensationalism, one I appreciated for its good writing but am glad to leave behind now out of exhaustion from the thoughts of the protagonist and antagonist and the lonely similarities of their otherwise disparate lives.

I rarely rate a book this high because I am a very tough critic, but this author is outstanding and needs to be applauded. Not only is he a clear and clever writer, he creates a unique atmosphere unlike the huge majority of mysteries. His books are both secretive and revealing, moving through the plots and well-developed characters at a perfect pace. I have read "His Bloody Project" and this one and can't wait to read his newest one. I am firmly embedded as a big fan.

It was an evening like any other at the Restaurant de la Cloche. Behind the counter,the proprietor, Pasteur, had poured himself a pastis, an indication that no more mealswould be served and that any further service would be provided by his wife, Marie,and the waitress Adèle. It was nine o'clock.Manfred Baumann was at his usual place by the bar. Lemerre, Petit and Cloutier sataround the table by the door, the day's newspapers folded in a pile between them.On their table was a carafe of red wine, three tumblers, two packets of cigarettes,an ashtray and Lemerre's reading glasses. They would share three carafes before thenight is out.This is the opening of Graeme Macrae Burnet's 2013 debut novel. Skip the title page and start right in with the passage above. Sound familiar? Provincial French bar, the regulars at their respective tables, the taciturn proprietor, evening passing into night. The noir atmosphere could be the start of a Georges Simenon novel, whether a mystery featuring Inspector Maigret, or one of his gritty psychological novels, the so-called romans durs. In fact, it is a mixture of both. Not only does Macrae Burnet clearly intend an hommage to the French writer, but his two principal characters, the bank manager Manfred Baumann and Detective Inspector Georges Gorski, both have Simenon soundtracks running through their heads.This being a mystery novel, there is little more I should say about the plot itself. In fact, it soon turns out that there are three possible crimes: present, past, and future. The present case is the unexplained disappearance of the restaurant waitress, Adèle, which Gorski soon begins to treat as a murder. The past one is the murder of a teenage girl twenty years ago, when Gorski was just beginning his career. And the possible future crime involves another youngish woman in a situation that begins to look increasingly perilous. The reader soon realizes that Manfred Baumann might be involved in all three; the mystery is not in the facts, but how the three time-frames intertwine, and especially what is going on in the minds of the two protagonists. Gorski, whose childhood reading of Maigret led him to become a cop, remains haunted by his failure in the earlier case. Baumann, an awkward loner, over-imagines what people think of him, and shapes his answers to Gorski's questions as though he were a character in crime fiction rather than an honest citizen simply telling what he knows. From the midway point on, I found it impossible to put the novel down, not so much that I wanted to know the solution to some mystery, but because I felt tangled in an incipient tragedy that I was powerless to avert. Highly recommended.+ + + + + +But there is another mystery here, of a different kind. Look at that title page:The Disappearanceof Adèle BedeaubyRaymond BrunetTranslated and with an afterwordby Graeme Macrae BurnetWhat? And more particularly, Why? If you think about it, RAYmond BRUNET is a pretty obvious pseudonym for MacRAE BURNET. But he goes much further. His "Translator's Afterword" is a four-page biography of the supposed author, whose life has much in common with that of Manfred Baumann in the novel. He is supposed to have lived in the town where the novel is set, Saint-Louis, a real community on the Rhine, facing the border with Germany and Switzerland on the opposite bank, and depicted in absolute detail in the novel; you can even follow the character's movements with a street plan. But there is even more. Macrae Burnet says that "Brunet's" book, after its inauspicious French publication in 1982, achieved the status of a cult classic with the success of the screen version by Claude Chabrol in 1989. And, if you look online, you can even find a 90-second trailer for this movie, starring Isabel Adjani and Sam Neill. It is totally convincing, but neither Chabrol's filmography nor those of any of the actors supposedly involved list it. The film simply does not exist!So I ask again, why go to all this trouble? One of the things I most appreciated about his Man-Booker shortlisted second novel, HIS BLOODY PROJECT (2016) was that you could not be quite sure whether it was fact or fiction. Purportedly about a murder by a mid-19th-century Macrae ancestor, the book consists of a personal diary and various legal documents that appear totally authentic; only with difficulty did I conjecture that they were all made up. But this earlier novel is clearly fiction, so why pretend it is not his own? I think for the sake of authenticity. Rather than have readers ask who is this 21st-century Scot to think he can turn his hand to classic French noir, he invents a French author of the period to do the job for him, and backs it up with every grain of authenticity he can muster. It is an astonishing performance, but really only a footnote to the book itself.And that, I am glad to say, is fully good enough to stand on its own.

We spend much of the story inside the head of Manfred Baumann, an extremely anxious and repressed small-own banker in an extremely claustrophobic French provincial town. A waitress from the restaurant he frequents disappears and Manfred soon becomes a suspect pursued by an Inspector Gorski. Manfred's possible guilt becomes more likely when we learn of a tragic event from his lonely childhood being raised by disapproving grandparents. A thriller of an odd sort b/c it is actually pretty ennervating to be inside Mandfred's head. He is not a cunning criminal, but a man who is tied in knots by the most mundane decisions - what to order in the restaurant, when to join the weekly card game he's expected to join, what to say to the woman who lives in his building to whom he's terrified to be attracted. He is clearly his own worse enemy.

At first I didn't quite know what to make of this, as it was unlike anything I had read before. It's main characters are a detective & a socially awkward, rather paranoid young man, Manfred, who may or may not be involved in what may or may not be a murder. But it is neither purely a detective procedural nor a crime thriller: there is suspense in that we are never quite sure where either of them stands in relation to the putative murder & what the outcome will be. But this is mediated through a close, discursive examination of the social & private lives & the thought processses of the two men in a provincial setting more than half a century ago. Perhaps that doesn't sound very exciting, but their inner lives, particularly that of Manfred, have a great immediacy which draws you into the very heart of things. It is this technique which makes it an absorbing & compelling book.

As with the brilliant "His Bloody Project," Graeme Macrae Burnet conceals his authorship, here claiming to be nothing by the translator of the well-known French novel by Raymond Brunet (Brunet, Burnet, geddit?), apparently now a cult classic following Claude Chabrol's screen version in 1989. It's beautifully written, redolent of Simenon at his best. I inadvertently read a review before reading the book which gave me a hint about something I wish it hadn't, so I'm going to avoid saying anything about the plot. Just going to say that the key character is Manfred Baumann, a sad loner whose character is beautifully summed up in this paragraph: "Dominique returned with his meatsalad, a dish Manfred disliked, but which he nevertheless ordered once a week for fear of offending Pasteur, who regarded it as something of a spécialité de la maison".

Brunet depicts an apparently bleak existence with supremely delicate pen strokes. The novel is set in the unremarkable town of Saint-Louis, on the French-Swiss border - home to the author himself.Revolving around Adele's disappearance, Brunet brings to life characters of which the intensity, the depth of their personalities, the complexity of their psychologies, the richness of thoughts, feelings and emotions contribute to making this an extraordinary piece of work.Thoroughly enjoyable, highly recommended.

A smart, stylish story dissecting the life of one Manfred Baumann a strangely introverted man who works at the bank in Saint-Louis and dines most lunchtimes and evenings at The Restaurant De La Cloche. He regards, in an almost salacious way, a young waitress called Adele Bedeau and when she disappears Manfred becomes the chief suspect and is pursued relentlessly by Inspector Gorski of the Saint-Louis police.This delicious novel is really the study of human behaviour, in all its quirks and oddities, and you the reader have a front row seat to observe and judge. Manfred is a wonderful character, socially inept, reserved, withdrawn, indeed some of his working and socializing colleagues are of the opinion that his preference may be towards a male rather than a female partner. He is fastidious almost a perfectionist in his approach to daily tasks... "He dressed, combed his hair and put on his watch. Back in the kitchen he laid out two croissants in a basket, butter and jam, a plate and a knife. He poured coffee into a large bowl and sat down at the table.".....Inspector Gorski has a troubled marriage. His wife Celine, who manages and runs a fashion boutique in town, views Gorski as socially inferior but still insists that he attends social gatherings in order to "establish the Gorskis as part of the Good Society of the town." The Inspector therefore preferred to spend his day policing, and the pursuit of Manfred Baumann proves a welcome distraction.I loved the unhurried telling of this story the unravelling of the everyday orderliness of Manfred and by doing so expose a dark secret. Can a wise and wily Gorski utilize this secret to expose the truth of Adele's disappearance and by so doing will this set in process a chain of events that may end in disaster? With a very neat and unexpected ending I was delighted, amused and thoroughly entertained by this literary work form a great writer.

A small French town, an outsider who spends his life going through the same routines and the policeman who investigates the missing waitress at the cafe where the outsider eats, these are the ingredients that make up this unusual crime novel. I wouldn't have read it if I hadn't found Burnet's next novel - My Bloody Project - so compelling. There are echoes of this book with Burnet claiming his novel was written by someone else (and he's only the translator) and speculating on the link between the author and his central character. Unfortunately, My Bloody Project was so powerful and so thought provoking that it rather eclipses this earlier work. Never-the-less, I enjoyed watching the truth emerge from the shadows even though I spent much of the book wishing they would remain hidden. A strange but interesting experience.