Sebastien Japrisot - and Advertising

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, by Sebastien Japrisot, and translated by Helen Weaver, has languished in my to-be-read pile for a very long time indeed. I’m not quite sure why this is so, since I enjoyed his far-fetched but gripping thriller Trap for Cinderella some years back. Perhaps the cumbersome title put me off. Now I’ve finally read it, I must say I enjoyed it a good deal, with just a few reservations.

Dany is a blonde, beautiful and myopic woman of 26, who borrows her boss’s Thunderbird car on impulse and sets off for the sea. But a series of mystifying events disrupt her journey – people she meets tell her that she made the same trip the day before, when in fact she was in Paris. She is attacked, and left injured, and then discovers a body in the boot of the car. What on earth is going on?

This vivid premise really is terrific, and reminiscent of the work of Boileau and Narcejac, though Japrisot probably has more pretensions as a “literary” writer. The snag, inevitably, is that the unravelling of the truth is rather cumbersome. Japrisot, like a number of his contempories (Catherine Arley and Herbert Montheilet spring to mind) sometimes struggled for a credible resolution to the dazzling puzzles that he created. All the same, this book didn’t deserve to wait as long as it did to be read.

Dany and her boss work in advertising, and so for a time did Japrisot (his pen-name was an anagram of Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name). Advertising and PR has supplied a good many crime writers not only with settings but also with business experience. Dorothy L. Sayers, Julian Symons, David Williams, John Franklin Bardin, Leighton Gage, Elmore Leonard, David Goodis and Alan Furst are examples, and I’m sure there are plenty of others. I’m not sure if anyone has ever written about the connection between working in advertising and crime fiction; perhaps it’s a subject worthy of further exploration.

Like father, like son?

The fact that today is the 18th birthday of my son and webmaster Jonathan, coupled with the fact that, A Level grades permitting, he’ll be attending the same college as I did, and to study law, prompts me (in between copious celebrations) to reflect on links between the generations.

As far as crime fiction is concerned, I recently received a copy of Quiver, a thriller published by Faber and described in the blurb as ‘a thrilling, filmic crime debut that will appeal to fans of Tarantino and the Coen Brothers’. Sounds interesting, but what really caught my eye was that the book is written by Peter Leonard. The author just happens to be the son of Elmore Leonard, one of the most successful American crime writers of the last thirty years.

The Leonards are by no means the only father and son (or, I should say, parent and child) crime writers. In the past there have been quite a number. Examples that spring to mind are the Americans C.W. and Sue Grafton and, in Britain, Edgar and Selwyn Jepson and E.C. and Nicholas Bentley. Coming up to the present day, we have James Lee and Alafair Burke as well as the Leonards in the States and, in Britain, Peter and Phil Lovesey.

Phil Lovesey is a writer I’d like to single out, because his writing has always appealed to me. He’s earned acclaim for a number of books, but it’s probably fair to say that the mega-success I’ve predicted for him hasn’t quite arrived just yet. Nevertheless, he is, like his gifted father, a writer both readable and talented. I’ve included a couple of his stories in anthologies that I’ve edited and, for a book called Scenes of the Crime, I persuaded both of them to contribute – a pleasing double act. They were two very good stories, needless to say, and I eagerly await Phil’s next novel.

Following a parent in the same line of business may have some advantages (contacts, understanding of the business and so on) but in other respects it isn’t straightforward. I’ll look forward to reading Quiver, but I’ll enjoy it on its own merits, rather than because it’s written by the son of a superstar.