There is no doubting Lyon’s creds as a crime city. The Quais du Polar had been held annually in Lyon since 2005 and is now arguably the largest European festival of crime novels and one of the largest in the world. The festival awards several prizes; the readers’ prize, the comic thriller prize, the Prix du Polar Européen for the best new story and another for the best European short film. Some time back, after a rather enjoyable trip, I decided to write about the crime novels of Toulouse. I should not have been surprised that wine and cheese often turned out to be either the cause or the method of local murders nor that cheese and wine were the preferred off-duty pastimes of local cops…and robbers. So with Lyon it’s not a surprise that once again food and gourmand detectives are also frequent. For the record, Lyon is France’s third largest city, by the River Rhone with about two and a half million citizens. The inner city is stunningly well preserved, there’s some Roman ruins, it’s considered a gastronomic capital of the world, and there’s plenty of vineyards round and about. So, to the city’s crime writing….
Lyon’s dark side is perhaps its war years – in World War Two it was a centre of the Nazi occupation of France. In The Lyon Resistance (2019), book three of Richard Wake’s Alex Kovacs thriller series, France has been overrun and the Gestapo now controls the country. Alex Kovacs and his wife, Manon, travel to her home in Lyon to continue the fight they began as espionage agents in Switzerland. They form a Resistance cell and sabotage the Nazis wherever they can.
Alex Gerlis’s Wolfpack trilogy is a terrific read – also set in World War Two among the French resistance. The third book in the trilogy, Agent in the Shadows (2023), finds British undercover agents Jack Miller and Sophia von Naundorf in 1943 Lyon about to encounter the city’s most notorious wartime resident, Gestapo boss Klaus Barbie, aka the ‘Butcher of Lyon’. The resistance is in disarray, there is a traitor in Lyon, working for Barbie and Jack and Sophia must root them out. The true, and horrific, story of Barbie in Lyon is told in Richard J Goslan’s Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France’s First Trial for Crimes against Humanity (2022).
OK – enough of the dark old days. I promised you cheese and wine. So how about Minced, Marinated, and Murdered: A French Culinary Mystery (2018)? A routine assignment in Lyon goes bad for food writer Laure Grenadier when a top chef is found murdered. Laure combines investigating murder with reviewing the city’s bistros, interviews the town’s best chefs and local food producers, and shares stories and culinary lore with her photographer Paco Alvarez. This is book one of a project series entitled Gourmet Crimes – so hopefully Laure and Paco will be back to sample more Lyonnais cuisine soon.
More wine you say? Well how about Katherine Hall Page’s The Body in the Vestibule (1992)? On a two-month stay in Lyon with her husband and son, Faith Fairchild, pregnant with her second child, is working on a cookbook and trying to throw the perfect dinner party until she discovers the body of a local homeless person in a dumpster. Will she catch the killer? Will she bring off her planned gastronomical triumph? This is actually book four in the 26 book series featuring amateur sleuth Faith Sibley Fairchild. Faith is American, lives in a quaint Massachusetts town but gets all over the place – New York, Italy, the Vermont slopes….
I could of course complain (as I do occasionally) that some of the most popular crime writers featuring Lyon just aren’t translated into English. I asked Lyon friends and they pretty much all mentioned Odile Bouhier, a regular at the Quai du Polar and who writes the Commissioner Kolvair and Professor Salacan novels about 1920s criminologists in Lyon. But no English translations as yet sadly. Nicole Avril, Coline Gatel, Oliver Carzon, André Buffard, Jacky Schwartzmann, René Belletto, Antoine de Meaux, as well as graphic novelist Ludivine Stock who illustrated the Lyon-set La morgue flottante and Lyonnais true crime writer Nicolas Le Breton, are all French writers mentioned regularly who often set their work in Lyon who remain untranslated. I’ve included this longish list of writers not to show off, but to remind us hopefully of just how many writers there are out there we still don’t get to read in English.
Mentioning true crime we should note Martin Dumollard, France’s first ever identified serial killer – the “maid killer” – who approached his victims in Lyon and was eventually charged with three murders between 1855 to 1861. He was so famous at the time he is mentioned in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. He was executed and his wife, and accomplice, got twenty years penal servitude. The story is told in Ryan Green’s Crimson Petticoats: The Betrayal, Brutality and Bloodshed behind the French Maid Massacres (2022).
And Lyon was home to Edmond Locard (1877-1966), the “Sherlock Holmes of France” who set up the world’s first forensics laboratory in the city and solved the famous 1912 case of the Lyon Strangler who brutally killed Mademoiselle Marie Latelle. Her boyfriend Emile Gourbin, the principal suspect, claimed she had been killed while he was playing cards with his friends, each of whom supported his statement. After analyzing the dirt beneath Gourbin’s nails, Locard found traces of Marie’s makeup. Faced with this evidence, Gourbin confessed to the brutal murder. His worldwide fame was now established. Locard himself wrote up his own cases in seven volumes Traité de Criminalistique (Treaty of Criminalistics).
And finally, something a bit different, Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang (1995), the follow up to his much praised at the time Under the Frog (1993). It’s about a washed-up middle-aged British philosopher named Eddie Coffin who teams up with a one-armed French convict to rob banks, from Montpellier to Toulon via Lyon. The Thought Gang is an unabashedly comic novel of ideas and uncertainty. It is a philosophical novel (or perhaps just a novel about a philosopher). Applying philosophy to larceny, the unlikely bandit duo question the meaning of life, the value of money, and the role of banks.
Lyon is a city of many pasts – serial killers and war criminals as well as food and wine. The city today can appear almost curated it’s so perfect in parts, yet round that corner, down that underpass, lurks the old Lyon, the criminal Lyon, just waiting to re-emerge.
