Slay Me A Sinner - Pierre Audemars

This is one book in a series of mysteries starring a Monsieur Pinaud of the Surete, as best as I can tell. I found the book at random in a bookstore I was perusing on Memorial Day. They were only recently opened, and nothing was organized (a fact they at least advertised on the door, and the staff did try to be helpful). This helped cement the recent realization I have no patience for that kind of digging through random boxes of stuff. There must be some sort of organizational strategy, so I have some idea what areas to be looking in (this applies to movies, music, and comics as well). Many of the books were stacked in the shelves such that you couldn’t see the covers or the titles, but this one, at least, did have the cover visible, and the green cover, with the dark outline of a man running through the woods, framed by a crosshairs, and with little white circles all around, caught my attention.

This is a case early in Pinaud’s career, before he had achieved whatever measure of fame he apparently managed, and he’s apparently relating the story to his ‘chronicler (who is only interested in facts)’, as the book puts it (repeatedly). Young Pinaud has just solved the case of the perverted landlady of Lucarne, and is driving home rapidly to Paris to be with his wife and children, when he gets a flat tire. While changing it, he meets several men emerging from a copse where they had been rabbit hunting, separately. Shortly after, a young girl named Claudine runs out of the woods and tells him her stepfather is dead. Her mother and the village priest, as well as everyone else in town, is convinced it was an accident. Colonel Romand went out to go rabbit hunting, tripped, and his loaded shotgun went off as it fell from his hands and blew most of his head off.

“Accident” may not be the right word. The townspeople, all of them Pinaud meets, might consider it more divine providence, because the Colonel was a despicable and depraved individual, by all accounts, and they consider the village and the world much better off without him. Pinaud is unconcerned with this. He considers the sequence of events they suggest extremely unlikely, and found evidence suggesting someone tied a cord or rope to a tree at ground level along the path. He presses ahead trying to investigate a murder, while the villagers all try to convince him to leave it alone, first politely, with words and kindness, later through an increasingly bizarre series of events ranging from dropping a tree on him, to having their dog run at his car, to serving him an awful lunch.

None of it works, but the question of how things will end is never really in doubt, because of how the case is described on the first page.  There was really only one way it could go, once it became clear the problem would not be whether Pinaud will solve the case, but what he’d do with that knowledge. But I guess most mysteries are at least somewhat predictable in that regard. The mystery is usually solved, after all; it’s the matter of what that costs, and what the answer is good for that’s the meat of things. I don’t know how well the book does in that regard. It is so uniform in that everyone insists Romand was a terrible person that should have been killed, it stretches belief. Surely there is one person who would have something kind to say of the man, and if not, how did it take this long for him to die? If the whole town has agreed to apply the “Move along, nothing to see here” approach, why not just kill him and be done with it? The people say repeatedly that everyone in town knows what’s going on with everyone else, so the consensus of opinion couldn’t have been a secret.

At the same time, it is amusing to watch their various and increasingly desperate attempts to get Pinaud to give up the ghost. Wherever he goes, the person he wishes to speak to knows he’s coming, and knows what he’s been up to. It’s like he’s on a massive stage, and the townspeople are rushing around behind the curtain to set up the props for the next scene, rehearsing their lines. It’s kind of funny, if only because they aren’t much better at driving him away than Old Man Jenkins was at running off Scooby and the gang.

There is a certain irritating repetition to the writing. Constant references to how Pinaud carries on because he is being paid, and thus there is an obligation. Lots of mentions of obligation, and duty, all throughout the book, likely to raise the question in the reader’s mind of what a policeman’s true obligation is in a case such as this. Still, after awhile, I get tired of reading constant reminders of it, even if I’ve used similar reasoning to drive myself forward at times in my various jobs.

‘He felt tired, dejected, and exhausted. But his conscience drove him on, remorselessly and relentlessly. He could not afford to rest. There was no time to relax. He had not finished yet. He could say with truth that he had not even begun. He was convinced that this was a case of murder, and his duty to find the murderer was clear and unmistakable.

For that he was paid his salary by M. le Chef, and provided with a car. The salary was obviously inadequate, but having accepted it he had also accepted the moral obligation of earning it – fairly, honestly, and conscientiously.’