Death in the City of Light is a thriller, in every sense of the word.
However, as opposed to the many thrillers on the Bookazine Big C Extra
shelves, Death in the City of Light (ISBN 978-0-7515-48 45-7, Sphere
Publishers, 2011) is a true story.
It has, what all good thrillers should have, a murder or two (or many as in
this instance), sex, drugs, a police inspector who is not the sharpest knife
in the drawer, confusions and side tracks, and unfolds in wartime Paris with
the Nazi occupation in full swing. But this is all true, remember! Author
David King has not made any of it up.
Like a good fiction, author David King gives great detail. Even down to the
number of the police car the Inspector used to pursue the murderer.
Painstaking research on the author’s part. But this is all true, remember!
Real-life celebrities such as Pablo Picasso join the cast of thousands in
this book, including John-Paul Sartre and it was with interest that I noted
Sartre’s book reviews went on for 6,000 words. (More than mine, by several
thousand!)
The actual reason(s) given credence by the public for the serial killings
outlined in the book ranged from madness to depravity and all human
characteristics in between. In the absence of the presumed murderer,
everything was guesswork, rather than sleuthing, something that was not
being shown by the police.
Now throw in the wild card of the French Resistance fighters and illicit
passages out of France and away from the German occupation, run by
gangsters, not patriots, and it becomes even more intriguing. Tickets and
visas to Argentina were sold to the highest bidder, so forget the concept of
‘noblesse oblige’.
This era of German occupation of Paris (the City of Light) is fascinating,
and the historical aspect as written by author David King is somewhat
different from that in the popular history books. Collaboration seems to
have been the collective ‘plat de jour’, other than for the increasingly
oppressed Jews.
Another character to be dragged into the plot is the fictitious policeman
Jules Maigret from the pen of Georges Simenon, whose persona is said to have
been modeled upon the Police Inspector Massu, the one who sought the
presumed murderer for three years.
When the murderer was finally apprehended, his trial under French law took
months going into years. It was described as “the most sensational criminal
trial in modern French history.” The various nuances of French law are
explained for the Anglo-Saxons for whom the book was written.
At B. 468, this is a steal. A book that will keep you occupied for days, and
awake for as many nights. Notes and a bibliography take up the final 80
pages in a blockbuster of a book! It is not a thriller you can just skim
through as author King gives you so much detail. He gives special thanks to
the Prefecture de Police for granting him access to the dossier, which had
been regarded as classified information up till his getting hold of it.
