Moments In Crime

And on the Seventh Day...

     Sunday, September 7th

 

     Liliane:

     And on the seventh day, He took a rest. A little nap? I agree, the cats too. When I awake, three hours later, I write, with a pen, half a page, in my bed. I am very satisfied. Laurence calls me, she is near the Seine, we talk about insomnia. I do not dare tell her I slept so well. But now, she knows. I prepare the dinner, “tea for two and two for tea”, toast, cheese, and ham. Our mother asks innocently if I’ll do the laundry soon. “Take your time,” she advises. So, at midnight, I push the washing-machine on button, and I start writing a murder scene. Very bloody. Mighty good.

 

     Laurence:

     This morning, while preparing tonight’s meal, I looked at a documentary TV about the island of Okinawa in Japan. There are a lot of centenaries there, because they eat much fish and practice karate. If these are the conditions to grow very old, I am in a bad position...

     After some hours by the Seine, and two quarrels with men who wanted to buy books at half price, I chose to go to the movies, alone because Bernard was tired. I saw, with great pleasure, a film released only six months ago, “The Darjeeling Limited Express”, by Wes Anderson. The three brothers are excellent. Adrian Brody, I knew, the two other actors, no. I had a very good time, and, for once, with a recent film.

On Writing Together and Burying Sponges

     Saturday, September 6th

 

     Laurence:

     I bought some food for tonight: our elder son, David (26 years old, an engineer) and his wife, Kumiko, are coming to dinner. Everything is not only very expensive, but full of chemical products and wrapped in too much paper. The problem is that if you take the chemical products out, the price is higher...

     Then, I manned our book cases on the Seine so that Bernard, who opened them early, could go to eat. Rainy day. But nice people. I sold many books, which is always reassuring, not only because it is our job, but also because...well, if there are still readers on this planet, life is not so bad!

     As promised yesterday, I’ll address the question about how my sister and I collaborate: Liliane and I have a long habit of writing together. The fact is that we actually do not write together! That is, we talk a lot about the book we want to write, then Liliane works on the story, prepares the chapters, and I begin to write at my home. When I have about thirty pages, I give them to her, she says "how marvelous!", and she begins to correct all the wrong sentences, to take away all the redundant words, the anachronisms, etc...then she adds her own texts. She gives all that to me, I make corrections too - that's only fair ! - and I go on writing the new chapters...It is not easy, maybe more complex than writing alone, but, as we are complementary, it helps a lot, because if we did not work together, I doubt we would have had the courage to undertake this!

 

 

     Liliane:

     I dreamt that I was burying sea sponges, and that I was hearing a voice telling me: “squeeze the sponge and forget your troubles!” OK, OK, I understand, I am going to go very slowly and have a good time.

     Jaime is leaving to take pictures. I shall be alone five days with our mother, and the two cats. Who is going to cook? Myself!

     I meditate about the meaning of life. Life? A big meal!

     On the TV, they were speaking about the new books for September. A word came up again and again: catharsis. I rush to the dictionary: is to kill about five or six people in each of our books a catharsis for my sister and I? I don’t find the answer.

Interviews and Intervening Inventions

 Friday, September 5th

 

     Liliane:

     Laurence and I must meet in a café for an interview. I hope the journalist will not ask us the fatal question: how do you manage to write with four hands?

     Noon. Finished. Well done. Of course, the question was asked. We’ll answer that one for you tomorrow!

     Afternoon, home, sweet home. Alert! I close all the windows, and I ask the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi to help me to cover the infernal noise of street excavators with his “Rome Fountains”, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Victory! Respighi leaves the place to Irving Berlin. Imposing finale: Scottish bag-pipers.

     I am hungry. I prepare a small meal for myself. Jaime, great amateur of tea, appears. I suggest to him to create a fund to raise a monument dedicated to silence. He agrees.

     Evening : I swallow two sleeping pills, no result. So I watch “Terminator” and “Conan the Barbarian”, that quiets me.

 

 

     Laurence:

     I read this morning in the “Journal Illustré” of 1897 (the year the ninth Victor Legris will take place) that “the modern inventions are dangerous to individual liberty. First, we had the telephone that tied the employees up with its wires. Then came the phonograph, a new torture that drives you mad by forcing you to listen everyday to the same romance sung by your stepmother! This is too much! Where will this end?”

     I ask myself.

     I would like to travel into the past and visit Paris in the 1890’s with Victor Legris. The bouquinists of this time sold many books, and not, as now, “souvenirs de Paris”. There was much poverty and the streets were dirty, but now, many people sleep on the pavement, and spitting is becoming a new mode.  So what?

Working at the bouquinist store and on the ninth Victor Legris!

     Thursday, September 4th

 

     Laurence:

     I worked at my “bouquinist store” today, a rather fine day. I even sold books, Zola, Simone de Beauvoir, Platon (he is still read, what a career !), and Colette.

     A young man from Montreal asked me if, in spite of the fact that I have always lived in Paris and that I work near Notre-Dame, I have not got used to such marvels? I answered no, each time I cross the Ile Saint-Louis I am impressed with this beauty, particularly in the evening of a sunny day, when the orange light shines on the white façades.

     7 P.M. Jonathan, our younger son, 21 years old, a future engineer and musician, is playing the trumpet in our bedroom. So I watch the TV on mute, but what is the difference? I begin to prepare the dinner. After his day’s work, Bernard went to buy books in a shop soon closing . Let’s bet it’ll be replaced by a bank or an optician!

     I decide to read my e-mails and the amount of spam discourages me. Last year, Jonathan went to London to see “Spamalot” by Monthy Python, he said it was great ! The title certainly is!

 

     Liliane:

     I have begun to think about the manuscript of the ninth inquiry of our dear Victor Legris. I am lazy and I feel guilty. I imagine that an alien asks me to make a wish. I answer: “I wish that all my wishes be realized.” I establish a list:

     - That all the people I love be happy and healthy.

     - That I loose ten pounds and thirty years and that I gain the missing teeth back (and the money I gave to my dentist!)

     - That all the weapons of this lousy planet be changed into mud.

     Etc...

     Noon. I have not yet written a single word and my feelings of guilt are growing. I go to see my mom who lives next door. She is very wise and asks me: “What is the good of working so much?” The guilt flies away, as I have done nothing, and I allow myself to eat a cake.

    6 P.M. After having taken care of hundreds of cats in her lifetime, our mother still has two darlings. The problem: they eat like 10! And guess who has to buy their food? Oh, what happiness to push a caddie through a super-market, listening against my will to elevator music!

        In the evening, Jaime and I watch “Picnic”, a Joshua Logan film with, again, William Holden. I love the actors of the fifties, Gregory Peck, Peter Finch, James Mason, Gary Cooper...all dead!

Person Victor Legris

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Vegetable Cubes and Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"

     Wednesday, September 3rd

 

     Liliane:

     10 A.M. I am awakened by the regular toc-toc of a big knife on a wooden plank. It is Jaime, who cuts vegetables in small cubes. He begins the preparation of our meals at dawn. I should thank heaven because, in 28 years of life together, he has always insisted on being the cook, he is a food epicurian.

I go downstairs. Now, my man is in front of his computer again. I advise him to have mercy on his own back, because mine has suffered a lot from this work. He grumbles.

     2 P.M. I have decided to give into my movie addiction. The TV set is at the foot of the bed. I jump under the blanket, ready for an dose of “retro” films.

     7 P.M. Saw “Nightmare in Manhattan” (I had read the book when I was a child) with William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald. Not a wrinkle, this movie, although it was made in 1952. I continued with “Les 400 Coups”, by François Truffaut. What a pleasure!

 

     Laurence:

     In the subway again: not a great pleasure! All those people listening to music (is this music?): they have Mickey’s ears, big round black discs on them! Or they talk very loudly on their cell phones, saying: “I’ll be home soon!” Some of them read real books, it is true, I saw them, which is rather encouraging.

     Talking of books, earlier I went to the library of the suburb where our mother lives, a 93-year-old lady and devourer of books! She has often been disgusted to realize that one life will not be sufficient to swallow all these stories!

     Evening: Owing to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Bernard and I were able to stand our neighbours’stamping. Are neighbours fit for anything except making noise, I wonder? But we are neighbours, too...

 

Along the Seine and At the Dentist

      Tuesday, September 2nd

 

     Laurence:

     Today, Victor Legris begins his career in the United States: It seems like a dream! A sort of miracle, as were the translations of the first of our books in Italian, English and Spanish. But the greatest miracle of all was during that summer of 2001, when we learnt that the collection “Great Detectives”, published by 10-18 in France, had decided to adopt our book-seller sleuth living in Fin-de-siècle Paris!

     When I am selling second-hand books along the Seine, as I am this afternoon, Claude Izner seems at the same time very near and very far away!

 

 

     Liliane:

     What a wonderful morning. Our first Victor Legris’s enquiry is going to be released today in America. God bless America!

     3 P.M. I have a date with a charming young man, my dentist, who insists to inspect all my teeth. He probably intends to offer himself a little break in Bahamas with my money, as in the book 84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff. I am very glad not to be a shark or a crocodile!

I returned home depressed, and in spite of my good resolutions, I smoked a cigarette and ate a hamburger : bad for my health, good for my mind.

     At home (“there is nothing like home...follow the yellow brick road!”), not the wicked witch of the East awaits, but Jaime, my dear husband, stuck to his computer, where he scans photos to put more butter in our spinaches (a French idiom, equivalent to the English “put bread on the table”). He is a press photographer and I love him as I have the first day!

Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow...

     Monday, September 1st

 

     Laurence :

     Back in Paris again, after two weeks in the “Presqu’île du Cotentin” where my husband Bernard and I are lucky enough to have a house with a garden, not far from the sea. It was quiet and windy, as ever. We looked at the birds in the trees. Do they ever stop working? I did! And found wasps in an earth hole – a small B-52 base! Continuously flying and coming back.

     Liliane spent ten days with us. While Bernard was heroically painting a wall, we re-read our eighth Victor Legris mystery (entitled The Mummy at the Butte-aux Cailles, in which Victor becomes a prime suspect while trying to solve the case), saw new errors, corrected them and it was over, until next time!

     I discovered Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, and began Peter Ackroyd’s huge biography of Charles Dickens: ancient books, as is often the case in my personal reading!

    At night, Liliane and I watched DVDs of old films, such as “Little Big Man” and “To Kill a Mocking-Bird”. After all, what is time? Past is present, present is quickly gone, future does not exist...We also watched a recent German film, a great one, we think, “The Lives of Others”.

     This morning, before meeting Liliane, I have to clean the flat, to buy food and to help Bernard prepare engravings to be sold at our “bouquinists cases”. Victor, Tasha, Joseph, Kenji and company are in the back of my mind, not quite ready to live new adventures...Thay await Lilian’s next scenario, to be written this winter!

 

     Liliane:

     Too much sleep. It will soon be the beginning of the term. September reminds me of a show I saw in an off-Broadway theatre in prehistoric times: “The Fantastics”. I think it was in 1962. Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow...

     My God, I just remembered I have an appointment with Laurence. Where? Under Danton’s statue at Odéon? On the underground’s platform at the station Bastille? We are to meet our publisher to return to her the manuscript of the 8th Victor Legris mystery. Oh, patron saint of writers, I hope there will not be a lot of corrections!

     I finished The Master and Maguerite by Boulgakov in the subway, a masterpiece that I read for the second time.

Blogging This Week: Claude Izner

Claude Izner is the pseudonym of two sisters, Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefevre. Both are secondhand booksellers on the banks of the Seine and experts on nineteenth-century Paris. This week we will be brought into 21^st century Paris, as Liliane and Laurence provide an accounting of their lives during the week of publication of Murder on the Eiffel Tower—winner of the prestigious 2003 Michel Lebrun French Thriller Prize and the first installment in the Victor Legris mystery series.   Click here to visit Claude Izner's website.

The brand-new, shiny Eiffel Tower is the pride and glory of the 1889 World Exposition. But one sunny afternoon, as visitors are crowding the viewing platforms, a woman collapses and dies on this great Paris landmark. Can a bee sting really be the cause of death? Or is there a more sinister explanation? Enter young bookseller Victor Legris. Present on the tower at the time of the incident, and appalled by the media coverage of the occurrence, he is determined to find out what actually happened. In this dazzling evocation of late nineteenth-century Paris, we follow Victor as his investigation takes him all over the city and he suspects an ever-changing list of possible perpetrators. Could mysterious Kenji Mori, his surrogate father and business partner at the bookstore Legris operates, be involved in the crime? Why are beautiful Russian illustrator Tasha and her colleagues at the newly launched sensationalist newspaper Passepartout always up-to-date in their reporting? And what will Legris do when the deaths begin to multiply and he is caught in a race against time?

Murder on the Eiffel Tower is painstakingly researched, an effortless evocation of the glorious City of Light, and an exciting opening to a promising series featuring Victor Legris.