Sunday 3 July 2016

The Paris Architect

The Paris Architect is a 2013 novel by Charles Belfoure and the author's debut in fiction writing. It follows the story of a French architect Lucien Bernard who is paid to create temporary hiding places for Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Specialising in historic preservation, before writing The Paris Architect, Charles Belfoure had written several non-fiction books on architecture, including works on the history of American banks and rowhouse architecture in Baltimore. He decided to pop into fiction spontaneously, thinking it might be an exciting experience and a way of having a break from everyday work. A direct inspiration came to Belfoure after discovering the fact that during the reign of Elizabeth I in England special spaces were designed in houses as temporary hiding places for repressed Catholic priests.

Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews.
So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews being hunted by the Nazis, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life for a cause he doesn’t really believe in. He desperately needs the money to make a living though he knows that if caught, he will be killed.

Ultimately he can’t resist the challenge and begins designing expertly concealed hiding spaces --- behind a painting, within a column or inside a drainpipe --- detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.  But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what's at stake. 

The Paris Architect asks us to consider what we owe each other, and just how far we'll go to make things right. 

A Morality Tale in a Claustrophobic Setting



Mr. Trevor beams in his morality tale this time through a corrosive, middle-aged female photographer among some three-penny urban misfits in Dublin. Mrs. Eckdorf, divorced twice and brash as a blue-jay, explodes into the seedy confines of O'Neill's Hotel, its occupants and satellites placidly revolving around the silent world of its ninety-two-year-old owner,
the deaf-mute Mrs. Sinnott. Communicating with Mrs. Sinnott by means of school exercise books are her family, blood kin and orphans she has sheltered. Mrs. Eckdorf, at the height of creative and spiritual excitation, is increasingly convinced that the silent benison of Mrs. Sinnott's presence has united this unpleasing horde in mutual forgiveness. Madly photographing, Mrs. Eckdorf barges in on the bewildered, hostile "family." After a series of extravagant actions and confessions, Mrs. Eckdorf is holed up in a mental institution - completely potty. Only the priest, Father Hennessey, her only visitor, suspects - against his better judgment - that she may have been on to something. Not Trevor's best - there's just not enough leaven for the lunatic vision - but it's a full house of believable, likable rogues and rabble, with an unexpected joker. (Kirkus Reviews)

Dark Narratives

Nearly one month has passed since my last post and I have got through a number of books.  Most of them have been somewhat bleak.  With the prospect of three weeks on a small boat, with another couple, I chose some reading material that would not require a low threshold of concentration.  Thrillers tick that box for me.  With hindsight, given the anxious days preceding the EU referendum and the pain of the days after the result I might have chosen something lighter.......

Based on the recommendation of my friend William I had bought Philip Kerr's trilogy Berlin Noir.  I tackled the first novel, March Violets, and found it to be an engaging
thriller set in a Berlin on the threshold of World War.  Bernhard Gunther is a private eye, specializing in missing persons. And in Hitler's Berlin, he's never short of work... Winter 1936. A man and his wife shot dead in their bed. The woman's father, a millionaire industrialist, wants justice - and the priceless diamonds that disappeared along with his daughter's life.As Bernie follows the trail into the very heart of Nazi Germany, he's forced to confront a horrifying conspiracy. A trail that ends in the hell that is Dachau...  Stylishly written and powerfully evocative, Kerr's crime classic transports readers to the rotten heart of Nazi Berlin, and introduces a private eye in the great tradition of Hammett and Chandler.


I followed this with another Mo Hayder thriller, Ritual, which makes for even more grim reading than the two former titles which I have read.  Her protagonist, Detective Inspector Caffrey, is a troubled man who has never managed to get past the abduction and presumed murder of his younger brother when they were boys.  In Ritual just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Yet more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they were removed.
Jack Caffery has been newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. He and Flea soon establish that the hands belong to a boy who has recently disappeared.

Their search for him - and for his abductor - lead them into the darkest recesses of Bristol's underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where an ancient evil lurks; an evil that feeds off the blood - and flesh - of others ...


I have also chosen two more titles in the Detective Erlendur series.  Black Skies and Voices follow Arnaldur Indridason's whodunit formula of offering the solution of two crimes, in effect two stories, in between the covers of one book.   In Black Skies Detective Sigurdur Oli is in trouble.  Moving from the villas of Reykjavík's banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride and murder.  After a school reunion exposes the chasm between his life and those of his much more successful contemporaries, leaving him bitter and resentful, one of his old friends asks him to pay an unofficial visit to a couple of blackmailers.
He readily agrees, only to arrive to find one of the pair lying in a pool of blood. When the victim dies in hospital, Sigurdur Oli is faced with investigating a murder without revealing his own reasons for being present at the murder scene.

In Voices it is a few days before Christmas and a Reykjavik doorman and occasional Santa Claus, Gudlauger, has been found stabbed to death in his hotel room in a sexually compromising position. It soon becomes apparent that both staff and guests have something to hide, but it is the dead man who has the most shocking secret.  Detective Erlendur soon discovers that the placidly affluent appearance of the hotel covers a multitude of sins.