A new French crime novel (sort of)

Under the Channel, by Gilles Pétel, joins a number of recently translated French crime novels with a decidedly quirky tone and structure, by writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette and Pascal Garnier. But Pétel's story is a police procedural that has little interest in the police or procedure. Under the Channel starts with a murder and moves quickly to a police investigation, but it's really about something else.

Lieutenant Roland Desfeuilleres is the officer in charge, after the bungled discovery of a body on the Channel-Tunnel train from London to Paris. The reader has witnessed the victim's progress through his last day in London and the first part of his train journey in the first chapter. An English couple upon discovering the corpse in a first-class seat sets off a comedy of errors among train staff and police at the Paris station, a situation that Roland must confront along with the disastrous dissolution of his marriage. Seemingly to escape Paris and his wife, he travels to London to pick up the murder investigation there. But once in London, his attention to the murder is less than intense.

Instead, he hovers around the sites and people related to the dead man's daily life, from gay bars to his real estate office (and an attractive female coworker there) to the abandoned apartment (a very attractive one, near the Pimlico office of the deceased). His police contact in London is at Interpol (which seems kind of strange--wouldn't he "liaise" with Scotland Yard instead?), but is not very helpful. What follows is an existential journey for Roland, with the solution to the crime provided eventually as a final quirk of the odd story, rather than a resolution.

Roland's last days in Paris with his wife are quite funny, in a painful way, but his stay in London is more sober (not counting the numerous pints he drinks in the same pub frequented by the victim), following a transformation of the cop's identity that is interesting if (to me) not quite plausible. Pétel, though, isn't after plausibility: this is a philosophical tale, and an amusing one, rather than a straightforward detective story. The author has four previous untranslated novels: I'd be curious about the quality (and the genre) of those books.