Why I Keep Returning to France

There are questions I am asked so often that I ought to have a neat answer ready for them. Why France? Why murder mysteries? Why a bookshop on a boat? And, perhaps most frequently of all, why is there always a cat involved?

The truth is that none of those things feels separate to me anymore.

When I began writing the Canal & Croissant Mysteries, I knew that I wanted the books to move. I did not want one village, one street, or one familiar collection of suspects waiting for the next murder. I wanted the freedom to arrive somewhere new, stay long enough to become curious about it, and then move on.

That is what Le Livre Vagabond gave me.

A boat changes the way you travel. You cannot hurry in quite the same way. The landscape does not flash past a car window. Villages approach slowly. Bridges matter. Locks matter. The weather matters. You become aware of where the water is taking you and how much work human beings have done over centuries to make those waterways possible.

There is something wonderfully calming about floating on water, even when almost nothing is happening. Perhaps especially when almost nothing is happening.

I like the small routines of it: tying up for the evening, hearing water against the hull, making tea while another boat passes, looking out in the morning and realizing that the view outside the window is not the same one you had two days ago. A boat is a home, but it is a home that keeps offering you a reason to wonder what is around the next bend.

That feeling became very important to the books.

Elodie does not travel because she is hunting murders. She travels because she wants to see what is there. The murders have the irritating habit of arriving anyway.

And I think that distinction matters.

I love murder mysteries. I love the machinery of them: the small fact that means something different once you understand it properly, the person who is telling the truth but not quite all of it, the explanation that seems convincing until one ordinary detail refuses to fit. I especially enjoy mysteries in which the solution does not depend on the detective suddenly becoming superhuman. I want the clues to have been there. I want the reader to have had a chance.

But the murder is never the only reason I want to write one of these books.

Often it begins with a place.

Lyon, for example, gave me the silk workshops of the Croix-Rousse, old technical knowledge, patterns and archives, and the complicated question of who really creates something when an artist, a craftsperson and a business have all contributed to the finished work. Once I began thinking about that, I could see the beginnings of a mystery.

Another place offers something entirely different.

Carcassonne is almost impossible not to stare at. You approach those walls and towers and there is a moment when the place looks less like somewhere people actually built and more like the memory of a story you knew as a child. Then you go inside and it becomes real again: streets, stone, doors, restaurants, people working, people going home.

That is one of the pleasures I hope the books can give readers.

I want someone to finish a story and think, I would like to see that place.

Not because I have written a travel brochure. I hope I never do that. A city becomes interesting when it is more than a list of sights. I want markets where people are actually buying dinner, back streets somebody uses on the way to work, a bakery that matters because two characters are hungry, a church square in the wrong weather, a canal bank where somebody sits because there is nowhere else they particularly need to be.

If a reader later goes to Carcassonne, Lyon, Castelnaudary or another place from the books and recognizes something—not necessarily a particular doorway, but the feeling of being there—that would make me very happy.

France makes this almost unfairly easy. Every region seems to offer another history, another kind of food, another landscape and another set of occupations that somebody has spent a lifetime learning.

And then there is Pistou.

I love cats.

There is no more complicated literary explanation than that.

But I am also very particular about what I want Pistou to be in the books. He is not a furry detective. He does not understand murder. He does not look meaningfully at the guilty person because some mysterious feline instinct has solved the case three chapters before everybody else.

He is a cat.

He goes where he wants to go. He sits on things people are trying to use. He likes some people for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they are good people. He ignores expensive objects and becomes fascinated by something that cost almost nothing. Occasionally, simply because he is living his ordinary cat life in the middle of human complications, he notices or disturbs something that matters.

That feels much more satisfying to me.

Cats are very good company for writers because they have absolutely no respect for the importance of writing.

You may have finally reached the crucial scene in which three months of plotting come together, and the cat has decided that your keyboard is warmer than the chair.

There is something healthy about that.

I think my years as a teacher also found their way into these books more than I expected.

Teaching trains you to pay attention to people.

A classroom is full of different ways of understanding the same thing. One person needs to hear an explanation. Another needs to see it. Somebody has understood perfectly well but does not want to answer. Somebody else is answering confidently and has misunderstood the entire question.

You learn very quickly that what people say and what they have understood are not always identical.

That is rather useful when writing mysteries.

Teaching also made me interested in how knowledge is passed from one person to another. Who knows how something works? Who only knows the official version? What happens when an expert has to explain a complicated subject to somebody outside it?

I use that constantly now.

If a mystery involves silk weaving, bookbinding, canal engineering, cooking, restoration or some other skilled work, I do not want the reader to feel that I have stopped the novel to deliver a lecture. The information has to belong to somebody. One character knows something because it is her work. Another understands only part of it. Elodie asks because she genuinely does not know.

That is very close to teaching at its best. You take something complicated seriously without insisting that it must sound complicated.

Teaching also gave me patience with the slow accumulation of understanding.

A mystery rarely becomes interesting because of one enormous clue. It becomes interesting because several ordinary things begin to connect.

Perhaps that is why I enjoy Elodie as much as I do. She is curious, but she is not constantly trying to prove that she is the cleverest person in the room. She listens. She remembers. She asks another question when an answer does not quite make sense.

Those habits belonged to my old working life long before they belonged to hers.

Recently my publisher asked me a dangerous question.

“Will you ever write something else?”

I knew what the question really meant.

Another series.

I gave the sensible answer first, which is always a mistake because publishers can tell when you are buying time.

Then I said, “Perhaps.”

That apparently was not enough.

Would I leave Canal & Croissant?

No.

At least, I cannot imagine doing it cleanly.

There are fictional worlds that you finish, and there are fictional worlds that begin to feel like places you know how to return to. Leaving Elodie, Pistou and Le Livre Vagabond completely would feel less like finishing a series and more like moving out of a house while some of your favourite things were still inside.

But there are other places beginning to make noise.

Paris, unfortunately, is one of them.

I say unfortunately because Paris is not the sort of idea that remains a small idea for very long.

Imagine a mystery series that does not simply use Paris as a famous backdrop but stays there and keeps going deeper.

Not just the Eiffel Tower and the Seine.

The passages. Small museums. Old apartment buildings. Courtyards you almost walk past. The streets behind the streets everyone photographs. Old theatres. Bookshops. Markets. Cemeteries. Workshops. Hotels that have survived several different versions of the city.

Montmartre alone could probably keep a mystery writer occupied for years.

And then I start thinking about the Moulin Rouge.

Not simply the bright red windmill that everyone recognizes, but the history around it. The performers, dressing rooms, rivalries, costumes, old photographs, people who disappeared from the record while somebody else became famous.

You see the problem.

Within five minutes I am already wondering what somebody might discover behind a wall during renovations, or why a costume in an archive does not match the photograph it supposedly appears in, or why a woman who insists she has never been backstage knows exactly which staircase leads to an old dressing room.

This is why publishers should not ask writers innocent questions.

Would it become another series?

I have not said that.

Would there be a new protagonist?

I have not said that either.

Would Canal & Croissant continue?

I think some boats are perfectly capable of travelling more slowly without being tied up forever.

That is all I am prepared to say.

For now, there are still waterways ahead, towns I want to explore, foods I have not yet given Elodie an excuse to eat, people she has not met, and crimes that have not yet inconvenienced her plans.

There are also a great many places in France I would love to take readers.

That may be the part of this work I enjoy most.

A mystery gives us a reason to look closely at a place. The crime creates the question, but everything around it gives the book its life: the streets, the work people do, the things they make, what they eat, what they argue about, what they remember, and what they would rather forget.

And if, when the last page is finished, a reader looks up Carcassonne or Lyon on a map and begins wondering what it might be like to go there themselves, then perhaps Le Livre Vagabond has done exactly what its name promised.