Book Review: Autumn, All the Cats Return

Autumn, All the Cats Returnby Philippe Georgettranslated by Steven Rendall and Lisa NealEuropa Editions, 2014Dogged French police lieutenant Gilles Sebag returns in Philippe Georget's Les violents de l'automne, translated into English as Autumn, All the Cats Return by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal as part of Europa Editions' enormously enjoyable “World Noir” series, and although this second volume (in what we can only hope will be a very long series) is much more ambitious than its predecessor, Summertime, All the Cats are Bored, Sebag himself hasn't changed: he's still coolly intuitive, masculine to the point of being ursine, and infinitely capable in all situations; in other words, he's still Jean Reno.In this new adventure, an old man is found dead and decaying in his apartment in the southern France town of Perpignan where our stage is set. He'd been shot in the head, and scrawled on the door of his flat were the initials “OAS,” signifying the French-Algerian Secret Armed Organization that had a long and bloody history during the Algerian War fifty years earlier. Sebag is called to the crime scene shortly after consoling his teenaged daughter over the death of her young schoolmate in a scooter accident (“life wasn't like a video game,” Sebag muses with a condescension we can comfortably assume is the author's own, “When the game was over, you couldn't play it again”), and we're immediately reminded of his phlegmatic exterior when his partner outrages over the crime scene:

“Do you realize what that means? Six days without anybody looking in on him, that's really incredible. When I was young, that wouldn't have been possible, but nowadays, damn it, it's all about selfishness and indifference. What a society we live in … Shit!”

Only to prompt a typically reserved internal monologue on the part of our hero:

Sebag let his partner express an anger that seemed to him as pertinent as it was pointless. It was one thing to use angry words and display noble feelings, and another to put them into action. Sebag had never heard Molina talk about his neighbors except to complain about them. He himself had always limited his relations to those around him to a minimum, and if something serious were to happen in one of the two houses next to his, he wasn't sure he'd notice it. So why spill your bile if you aren't capable of changing your own behavior? What shocked Sebag most in today's France was not indifference or selfishness, it was that so many people were more eager to tell others what to do than to set an example.

That steely control is on display as well in a later scene when Sebag confronts a crowd of bystanders hostile to the police:

“We're not accusing anyone,” he said in a calm but firm voice. “If we had to do that, it would take place not here but at police headquarters.”“Hitting us on the head with phone books to make us confess,” a woman sneered. She wore no makeup and was without either charm or age, a sort of Mother Teresa of the secular left.Sebag looked her straight in the eye.“Have you often been hit with a phone book, Madame?”“Uh … no, not me personally, but that doesn't mean that we're not acquainted with your methods.”“Better than I am, apparently,” Sebag laughed. Then he smiled and added: “I don't have a phone book in my office. When I need to look up a number, I consult the yellow pages on the internet.”“Whoa, our police is state-of-the-art,” sniggered a pretty young woman with arched eyebrows that gave her a perpetually astonished expression.“We can assume that you must have come up with something else,” the old activist said in an acerbic voice. “A good old dictionary, for example.”“Dictionaries have solid covers; they do damage and leave marks,” Sebag pointed out. “Besides, the administration has not seen fit to provide us with them, the courts never having considered misspelled words on a parking ticket to be procedural errors.”

That oh-so-Gallic sangfroid will carry Sebag through a good deal of the plot of Autumn, All the Cats Return, which delves into refreshingly detailed partisan accounts of the Algerian War and which so adroitly mixes politics and detective work (as in the best of Reginald Hill, among others) that they reinforce rather than distract from each other. The laconic tone of Georget's narrative is very calculatedly deceptive; this is a book where everything is connected to everything else by thin but tough steel wires (including, amazingly, that scooter accident at the very beginning). Some reference is made here to events in the previous volume, but Autumn, All the Cats Return can – and should – be read entirely on its own strengths.