The Accident on the A35

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Macrae Burnet writes a literary mystery, paying homage to Sartre and Georges Simenon in this distinctly French style novel, set primarily in the non descript and insipid small town of Saint-Louis. An author commits suicide, paving the path to the publication of a novel deemed to be autobiographical, although how much is truth or false is up for debate, but it does feel real. George Gorski, Chief of Police in the town is, by his own estimation, a provincial plodder, separated from his wife, Celine, and missing his daughter. He wanders around the town's bars, cafes and restaurants, drinking whilst trying to avoid being perceived as a drinker. A fatal car accident on the A35 kills respectable lawyer, Bernard Barthelme, a man not much mourned by those close to him or those who knew him. Lucette, the widow, asks him to look into the death because her husband by all rights should not have been on that road. Feeling drawn to Lucette, and with nothing better to do, Gorski begins to look into the mystery. This is a slow building character driven story, not a plot driven crime story with tension and suspense. A spokeswoman for the South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said: “We were called at 2.17pm to an incident near Puddletown and sent three double-crewed land ambulances, a critical care car, an operations officer, a rapid response vehicle and an air ambulance." Accident on the A35 is a literary mystery. Not like other crime mysteries that are plot-driven with many twists and turns. It’s important to step into this novel realizing you are about to read an easy flowing mystery that is character-driven.

I really enjoyed The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014) and so was keen to read this 2017 follow up.The driver of the Land Rover - a woman in her 50s from the Tooting area of London - was taken to Dorchester Hospital. Police say her injuries are not believed to be life-threatening. Accident on the A35 is the 2nd in a series, but can definitely be read as a stand-alone. I haven’t read The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau yet and look forward to doing so. His Bloody Project was presented as a collection of documents unearthed by Burnet as he traced his family tree. This time he’s the translator of a French writer named Raymond Brunet, who after publishing The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau killed himself in 1992. Two decades later, on the death of his mother, lawyers acting for Raymond (mark the name) sent his publisher a parcel containing the manuscript of L’Accident sur l’A35. Reading The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau convinced me that Burnet was channeling Simenon; while carrying on in that vein in The Accident on the A35, he now brings in some of the existentialist flavor of Sartre with a side of Camus. The alienation, the desire for freedom, the internal darkness is all there, running throughout the entire novel. Burnet has really done an especially great job with the character of Raymond, who exemplifies the existential angst of doing and feeling what he wants to as opposed to conforming to social expectations; the same is true in the case of the elder Gorski, with the added problems of a failing home life and career which is anything but satisfying. Add into the mix that these dramas play out within the confines of the claustrophobic French town of Saint-Louis, and what may have started as a detective story turns into much more of an examination deep into the realm of the human psyche. And it's not pretty, trust me.

The mystery at the centre of the book is fairly straightforward. A lawyer, Bertrand Barthelme, in a small French town is killed in what looks an accident late at night but on a road he shouldn't be on if he was where he told his wife. When Chief Inspector Georges Gorski informs the man's young and attractive wife of his death, she asks him to find out where her husband had been that night. Bertrand's 17 year old son, Raymond decides to carry out his own investigation into his father's movements that night. When Bertrand Barthelme runs his car off the A35 into a tree one evening and dies, Inspector Georges Gorski has no reason to think it was anything other than an unfortunate accident. But Barthelme's widow thinks there's something odd about her husband having been at that spot at that time and asks Gorski to look into it a bit more. Mme Barthelme is an attractive 40-something with more than a touch of the femme fatale in this first meeting, so Gorski finds himself agreeing. Meantime, Barthelme's 17-year-old son Raymond starts a kind of investigation of his own, in an attempt to learn more about the father with whom he had always had a rather cold, distant relationship. Both investigations will head off in unexpected directions. Unflashy yet highly accomplished, The Accident on the A35 works on several levels. It’s the story of a bereaved schoolboy going off the rails and a middle-aged man whose wife has had enough – and his subsequent poignant need to return to his boyhood home to live with his widowed mother, who has dementia. It has a denouement like something out of Greek tragedy but delivers as a proper police procedural too, with further mystery when Gorski is drawn reluctantly into the unsolved case of a Strasbourg woman strangled, it turns out, in the unaccounted hours before Bertrand’s death. An investigation is underway into this collision and I am appealing to anyone who witnessed what happened to please come forward.In a statement released today (January 17), police said a family from Cornwall were travelling in the BMW involved at the time of the crash. This novel is situated in Saint-Louis in France. It is is structured in two parts. The first part is the plot about how the death of Bertrand Barthelme during a car crash affects the lives of the two main protagonists. The first protagonist is Georges Gorski, a senior officer in the St Louis police force who is investigating the crash. The second is Raymond Barthelme, the son of Bertrand Barthelme. Because of the death of the editor Pires, a trainee who subsequently received the manuscripts had put them to one side, not realising that they linked up with a previously published novel of Brunet called The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau. The link was recognised later by another editor at the publishers, who then published a second novel from the manuscripts as The Accident on the A35. Graeme Burnet uses this as a clever structural device to add mystery and intrigue to what otherwise would be a straightforward police mystery novel. The reader sees the novel as being a smaller thing within a larger publishing world. Nothing was mentioned as to the fate of the second manuscript. The Accident on the A35 is a darkly humorous, subtle, and sophisticated novel that burrows into the psyches of its characters and explores the dark corners of life in a sleepy town.”