Murder at home: The best crime novels in the middle of winter – culture

survive life

A dead woman in the morning, shortly before Christmas, in the small town of Montréal-La-Cluse in the French Jura: Catherine Burgod runs the town’s post office, on December 19, 2008 early customers find her body in the back room – 28 knife wounds, “of which some had struck lungs and broken ribs, six had been fatal, two of them in the throat”. A robbery apparently, a sum of money has disappeared.

On true crime, narrated cautiously but emphatically by the successful journalist Florence Aubenas, with laconic suspense. Again and again she came to the place, researching the fate of everyone involved. The actor Gérald Thomassin was long suspected of being the perpetrator – a rebel who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Jacques Doillon hired him for his film “The Little Gangster” in his youth. Gérald is reminiscent of the young Jean-Pierre Léaud in Truffaut’s “Les 400 coups” and received the César for best young actor in 1991. Like Chaplin, Doillon recalls, a mixture of grace and awkwardness. For Gérald himself, someone like Scarface is a role model: “I live, I survive life.” Thomassin was imprisoned for a long time, he disappeared in August 2019 and has not reappeared to this day.

An adultery

Once they were a happy couple, Jean Seghers and his wife Remedios, a photo shows them ten years ago in Venice, at the engagement. in Venice. “Adultère” is the original title of Yves Ravey’s novel, adultery as a motive for a crime. And insurance fraud associated with it. The husband is the narrator, he sees his unfaithful wife coming home at four in the morning, brought by another man, the President of the Commercial Court. Jean just had to file for bankruptcy for his gas station. The marriage is in tatters, and the business, you know it from James M. Cain’s dreary petit-bourgeois melodramas of the ’30s. And then there’s the severance pay Jean has to pay to his longtime mechanic and night watchman, Usman.

The moral agility with which Jean guides us through his criminal plot is as terrifying as it is fascinating. When he is visiting his mother, he decides to secretly reach into the soup bowl in the bedroom closet, where she hoards her money – she doesn’t want to give him a loan from her pension. Eventually the gas station goes up in flames and the responsible insurance company, whose name is Hunter, is suspicious. “You thinking too loud, Seghers? Too bad I didn’t stand closer to you to overhear.”

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Three fingers game

A family tragedy from Japan, written after the end of the war, its tragic consequence has a lot to do with Japanese tradition. A classic in shape locked room mysterybased on the Anglo-Saxon model: a murder in a closed room (from the inside) that nobody could actually enter from the outside.

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A double murder on their wedding night in the middle class house of the Ichiyanagis: a rich widow with her five children. The eldest has just married Katsuko, a girl from a humble family, the morning after the couple is found dead, slashed open with a katana. There is also a koto in the closed room, a zither that someone played with bloody fingers.

Japan is a closed society, even if there is orientation and travel to the west. The whole thing presents itself as a factual report, of Japanese deliberation. The riddle is solved by the young, inconspicuous, even grubby private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (with the help of a solid crime library of exquisite Locked Room masters such as John Dickson Carr or Maurice Leblanc). Seishi Yokomizo went on to provide a whole series of Kindaichi novels, many of which were filmed by Kon Ichikawa. A mysterious fellow hangs around in this story who only has three fingers on one hand. That’s all you need, the narrator explains to us precociously, to play a koto: “Because the strings are plucked with the thumb, index and middle finger.”