Murder on the Ile Sordou
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Praise for Death in the Vines
“Judge Antoine Verlaque, the sleuth in this civilized series, discharges his professional duties with discretion. But we’re here to taste the wines, which are discussed by experts like Hippolyte Thebaud, a former wine thief, and served in beautiful settings like a 300-year-old stone farmhouse. So many bottles, so many lovely views. A reader might be forgiven for feeling woozy.”
—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
“Though the plot is hair-raising, what keeps you glued to this mystery is its vivid portrait of everyday life in Aix, which deftly juxtaposes the elegance of the city . . . with quotidian woes and pleasures.”
—Oprah.com
“As much as the mystery intrigues—in this case some intertwined crimes involving a local winery, a missing elderly woman, and a rich man’s suspicious construction project—what really makes Longworth’s books enjoyable are the atmosphere and details that she includes of the South of France.”
—The Seattle Post Intelligencer
“A lovely, almost cozy police procedural that deserves to be read with a glass of wine in hand. Longworth paints such a loving picture of Provence that it’s likely you’ll start planning a vacation trip to France the moment you set the book down.”
—The Denver Post
“This is an intelligently written police procedural with the warm comfort of a baguette with banon cheese.”
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
“Enjoyable . . . the book’s real strength is its evocation of place.”
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Murder in the Rue Dumas
“Fans of European sleuths with a taste for good food . . . will have fun.”
—Publishers Weekly
“What really makes Longworth’s writing special is her deep knowledge of French history, landscape, cuisine, and even contemporary cafés and restaurants. This is that rare atmospheric mystery that is street-wise and café-canny.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Longworth’s gentle procedural succeeds on several levels, whether it’s for academic and literary allusions, police work, or armchair travel. With deftly shifting points of view, Longworth creates a beguiling read that will appeal to Louise Penny and Donna Leon fans.”
—Library Journal
“French-set mysteries have never been more popular [and] among the very best is a series set in Provence featuring Monsieur Verlaque, an examining magistrate, and his sometime girlfriend, law professor Marine Bonnet.”
—The Denver Post
Praise for Death at the Château Bremont
“This first novel in a projected series has charm, wit, and Aix-en-Provence all going for it. Longworth’s voice is like a rich vintage of sparkling Dorothy Sayers and grounded Donna Leon. . . . Longworth has lived in Aix since 1997, and her knowledge of the region is apparent on every page. Bon appétit.”
—Booklist
“A promising debut for Longworth, who shows there’s more to France than Paris and more to mystery than Maigret.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Mystery and romance served up with a hearty dose of French cuisine. I relished every word. Longworth does for Aix-en-Provence what Frances Mayes does for Tuscany: You want to be there—NOW!”
—Barbara Fairchild, former editor in chief, Bon Appétit magazine
“Death at the Château Bremont is replete with romance, mystery, and a rich atmosphere that makes the south of France spring off the page in a manner reminiscent of Donna Leon’s Venice. A wonderful start to a series sure to gain a legion of fans.”
—Tasha Alexander, author of the Lady Emily mysteries
“Longworth has a good eye and a sharp wit, and this introduction to Verlaque and Bonnet holds promise for a terrific series.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Death at the Château Bremont offers charming French locales, vivid characters, and an intriguing who-done-it.”
—Kevin R. Kosar, author of Whiskey: A Global History
“Here’s hoping the series lasts for years.”
—RT BookReviews
“Your readers will eat this one up.”
—Library Journal
ALSO BY M. L. LONGWORTH
Death at the Château Bremont
Murder in the Rue Dumas
Death in the Vines
A PENGUIN MYSTERY
Murder on the Île Sordou
M. L. LONGWORTH has lived in Aix-en-Provence since 1997. She has written about the region for the Washington Post, the Times (UK), the Independent, and Bon Appétit magazine. She is the author of a bilingual collection of essays, Une Américaine en Provence, published by Éditions de La Martinière in 2004. She divides her time between Aix, where she writes, and Paris, where she teaches writing at New York University.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Mary Lou Longworth
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Excerpt from “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara.
Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Longworth, M. L. (Mary Lou), 1963– author.
Murder on the Île Sordou : a Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal mystery / M.L. Longworth.
pages cm
“A Penguin mystery.”
ISBN 978-0-698-14648-8
1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.4.L596M89 2014
813'.6—dc23 2014010451
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Dedicated to my cousins
Author’s Note
There are many islands off the coast of Marseille. Some are closed to the public, but Frioul and the Île d’If can be visited by boat from Marseille’s old port. Sordou, however, has been invented by the author.
Contents
Praise for M. L. Longworth
Also by M. L. Longworth
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter One | Lacydon
Chapter Two | The Welcome
Chapter Three | About the Chef
Chapter Four | Dinner for Ten
Chapter Five | Stranger Than Fiction
Chapter Six | About the Manager
Chapter Seven | Lunch Poems
Chapter Eight | Little Squid, Shirley
Chapter Nine | About the Boatman
Chapter Ten | The Rising Sea
Chapter Eleven | Housekeeping
Chapter Twelve | Pirates
Chapter Thirteen | About the Bartender
Chapter Fourteen | Ode to the Rouget and Saint-Pierre
Chapter Fifteen | About the Recluse
Chapter Sixteen | A Champion Swimmer
Chapter Seventeen | A Prayer Song
Chapter Eighteen | Paulik, and Scores of Journalists, Arrive
Chapter Nineteen | Fancy Foreign Noodles
Chapter Twenty | The Rest of Us Are Strangers
Chapter Twenty-one | Dreaming of University
Chapter Twenty-two | Past Lives and So On
Chapter Twenty-three | 3 Rue Valois
Chapter Twenty-four | Vernacular Architecture
Chapter Twenty-five | Bill’s Business
Chapter Twenty-six | Le Buzz
Chapter Twenty-seven | Le Cercle des Nageurs
Chapter Twenty-eight | Defending Marseille
Chapter Twenty-nine | Amore
Chapter Thirty | Prosper Has More Guests
Chapter Thirty-one | Antoine’s Feast
Chapter Thirty-two | Racing to Catch the Train
Chapter Thirty-three | An Old Story
Chapter Thirty-four | Swimming
Chapter One
Lacydon
From here he could see La Canebière rolling straight down into the old port, splitting the downtown into two equal parts, as though someone had drawn a line in the sand with a stick. It made sense that the main street would dump into water, for it had once been La Lacydon, a river. Eric Monnier tried to balance his hip against the handrails of the boat in order to relight what was left of his cigar. He noticed that the farther out from Marseille they got, the more the mountains behind the city seemed bigger, as if they were pushing—thrusting—the city into the sea. Funny, he thought, when you’re in the city you don’t notice the white chalky limestone hills. You only hear the beeping car horns, the cry of seagulls, and see the dust, and smell the sea, and dirt. He knew that Marseille made no attempt to fancy itself up for tourists, and each time he returned to the place where he was born it took him a few days to learn to love it again.
Lacydon had been his first and only book of poetry, written in the early 1960s when he was twenty-two and published on a shoestring by a friend in Arles. It was an ode to Marseille, and its history, its bright light, and its fast-talking inhabitants. He had sold a dozen or so copies at weekend flea markets and then had given out the rest to friends and family. He still had a cardboard box under his bed with the proofs—typed by the older sister of a friend—and five remaining copies of the slim, elegant tome.
With the nonsuccess of his poetry Monnier took a job at a high school in Aix-en-Provence teaching French literature, just until, he initially hoped, his poetry took off. An elderly great-aunt on his father’s side died and gave the apartment in Aix’s Quartier Mazarin to her great-nephew. He still lived there, surrounded by wealth: his neighbors being a count and countess (below) and a Parisian architect (above). And here he was, one month newly retired from that same job and same high school, never having put his poems into book form again. His new poems were now written out, in longhand, in black bound books that he bought at Michel’s on the Cours Mirabeau. He knew that the staff at Michel’s called him “Le Poète” as soon as he left the shop, and he didn’t mind.
Monnier’s eyes watered as he looked at Marseille. He had always loved the port, its golden stone medieval forts protecting the harbor, and the fortress-like church, Saint-Victor, lovelier in its simplicity than the elaborate nineteenth-century Notre Dame de la Garde. He turned to his right and saw the bunkers, built by Germans during World War II, on the hill below the Pharo Palace. As kids they had played around the bunkers, until getting chased away by a Pharo guard. As the boat went farther out on the sea more of Marseille came into view: the private swimming club just beyond the bunkers, where now membership took years and multiple recommendations, and beyond that the three-star Passédat restaurant.
He turned his back to Marseille now; not because he was displeased with the city, but to break the wind. On the third try his cigar relit—barely visible hints of red shone at the tips—and he puffed madly to get it going again. With his back to the city he saw that they were close to Les Îles du Frioul, a group of islands that included the abandoned prison on the Île d’If, immortalized by Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo. Two of the larger islands of the Frioul archipelago were joined by a causeway, with a large natural port that faced Marseille. They too had limestone cliffs and craggy hills, dotted with bright-green shrubs, all of it shimmering in the late July sun against the blue-green sea. When he was young an uncle (his mother, daughter of Italian immigrants, had been one of twelve children; his father, an only child) had had a cabin on Frioul, and Eric would spend weeks on end swimming and fishing with his cousins, and when alone, writing.
Farther out to sea the waves got bigger and the boat hit one and fell down with a thud. The poet heard a cry and what sounded like “Whoopee!” from a middle-aged couple who had boarded the boat just ahead of him. It was the wife who had yelped. She had her back to the city, arms spread out firmly gripping the boat’s railing, as her husband comically jutted around trying to stabilize himself so that he could take a picture. He wore white tennis shoes that seemed too big for his feet, and one of those hats that had a bill to keep out the sun but a hole on top. They never made sense to Monnier. He had no idea what the caps were called, but on the basis of that—and the wife’s “Whoopee!”—he guessed the couple to be American. The woman saw Monnier looking at them and she smiled and waved, yelling, “Rough sea!” Monnier waved back with his panama hat in his hand, having understood that she had said something about the waves.
He tried not to stare, but the poet was mesmerized by the American couple’s glee, and their shared enthusiasm. He had had love affairs but never married; the woman whom he would have married had died more than fifty years ago, and he hadn’t enjoyed dating after that. He used his poetry as an excuse to be a recluse; people believed him, as the making of poetry was too abstract for his few friends to understand.
A week on the island was a treat to himself for forty years of teaching ungrateful seventeen-year-olds (with some exceptions) the beauty of Flaubert. As a retired civil servant he would be earning his full salary—small at 2,000 euros a month—but it was more than enough for someone who lived rent-free, had no children, and never traveled. As he smoked his cigar he saw himself reflected in the boat’s window: he imagined that he looked like any retired teacher who loved to eat and drink (this was something he spent money on); his half-moon-shaped reading glasses permanently hanging around his neck; his paunch; his white Guayabera shirts that a friend bought on visits to Cuba (this one stained, he noticed, with last night’s beef daube); his red bulbous nose; a scruffy white beard; and his flyaway white hair, thinning, but not bald.
The Americans were still giddy at the waves, and he was thankful that the language barrier would be an excuse not to have to socialize with them once they got to the island. Not very social at the best of times, Monnier wanted silence on the island; time to reflect, and to write. And then he heard French.
A new couple had emerged on his side of the boat; they must have been on the starboard side and boarded after him and the Americans. They were younger by five years than the Americans, and younger than him by . . . twenty years perhaps. At least she was. He nodded as they walked by, their arms linked, and they smiled and nodded back. The woman was tall and slender, but not skinny, with a head full of curly auburn hair that flew about in the wind, just as Élodie’s had. She had a long thin nose, high cheekbones, and a thin mouth, and lots of freckles. Her partner was equally striking, but did not have her classic good looks. He was her height, if not a tiny bit shorter, and wide at the shoulders, wi
th a paunch that Monnier could just make out. His nose had been broken . . . an accident? a sporting injury? and his hair was thick and black and streaked with gray. His eyes were much darker than hers, but they were as intelligent. He had a large, wide mouth, and a hearty laugh.
Monnier’s cigar went out again and he turned back to look toward Marseille. The city’s details were now difficult to make out, except for Notre Dame de la Garde sitting atop a hill east of the city, much like Paris’s Sacré Coeur—a beacon—in this church’s case, for sailors. The boat had made its way around the Frioul islands and was now heading out farther to sea, southwest, to an island seven hundred meters wide and two kilometers long that was their destination.
“Is that a Cuban you’re smoking?” a deep voice said beside him. It was Broken Nose, the one with the beautiful freckled companion.
“What else?” Monnier answered. He may be just a humble civil servant, but he would only smoke Cubans. “An Upmann. But it’s out now, and I’m holding on to it still because I don’t want to throw it overboard.”
“I have an Upmann in my pocket,” the man answered, patting what looked to be, to Monnier’s inexperienced eye, an expensive linen jacket. “A Magnum forty-six. But I’m saving it for when we get to the island. My companion thought it silly that I smoke a cigar while on a boat, out at sea. I think she thinks the idea of a cigar and fresh air is incongruous.”
Monnier laughed. “Tell that to the Cubans.” He held out his hand. What the hell, he thought. They speak French and we’ll be together on a small island. “Eric Monnier,” he said.
“Antoine Verlaque,” Broken Nose said, shaking his hand. He looked at Monnier and smiled again. “Here for some R & R?”
“I hope so,” Monnier said. “Just retired from forty years of teaching. And you?”
“Vacation.”
“Have you brought more cigars with you?” Monnier asked. “I’m not sure the hotel will sell them.”