Murder, She Wrote

On one of her regular visits to the French capital from her home in San Francisco, American author Cara Black spent an evening on a café terrace obligingly answering personal questions. For one, how did she acquire the perfect nom de plume for a noir writer? Destiny. It’s her real name.

The former preschool teacher, who still looks girlish at age 59, dresses in eponymous black and smokes Gauloises Blondes. Hints of a darker side to her engaging, laid-back personality? Or simply signs that she’s in touch with her inner Parisienne? On first acquaintance, it is not obvious that Black is a femme fatale. But make no mistake. This woman has a penchant for mayhem.

“I murder people all over Paris,” she confesses cheerfully. “It’s thrilling.”

Her life of crime is getting more complicated, however. “The city is so densely packed. It’s harder to find a place to kill somebody, where the body won’t be discovered immediately.” Fortunately Black’s homicides are only fictional, imaginatively committed for the purposes of her best-selling mystery books starring plucky, spiky-haired girl detective Aimée Leduc. Since her debut novel Murder in the Marais in 1999, Black has published another ten volumes of Aimée’s adventures, each with the word “murder” in the title.

Black’s stylish heroine operates in a 1990s time warp where Parisians still pay in francs and smoke in restaurants. Daughter of a French cop and an American mother who vanished when she was eight, Aimée runs her own detective agency with René, a dapper dwarf with superior hacking skills. Though Aimée always promises to stick to computer security cases, the agency’s specialty, she’s constantly tripping over corpses in her Louboutin heels and plunging into dangerous intrigue. “Sam Spade in couture”, as the Washington Post described her, Aimée’s as gifted at snagging vintage designer bargains at the flea market as she is at tracking down culprits. Her sense of justice is strong; alas, so is her attraction to various Monsieur Wrongs.

Besides Aimée, suspense, seduction and a sprinkling of French phrases, the other winning ingredient in Black’s series is Paris. Each episode highlights a different arrondissement and takes the reader into the murkier, scruffier corners where guidebooks dare not venture. On her forays to gather material, zipping around on a rented Vélib’ bicycle, Black is as talented a snoop as Aimée: “For me, inspiration is always about going to the place, talking to people, getting behind the scenes. Something has to make my nose twitch.” Her convoluted plots grapple with contemporary social issues and involve immigrants, ethnic minorities and marginal political groups. “My Paris is not berets and baguettes,” Black underlines.

This year’s mystery, Murder in Passy, is number 11, and no exception to its gritty predecessors, despite its refined setting. “For years I resisted the 16th arrondissement, because of its snooty haute bourgeoisie image,” says Black. A friend tried to show her the 16th of Balzac, Art Nouveau and Le Corbusier, but there was still no twitch. “Until, bing…”, Black came upon a Basque cultural center and began imagining the worst. The result, featuring a murdered Passy matron, a kidnapped Spanish princess and the radical Basque organization ETA, inspired alliteration from Kirkus Reviews: “The ideal mix of the personal, the political, the puzzling and the Parisian make Aimée’s latest a perfect pleasure.”

Cara Black’s love for the City Of Light was sparked in childhood, she says. Her Francophile father made the family watch his favorite Jacques Tati films and sent Cara to a convent school where she learned old-fashioned French and picked up popular culture reading Elle magazine. Then, age 16, she read Romain Gary’s moving memoir Promise at Dawn and wrote him a fan letter. His unexpected reply, with his address on the envelope, was all the encouragement she needed. A couple of years later, having saved up her babysitting money to travel to Europe, she rang his doorbell in Paris. The literary giant invited her to his corner café. “There I was, with a Goncourt prize winner, leaning on the zinc counter sipping espresso while he smoked a big cigar. Heady stuff for an 18-year-old,” she recalls.

But Black’s own writing career did not even begin until she was in her 40s, after other adventures that included living in Basel, Switzerland, and attending Sophia University in Tokyo, where she met (“in Buddhism class”) her Japanese husband, a ceramicist. Back in San Francisco, she worked as a preschool teacher and he ran a photography bookstore. They had a son, who is now 22.

Black first heard the story that led to Murder in the Marais on another visit to Paris in 1984. As they were exploring the medieval streets and crumbling hôtels particuliers around the Place des Vosges, a friend spoke about her mother, who had lived there during the war, hiding from the Nazis after the rest of her Jewish family had been arrested, never to return. “Ten years later, in 1994, I came back on a holiday, and remembered the whole story. I began to think, what if? A secret from the past… At that time, it was still a shameful subject nobody talked about. Faces shuttered when I asked questions.”

Back home, the story became a “passion” that she developed in her writing group for more than three years: “In those pre-Google days, research meant writing letters and going to libraries, consulting Le Monde on microfiches at Stanford.” The result was Aimée Leduc’s first investigation, in which she is hired by a rabbi to decipher an old encrypted photo, finds a corpse with a swastika carved in her forehead, and uncovers guilty secrets from the war years.

Published in 1999, Murder in the Marais was nominated that year for a prestigious Anthony Best First Mystery Award. Before, says Black, “I was a reader. Writing was a dream.” Now, among other distinctions, she is a member of “Sisters in Crime”, a group founded by fellow crime novelist Sarah Paretsky (who, incidentally, names Cara Black when asked to name her favorite mystery writer, according to Penelope Fletcher Le Masson, owner of Paris’s Red Wheelbarrow bookshop).

Black never planned to write a series. “I had to write the first book, it was my passion. Then it was the editor who said, where is this going? There are 20 arrondissements—I have a way to go. If they still want them, I’ll write them.”

The next book will be released in March 2012. Murder at the Lanterne Rouge takes place in the 3rd arrondissement, around rue Volta, among its little-known, small and enigmatic Chinese community. “I was intrigued when two or three years ago a police specialist told me that nobody ever dies in Chinatown,” says Black. Her research included asking local shopkeepers how to say “there is a body in the back” in the Wenzhou dialect of southern China.

Black fact-checks valiantly. Her sources include computer geeks, a retired Brigade Criminelle inspector and a forensic pathologist. She once rode her bicycle down a Métro staircase to see if Aimée would make it on her scooter. She was mortified that in Murder in the Marais she mistakenly buried Baudelaire in Père Lachaise instead of Montparnasse cemetery. The latest edition restores him to his rightful spot.

When not writing, Black does a lot of readings of her works, in bookstores and at the Alliance Française. “I get to talk about Paris. It’s cool! And it’s not about me.” She comes to the city about twice a year to collect ideas for future tomes, adding “higgledy piggledy” to her stockpile of Paris lore. This time she’d met with the art police who track down stolen masterpieces, and rooted around underneath the 17th-century Observatoire de Paris…clues to the next Murder?

She does have a taste for the city’s more unusual sights. Among them, she recommends the Saint Louis hospital museum, to see the antique painted casts of syphilitic patients: “For a gross-out experience. What people looked like before penicillin.”

Will Black ever move to Paris? “When I win the Lotto, or sell the movie option.”

Originally published in the September 2011 issue of France Today