Pierre Audemars - The Fire And The Clay

[dem bones]

Pierre Audemars - The Fire And The Clay (Consul, 1961)

Blurb:
Pierre Audemars has written another novel featuring M. Pinaud of the Sûreté, of whom it has been said "a perfectly credible sympathetic and even impressive comic detective." The story opens with Pinaud finding the first headless corpse purely by chance. The bizarre discovery leads him to the strange family at the Château Capt and to the remote town of Chassagne where he is met by more violent deaths. His investigations and his eventual solution to the diabolical mystery makes an arresting story rich in originality and excitement.

The cover painting was the hook, the blurb strengthened M. Audemars' hand, and 50p asking price was the clincher.

It begins with M. Pinaud driving home the Commissaire's wife after a function at which he drank too much. Desperate for a piss, he pulls up near a railway cutting and waddles for the trees. There, lying beside the rails, a corpse - the head a few metres away on the track. Duty calls. Pinaud lugs the body back to his car.

On sight of the grisly burden, Madame le Chef faints dead away. She has yet to recover her senses when Pinaud returns with the severed head, so nothing else for it than to call at the nearest château for smelling salts. The formidable lady of the house, Madame Capt, is clearly furious at the intrusion and perhaps even a little fearful? She, like her gloomy offspring, Marie and Roland, becomes agitated when Pinaud tactlessly shares the details of his recent adventure.

The next morning, Pinaud learns from headquarters that his is not the first headless body to be discovered in Chassagne. Three days earlier, the trunk and severed fingertips of one Jean Falange were found in Madame Capt's garden! Suspicion initially fell upon man mountain Rostund, the jolly butcher, who never leaves home without a cleaver. Rostund is known to have argued violently and bitterly with the deceased, and it was he who discovered the body. Pinaud keeps him under close observation, but doubts he is the guilty party.

The lack of blood at either crime scene is baffling. M. Reuge the police surgeon has yet to identify the second victim who has the appearance of a tramp. Reugue and Pinaud agree that in each instance, the culprit has made an amateurish attempt at faking a suicide.

Back to Chassagne for some digging.

To be continued ....

[dem bones]

Pinaud finds Chassagne's one hotel a pleasant surprise but can't say the same of its landlord, Dubois, a surly, shifty-eyed toad of a fellow. We soon discover that any animosity is purely mutual.

The detective is forced to concede that the case has him baffled so he's delighted when beautiful ever-sad Marie Capt requests a meeting on the quiet. She is terrified that suspicion will fall upon her brother, Roland, who suffered a terrible head injury during the war and is prone to .... episodes. His proud mum borrowed heavily from the Mayor to buy the young man out of the asylum that he might be cared for at home. Roland, a brave and likeable fellow, is haunted by flashbacks of a particularly dreadful incident on the battlefield which saw three of his pals decapitated by a single shell. He lives in perpetual fear of his next beast-in-the-cellar seizure, as do his mother and sister.

The strain has taken a heavy toll on Marie who believes herself suffering from an unspecified incurable illness. She is hooked on sedatives prescribed by her fiancé, Dr. Armand Reuge, the police surgeon we met at the mystery corpse's autopsy.

Drama back at the hotel when Dubois attempts to push Pinaud down the cellar steps. The crime-fighter turns the tables, and the landlord falls to his doom with a horrible scream! What was all that about?

The Commissaire panics and saddles Pinaud with a sidekick. As it the greatest detective in France, a man "of almost superhuman fame," has anything to learn from a wet behind the ears popinjay who drives a lilac and maroon sports car! Charles Valim is as brash as his nancy boy cravat. It is perfectly obvious that Rostund is the murderer. Pinaud has the good grace not to laugh at the young fool's very public humiliation when he pays the butcher a visit.

Meanwhile, the killer claims another scalp (and fingertips), his most high profile victim to date, and Pinaud narrowly survives a second attempt on his life in as many chapters. Can he nail the killer before he or she nails him?

The back cover blurb notwithstanding, I approached The Fire And The Clay anticipating a break from the horrors but that's not the way things have turned out. It's not that the author revels in gore but the murders out of nowhere have shock value and I like that he's prepared to sacrifice a sympathetic lead player to up the misery of it all.

Just 40 pages (of 160) to go.

[helrunar]

Love that cover painting. And the tale has an engaging ring to it.

I wonder how long Consul Books lasted?  I don't think I've ever come across them before.  But I am a mere dabbler, far from being fit to stand amongst the authorities who patrol these halls.

H.

[pulphack]

That is a great cover, and it all does sound rather fascinating and Simenon-like. These bloody French and Belgian crime writers, they do love a bit of psychology, or at least they did in that era (I'm looking at you, Sebastien Japrisot!).

Consul is one of those imprints that was there and gone in the fifties and sixties - what little I can say about them is that they were part of WDL - World Distributors Ltd - who were out of Manchester and existed for a good while on their core business of annuals for kids. Certainly they were still around in the 1980's doing this stuff. Consul was a reprint, cheap rights, and even cheaper originals imprint. I had some Fu Manchu paperbacks they reissued, and I should imagine picking up the rights to this book was pretty cheap as well, probably sold as part of a package. They did some early TV stuff as well - DangerMan and The Avengers in particular. The latter was the only book about the Cathy Gale era, written by Douglas Enefer, a journalist who wrote a lot of their annuals for them, and also penned some thrillers that have seen him have a lasting reputation in France (coincidentally enough - he has his own Wiki page in French!) even though in his own land they were the fodder of later WDL cheapo paperback imprints like Triphammer and library hardbackers like Hale.

DangerMan was of course the work of well-known packager, editor, conman and rogue Bill Howard Baker and the mighty Press Editorial, about whom, etc...

WDL's lasting contribution to this site was the doyenne of Woolworth's bargain bins, Five Star (also probably a Baker project) whose many and varied reprints and originals can be found elsewhere on here. And how...

[helrunar]

Thanks for the info, Mr. Hack!  The ethnographic facets of it all are fascinating to me.

cheers, H.

[andydecker]

Mar 31, 2017 5:11:51 GMT pulphack said:

DangerMan was of course the work of well-known packager, editor, conman and rogue Bill Howard Baker and the mighty Press Editorial, about whom, etc...

WDL's lasting contribution to this site was the doyenne of Woolworth's bargain bins, Five Star (also probably a Baker project) whose many and varied reprints and originals can be found elsewhere on here. And how...

I wonder if Baker also had a hand in selling or licensing DangerMan to Germany. I never read one of those, but DangerMan was produced as a bi-weekly Heftroman series with 464 issues. It was called Secret Mission for John Drake for the first hundred issues. Later it was reduced to just John Drake. It had foto-covers with a logo of McGoohan.

Someone must have sold them the rights, either the production company or Press Editorial.