Title: After the Crash Author: Michel Bussi (translated by Sam Taylor) Publisher: Orion Publishing Pages: 432 Price: Rs 399 It was December 1980 and an airplane carrying 169 passengers from Istanbul to Paris crashed in the Jura mountains on the Franco-Swiss border. There were no survivors, except for a three-month-old baby girl. Surely, an act of providence. Not quite — for there were two baby girls of the same age on that flight, and when two families, one of wealth and influence, the other, poor and humble, come forward to claim the surviving child, it set forth a public and bitter legal battle for custody. And if only private detective Crédule Grand-Duc could have turned the other cheek to a pot of gold, he’d have saved himself the humiliation of having failed to solve the mystery of the identity of the child. [related-post] But there he was, sitting in his apartment 18 years after he’d been assigned the case, writing a journal chronicling his efforts, his near-misses and feeble successes — and looking to end his misery by taking his own life. One last glance at the December 27, 1980 newspaper that brought the case to his doorstep and he would pull the trigger. Except now, he couldn’t — that last look just solved the mystery; all these years, the answer had been staring him right in the face. When it comes to crime writing in languages apart from English, the Swedes and Norwegians have dominated the genre. Ever since The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (2005-2007) became a publishing phenomenon, detective fiction lovers across the world trained their eye on Scandinavian crime narratives where ordinary folks prove themselves to be capable of extraordinary evil. Nordic noir is now a sub-genre too. French writers, on the other hand, even the bestselling Fred Vargas books and Tonino Benacquista haven’t quite made the leap outside Europe, though the genre is extremely popular in France. Every fifth book sold in France is a polar — a roman policier, or a crime novel. But the stupendous success of the English release of Pierre Lemaitre’s kidnap thriller Alex (the first of the Camille Verhoeven trilogy) opened the floodgates. Bussi’s book too has sold more than 7,00,000 copies in France alone. After the Crash is unputdownable. Bussi scripts a taut thriller with very little bloodshed. Instead, the Frenchman has invested time developing his dramatis personae — Grand-Duc, the detective and part-time narrator of the mystery, whose diary hurls you the reader, and the intended readers in the book, Marc Vitral and Lylie (the baby who grows into a beautiful, young woman), down memory lane; Marc who is entrusted with the diary that will tell him the truth about Lylie; and Malvina de Carville, who will do whatever it takes to claim the girl as her sister. And while the action sequences are reminiscent of Larsson and Dan Brown, Bussi’s plot is also a sharp commentary on the class divide that leads characters to act in favour of power, never mind the consequences. If you want to know the truth about people, a little turbulence goes a long way.
