Ending Paris in July

 Murder and Roast Chicken

“Paris in July” has been a fun blog event hosted by Emma at Words and Peace this year. I’ve read a few books about France, and taken a few backwards looks at visits to Paris from the past. It’s been fun to see what books other readers chose, and I have a few new ideas of what to read.

Several reviewers mentioned the book Mastering the Art of French Murder by Colleen Cambridge, which was published earlier this year. Despite my efforts to concentrate on fiction written in French, I couldn’t resist this fictional portrayal of Julia Child in her earliest days in Paris, long before she wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking and became an icon of American food lovers. While author Colleen Cambridge has a rather loosey-goosey approach to historical research, it’s an amusing murder mystery. 

The novel begins with a murder in the basement of Julia and Paul Child's Paris apartment building at their famous address on Rue de l'Université. The year is 1949, early in the Childs’ time in France. The victim (fictitious, of course) had just left a party in the Childs’ apartment, and the plot involves finding out who murdered her and why. Good starting point!

Julia Child, as a character in the book, is always cooking. She is obsessed with a sudden series of failed mayonnaise preparations — and also, it seems with sex. She gives a few cooking lessons in the course of the novel: an omelet that’s not over-cooked; a roast chicken made beautifully brown because it’s smeared with butter; a superb ham; and the mayonnaise. Her culinary efforts all seem very much like episodes of  “The French Chef” from the 1960s and 70s -- or references to her original cookbooks. A few iconic scenes in the neighborhood food market also give the Julia Child character a chance to demonstrate her expertise.

I’ve read quite a few Julia Child memoirs and biographies, as well as using her original cookbook, and the novel doesn’t really add anything, or make the character more vivid than the prototypes — which a good fiction book in my opinion would do. Further, Paul Child was virtually absent from the narrative, though Julia’s sister did play a bit part. Ultimately, the reality-based characters in the novel don’t do much to help solve the murder mystery. A bit disappointing.

Julia, her sister, and Paul, needless to say, were real. Their neighbor, Tabitha Knight, who narrates the book and acts as an amateur sleuth in the mystery plot, is entirely the author's invention. Tabitha is a half-French half-American newbie in Paris, visiting her very rich grandfather. He lives in an elegant private home across the street from Julia and Paul with his lover, whom Tabitha views as her uncle. They are portrayed in an entertaining way: both of them had been active in the resistance just a few years earlier, though now they seem very aged and frail.

Tabitha's mother and grandmother had left France over 30 years before the time of the novel, having moved to America when her mother married a native of Detroit. There Tabitha was raised, and there she spent World War II working in the Willow Run bomber plant. She went to Paris because she had lost her job when the war ended — something that happened to large numbers of the female work force that unceremoniously became unemployed when the men came back from the war.

The action in the book is fast-paced, and Tabitha is constantly witnessing crimes and getting into terrible danger from the murder gang (if you want to call it that — no spoilers here). She’s very resourceful, cool-headed, and clever with tools thanks to her experience on the assembly line. Although a Paris police detective and his staff are working on the case, she beats them to the evidence and the guilty parties every time. That’s the good part of the book!

Just one thing: there are too many anachronisms for my taste, though I’m highly aware that most best-selling authors and their readers and editors are completely indifferent to this type of error. But here are a few details that could be checked with a casual google search, so they bother me. I know that they don’t matter to the intended audience of the book. Don’t read them if accuracy isn’t your thing —

• A reference to a 1946 Thunderbird when the first Ford Thunderbird was a 1955 model, released in 1954. (p. 69)
• Several references to the use of plastic bags in various contexts, some quite significant to the plot, when they weren’t available for at least a decade after the time of the novel. (p. 6 and elsewhere)
• Casual use of the word “gay” to describe the grandfather and his partner, a usage that existed in obscure circles but not used as in the novel until much later. (p. 61)
• This quote from a villain: “all of it has been going on right under their very noses for months now, and they know bupkis.” (p. 228) This yiddishism, bupkis meaning “nothing,” was invented in America, but did not appear in ordinary Americans' speech for decades after the time of the novel. Admittedly, I can’t rule out that the author may have been signaling that this villain is Jewish, and therefore using Yiddish slang, but that would be odd in the context. Also the spelling “bupkis” became common much later, hinting that the author didn’t check any sources.

In sum, it's a good read, fast paced, and amusingly makes use of the real and very famous couple Julia and Paul Child. A good find for Paris reading.

THE END

Review © 2023 mae sander