Nothing is more exotic for Jean-François Parot than the past. He’s well-placed to judge. Along with more than 30 years as a diplomat in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Parot also has his studies as a historian, anthropologist and Egyptologist to delve into. “From your armchair, you can enjoy far-off islands, strange animals, the deep sea. Where is the exoticism in all that now?” he asks. “Nowadays, the exotic is found…by returning to our pasts – which is not so very far away, but is so incredibly different from our lives when you consider the progress we have made.”

Parot has plundered this rich seam of inspiration to create a series of best-selling crime novels centred on the enigmatic police commissioner Nicolas le Floch. Set in Paris, in the second half of the 18th century, each novel unfolds over a year. For UK readers, Parot’s most recently translated novel is his fourth, The Nicolas Le Floch Affair, in which the detective himself comes under scrutiny for his involvement with an elegant Parisian socialite. French readers are eagerly awaiting the ninth novel in the series, and have enjoyed television adaptations of four of the books. Now in his early 60s, Parot has built up a huge library of books from and about the 18th century. But working as he currently does from his posting as ambassador in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, Parot does not have these to hand. No matter, he says cheerfully: “the details are all in my head. I’ve got a very large memory for these things, so details come quite naturally.”

For all his time-travelling and globe-trotting, there is one place to which Parot has not yet ventured – England. The author hopes to remedy this situation in the next year or so. In the meantime, he spoke to Bookdagger from his offices in Guinea-Bissau about his work and future literary plans.

Q: Is there something about diplomacy that lends itself to writing? In the past, there were the writings of Chateaubriand and Paul Claudel. Readers here now enjoy the fiction of Alexander McCall Smith. Are you part of some tradition?
A: I think it’s a bit less true nowadays, but in the past, diplomacy was a state of mind, a talent for observation and a type of intuition. It was also a way to explain things, and this was done by writing. Before computers and technology we used to write much more. Because we wrote so much, diplomatic life was a type of daily apprenticeship into literature. Then the fact that one was living in different countries, among different people, every four or five years encountering a new situation, would mean that one accumulated a heap of different impressions and emotions that one wanted to impart to others in some literary kind of way.

Q: Nicolas Le Floch is depicted as very observant, cool-headed, adept at ‘reading’ a tricky situation. Does the detective share any of these qualities with the diplomat?
A: The diplomat is often confronted by quite complex situations from which he may have to garner various different elements, and make an accurate assessment of them. He may also need intuition, so there too is something he shares with the detective.

But Nicolas Le Floch exists at a time when the French justice system was changing from being one in which little attention was paid to the scene of the crime and more weight was given to getting a confession, often either through interrogation or torture. This era was closing and moving towards one in which more efforts were made to find proof. Proof meant that the investigator had to be much more careful about what we nowadays call the crime scene. The investigator had to scrutinise all elements of the crime and try to piece them together to arrive at a reasonable suspicion of guilt.

Q: So is Nicolas an unusual detective for his era? To what degree would his contemporaries have still relied on using torture to solve crimes?
A: Nicolas [who is operating in the 1760s and 1770s] is atypical because he slightly anticipates the changes that came at the end of the 18th century. It was in the 1780s that Louis XVI abolished the ‘question prealable’ [one of two inquisition techniques abolished at the time, the other being the ‘question preparatoire’]. Prior to this move, several writers and philosophers had questioned the validity of a criminal justice system based on extracting guilty confessions from people subjected to torture. As a result of this debate, the ‘question’ technique was abolished. It was a major step in criminal investigation. But in my books, the investigators never use torture. It was being used far less by then; and Nicolas is a man of his time. He may threaten some of his suspects with using torture, but he never actually does.

Q: Why did you give Nicolas a Breton background?
A: I’ve kind of adopted Brittany as a region, if you like – my grandparents and my great-grandparents lived there a century ago. I was born in Paris, but have very close affinities with Brittany, and live there now, and have done for 40-odd years. So, I struck upon a character drawn from Breton origins. He was born in my mind rather abruptly – I suppose I said to myself, well here I am living in Brittany, I’ll make my hero a Breton who goes to live in Paris, a bit like D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, who is from Gascony and goes up to Paris with a lettre de recommendation. It’s the same for Nicolas. All the elements which shape his personality – his family, his friends, his relationships – have all come about in a fairly unstructured, uncalculated way.

Q: Why that particular period, the second half of the 18th century?
A: As a diplomat, I am a bit of a ‘canard sauvage’ [‘wild duck’] as we say here in France. I’m not your typically trained career diplomat, from the Quai d’Orsay. They usually have a generalist education in law or political sciences, or from ENA [the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration]. My background is in history, anthropology and Egyptology. When I did history, I researched the various Parisian neighbourhoods and their social structures just before the Revolution. I used notary archives, which tell you a lot about daily life at the time – marriage contracts, apprenticeship contracts, wills, all these documents give a very precise image of life as it was then. I’m also a specialist in Egyptian mummification techniques, I’ve studied human anthropology and when I was a student I would observe autopsies – what they called ‘opening up’ in 18th century parlance.

Q: How do you go about constructing your novels? What comes first – the plot and then is the historical detail added after that?
A: No, in fact I don’t write like that at all. I don’t have any plan. I decide what year the events are going to happen, I’ll strike upon an event that will be the catalyst – it could be a political event, and then I throw my detective at the crime. Then, I follow it, let it unroll in my head and almost dictate it to myself as I write it. At any moment in the day or night, I’ll take up my pen and carry on with the story, because it’s all there, all ready, in my head. It’s a strange way to work, it’s quite an unconscious way to write. I was at a book signing once in France, and many visitors were amazed to see me taking up my notebook and pen and getting on with the next book!

Q: The books abound with juicy detail, like the royal carriages that stink of urine because the over-privileged passengers simply relieve themselves in them as they travel. Where do you dredge up such details?
A: They’re all in my head! For about 40 or 50 years I’ve been collecting and reading books from the 18th century and about the era. I’ve got a large library of these works at home. As I’m often abroad, I don’t have these documents to hand, but the details are in my head. I’ve got a very large memory for these things, so details come quite naturally.

Nowadays nothing is really that exotic for us. On the television, from your armchair, you can enjoy far-off islands, strange animals, the deep sea. Places you’d never get to, now you can see in great detail. Where is the exoticism in all that now? Nowadays, the exotic is found either in science fiction in the future or, for me, by returning to our pasts – which is not so very far away, but is so incredibly different from our lives when you consider the progress we have made in so many fields.

Q: Aspects of 18th century society seem very violent. How accurate a depiction is that, particularly some of the grisly executions you describe, such as that of Damiens? [For the crime of attempted regicide in 1757, Damiens was burned with sulphur, his flesh torn with pincers, and finally drawn and quartered by four horses, dismembering his body.]
A: Damiens’ was a very gruesome execution, but he was a special case because he had wounded the king, which was worse than blasphemy in France then, because the king was sacred. When Damiens was arrested and tried, they went back in history to find a precedent to his crime, because it was very unusual. They went back to the assassination of Henri IV in 1610. They chose to punish Damiens in a manner befitting the 1600s, not the era he lived in. It was the same with the Chevalier de la Barre. But it was not the same throughout society. The early 1600s was the era of the terribly bloody Wars of Religions. The wars in the later 18th century were not as grisly. Things had changed.

History is not linear. There are parallel tracks within it but they do not run at the same speeds. For example, I talk of suicide in one of my books. At the time it was viewed as a terrible crime, you couldn’t bury a suicide victim in the cemetery, their bodies were paraded in the streets. But little by little, these morays disappeared because people started trying to understand how things happened and why.

Q: But characters such as Sanson, the sensitive executioner who was involved in Damiens’ execution – is his story taken from history or embellished?
A: It’s based on reality. I blend imaginary characters with those plucked from history, so they are interacting naturally together. With my training as a historian, I aim to ensure that everything that is historical is authentic and founded on real facts and sources. In fact, there is a French university student who has recently submitted a 1,000-page thesis on my novels, with the aim of deciphering what is real within a work of fiction. She has been through all the novels and checked the historical sources and elements. The result is that she has found that my novels are thoroughly founded on authentic historical facts, and in proper historical research. I wanted to write history in the form of a novel. But I knew that people don’t always want to read history. So mine is a way of sugaring the pill, getting people to enjoy history and to learn at the same time.

Q: One thing that remains constant is Nicolas’s love of good food. I’ve read that you too are a bit of gourmet, and that your dinners are renowned throughout West Africa.
A: Yes, you asked earlier what traits we shared and there aren’t many, because I find it more fun to describe someone completely different. But one thing we have in common is the love of good food. As a diplomat, I’ve always done the cooking, it’s a speciality of mine. I’ve tried to recreate that in my work. I don’t think you can create a character without showing how he lives, sleeps, eats, washes, dresses, moves about. It’s this accumulation of detail that conveys the sense of the era. Nicolas lives in a state of permanent tension, so these gatherings around a good meal are important for him. But this is also of its time. In 18th century France, cuisine became all the rage for a small section of the population – parts of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Even Louis XV did a bit of his own cooking in his private apartments. Many more people starting cooking, and that stimulated debate about how to cook and what dishes should be like. There were books published for or against the ‘nouvelle cuisine’. It was like in the 1960s and 1970s – almost in the same terms!

Q: Nicolas’s deputy inspector Bourdeau often hints, quite darkly, that the current privileged way of life for some sections of society, cannot continue. What is the thinking behind Bourdeau’s role?
A: Bourdeau represents ‘the people’ in contrast to Nicolas, who has had this very mixed up-bringing among Breton peasants and aristocrats, and who seems to exist at a remove from ordinary people. Bourdeau yearns for change; he can see the difficulty in which the majority live (for instance, many poor people would go from house to house to collect leftovers to make soup). Also he is quite cultivated, he’s read Rousseau and other philosophers. But at that time, in the 1760s and 1770s, no one really anticipated the massive change that was to come with the Revolution. Nicolas seems to have a natural melancholy that may come from his Breton roots, but he is not aware of how ordinary folk live. The closer we get to the key years pre-Revolution, the more aware of this he will become.

Q: Do you plan to continue up to the Revolution with your work?
A: Yes, and beyond. I’m a big fan of those English sea-faring sagas, by Alexander Kent and C.S. Forester. These big sagas allow the reader to live with the hero over a 40-year time span. The reader almost appropriates the hero, there’s an extraordinary link between them, I love that.

Q: So rumours in the French press that you plan to keep going until book number 24 are correct?
A: Yes, God willing, and as long as my readers still want me!

Jean-François Parot was interviewed by Anna Brown

Author image © Ulf Andersen Gamma

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