‘The Missing Monsieur Max’: Interview with the author
Q. What is this book about?
A. It is a Maigret-style crime novel set in the small town of St Rémy de Provence and centres on the disappearance of an expat Englishman. The detective delves into the lives of those connected with the missing man both in and around the town, with the location itself being as much a character as those being investigated.
Q. What is the inspiration behind the book?
A. Twofold really.
The first was my long-standing admiration of Georges Simenon for his Maigret series (and, of course, his other psychological novels) and being fascinated by his punishing writing routine of trying to complete a book in eleven days.
The second thing that inspired me was the enforced regime of lockdown when the only travel you could undertake was in your mind.
These two elements came together in that I thought I would return, in my head, to St Rémy de Provence (where we had owned a house for ten years or so) and write a crime novel using my knowledge of the place AND that I would try and complete it during lockdown.
Q. What can you tell us about the main characters?
A. The detective is Jules Ruppert, Jules being Maigret’s first name and Ruppert being a play on the name of the best actor who portrayed Maigret on TV, Rupert (!) Davies. Madame Ruppert features strongly and, as John Lanchester the novelist and critic recently wrote, “There’s no fictional character whose food I would rather eat.”
Ruppert himself builds a partnership with Lieutenant Bonnet during their investigations into the many other colourful characters that inhabit the plot. Of course, Max is the main person of interest and it’s his private life and peccadilloes that are under the spotlight. He is shown to be a secretive man and I have a saying that, invariably, such people usually have something to hide.
For extra fun, I used some of Simenon’s pseudonyms in the names of some of the minor players – some that reappear, others that are just cameos.
Altogether, I hugely enjoyed sharing the writing period with them all and in particular exploring the character of the town and Provence itself in their company.
Q. The book is set in 2006 or thereabouts. Why?
A. The thing about a Maigret book is the element of nostalgia for a Paris and France of the past and I wanted a slight feeling of that, but the main reason is that I knew St Rémy and the local area well at that particular time. Inevitably, places change – restaurants, bars and shops come and go – and I needed to fix the book in a fairly recent past that I felt comfortable writing about.
Q. How did you choose the title?
A. As with Simenon, I wanted a blunt title. The fact that I could get one that was alliterative and said exactly what it was about appealed to me. I started with The Missing Monsieur and then came up with Max – not rocket science, but pleasing, at least to me!
Q. What research did you do for the book?
A. I revisited the town of St Rémy by daydreaming about it, but I also read through our old house files and contemporaneous guide books, pamphlets and various other items I’d retained. It pays to be a hoarder if you think you ever might write about a place and a particular time when you knew it. Maps are important too for research and setting and I kept a town map on my desk as I wrote. Added to that, of course, it’s amazing what you can locate on the web to authenticate what you are writing about, provided you cross check with other sources.
Q. Do you have any plans for a sequel?
A. Yes. I would love to write more in the series and I already have to hand several plot ideas. You have to remember that Simenon’s Maigret novels were more about complications involving people than they were about the complexity of the clues, so the starting point (as for Simenon) is to draw up a list of interesting personalities that you, as a writer, can unravel.
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