MURDER IN LASCAUX
By: Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden
Terrace Books: Madison, WI
2011 (HC)
First-time fiction authors Betsy Draine and Michael
Hinden have created a charming and elegant little tale of mystery, history
and mayhem set in the beautiful river valley of the Dordogne, formerly
called the Province of Perigord, in the southwest of France. It is
beautifully written, which should perhaps come as no surprise as they are
professor emeriti of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Nora Barnes, professor of art history at Sonoma College
in the California Pay Area, and her husband Toby Sandler, a dealer in
antiques, have enrolled in a French cooking school at the venerable Chateau
de Cazelle in Beynac. Nora also hopes to spend time in the Chateau library
and archives researching the life of a minor French artist, Jenny Marie
Cazelle, whose long career spanned the years of the late 19th
Century to World War II, and whose last days were spent in residence at the
Chateau.
Nora and Toby also manage to finagle their way into a
guided tour of the legendary Lascaux caves and the prehistoric works of art
sketched on the cave walls more than 15,000 years in the past. Only five
members of the public are allowed to view the magnificent cave paintings per
day and Nora and Toby find themselves sharing the experience with a young
American couple, David and Lily Press (who coincidentally are also enrolled
in the cooking class at the Chateau de Cazelle), the guide Gounot, and an
aloof Frenchman whose name, they later learn, was Michel Malbert. As the
little group is completing its tour of the enchanted caves and the
breath-taking drawings of horses and bison, the lights suddenly are
extinguished in the Hall of Bulls and when they are restored, Malbert is
found dead, garroted during the brief moments of darkness. Who among the
remaining party of four could have committed the murder, or was Nora correct
in sensing the presence of another in the cave when the lights went out?
The four American are allowed to continue with their
vacation plans at the Chateau once they have been intensively interrogated
by the cynical and suspicious Inspector Daglan of the local police. Each of
them is certain that the inspector believes they are his prime
suspect. But life at the Chateau must go on as normally as possible while
the police continue their investigative efforts. Toby and Nora meet the
other members of their cooking class, American all. There is the flighty
Dotty Dexter and her young friend, Patrick Greeley, and Dotty’s
sister-in-law, Roselyn (Roz) Belnord. Roz, who is responsible for the three
of them participating in the school, is an old friend of the school’s master
chef, Marianne de Cazelle. Others in the Chateau family include sou
chef Madame Martin, Marianne’s brother Guilllaume, the surly jack of all
trades Fernando, and the patriarch of the family, Baron Charles de Cazelle.
Between cooking classes and Nora’s research on Jenny
Marie Cazelle, the two try their amateur abilities at sleuthing out possible
answers to the heinous murder of M. Malbert, who, they learn from Inspector
Daglan, was an agent of the Bureau of Historical Monuments and Antiquities,
and who was in the region investigating thefts from archaeological sites in
the Perigord. This fact resonates as Nora and Toby learn through their
inquiries that Fernando served prison time, perhaps unjustly, for stealing
archaeological artifacts and that Fernando had strong words with Malbert
about his checkered past; that the guide Gounot’s brother had been hounded
out of the fraternity of prehistorians by Malbert’s accusations that he had
been a Nazi collaborator; that Marc Gounot, son of the disgraced
prehistorian, also had sufficient reason to hate government agent; that
Malbert had been pressuring the de Cazelle family to yield the location of a
cave supposedly located on their property—a cave which might contain
prehistoric cave paintings or perhaps even works of art stolen by the Nazis
and hidden by the collaborationist de Cazelle family. In other words, the
number of suspects in the murder was almost legion!
The ultimate answer to the murder in Lascaux, and a
subsequent murder in the caves of Rouffignac that hints strongly that Nora
might be next, is clever and satisfying; it ties together the disparate
threads of a storyline that stretches far back into the history of the
Perigord. In addition to spinning a beguiling tale of mystery, the authors
give wonderfully evocative descriptions of the beautiful valley of the
Dordogne River and its hamlets, villages and monumental chateaus; the
Felibree, a regional festival of Perigordian traditions; the culinary
school at Chateau de Cazelle; and even Nora’s research efforts that shed
light on the life of the artist, Jenny Marie Cazelle, and inadvertently also
sheds light on the mystery of the de Cazelle family.
Four trowels for Murder in Lascaux!
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