The Mayor

Gerard Mangin a wily old politician with powerful connections in Paris who has been Mayor of St Denis for over thirty years, served a term in the French Senate and has powerful connections in Paris after working on the staff of the future President Jacques Chirac when he was Mayor of Paris. The Mayor’s politics are moderate conservative, but mainly devoted to the interests of St Denis and he has used his political influence to turn the town into the main commercial and administrative centre of his region. He also worked as a young man in the European Commission in Brussels and used his knowledge and connections to bring a steady stream of European Union grants to St Denis for its tennis courts and rugby stadium, its roads and tourism facilities. As a result, St Denis prospers when so many other small French country towns are dying. The Mayor’s son was Bruno’s commanding officer when they served in the French Army’s peace-keeping mission in Bosnia in the early 1990s where Bruno was badly wounded. Young Captain Mangin recommended Bruno to his father for the job of municipal policeman after his convalescence. Someday, the Mayor will retire and complete his long-delayed History of St Denis and Perigord, and in the meantime can never quite decide whether he wants the clever young deputy Mayor Xavier or Bruno to succeed him. His head says Xavier; his heart says Bruno.

The Baron

He is not really a Baron, but since he is the main landowner and thought to be the richest man in St Denis who lives a a lovely small 17th century chateau called a chartreuse, the title of Baron has become a universal nickname. A veteran of the Algerian war who then made his money in electronics, he came home to the family home in St Denis to enjoy it. A devoted sportsman and mainstay of the local rugby and tennis clubs, he is deeply conservative and patriotic but his politics are devoted to the memory of Charles De Gaulle as the greatest Frenchman of modern times. His father was a leading figure in the Resistance, and was arrested before the young Baron’s eyes by the Gestapo and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Baron dislikes Germans, but is deeply attached to the American and British and Canadian troops whom he still calls “mes liberateurs” after seeing them free his country as a boy. He says he can still remember the taste of the chewing gum and chocolate the allied troops gave him as they drove on north toward Germany in the August and September of 1945. He is devoted to Bruno as another old soldier and tennis partner.

Montsouris

Montsouris is the most prominent Communist in St Denis and a leading figure on the town Council. But most of his social views are decidedly conservative and his nominal Communism reflects his work as a railwayman, where the Communists dominate the powerful trade union. Montsouris’s wife is the real radical, endlessly organizing marches and protests and writing angry letters about American imperialism to the press, and constantly agonizing whether she should join one of the more militant Trotskyite groups. She keeps a watchful eye on her husband’s politics, which she suspects have been softened by his loyalty to the town and his friends in the rugby and hunting clubs.

Rollo

Rollo is the headmaster of the college of St Denis, a intermediate school for children from 12 to 16, before they leave school or go on to one of the big lycees or technical schools in Sarlat and Perigueux. Teachers have long been the bulwark of the French Republic in the rural areas, custodians of its secular traditions, and influential local figures. Rollo and his wife live in one of the apartment the college maintains for its teachers, and rents out his own house in the country and is thus a prosperous figure. He and the Mayor share an ambition, to make St Denis populous and wealthy enough to have its own lycee, rather than send its young scholars away to the larger towns. he is one of Bruno’s regular tennis partners.
Stephane

Sephane is a big and burly man, a dairy farmer in the hills above the southern banks of the river Vezere, who sells his milk and cheese and butter and yoghurts in the local markets. Thanks to his clever daughter, he now has a website and sells his produce to up-market restaurants and delicatessens in Paris and Bordeaux. He is Bruno’s regular hunting partner, and his stall at the local markets has become an informal club for local traders and farmers as they enjoy the ritual casse-croute, a morning meal of bread and wine and and cheese and pate, exchange gossip and talk local politics. Bruno enjoys these mroning sessions and fnd it a very useful place to keep his ear t the ground on local concerns.

Dougal

Dougal is a retired Scottish businessman, who became bored in retirement and started ‘Delightful Dordogne,’ a letting agency that rents out vacation homes of British and Dutch tourists and has become one of largest businesses in town. A drinking chum of the Baron and a regular tennis partner for Pierrot, his daughter is married to a local hotel owner and the entire family have been adopted as honorary citizens of St Denis. he won the affections of the tennis club by running a fund-raising lottery every year, at which ne of the most popular prizes was his own course in appreciating malt whiskies. His French is good and the Mayor wants to get Dougal elected to the town council as a fellow citizen of the European Union.

Jo

Jo was Bruno’s predecessor as municipal policeman of St Denis, but never lost his roots in the soil. The son of a poor peasant, Jo served as a boy messenger and later fought in the local Resistance against the German occupiers in World War II, and was awarded a Legion d’Honneur. Dashing and handsome and a star rugby player in his youth, he married the daughter of a prosperous local draper and built up a small farm while working as a policeman. A much-respected figure, despite a reputation as a formidable ladies’ man, Jo is a pillar of the rugby club and soends his mornings at one of the other of the town markets all around the Valley of the Vezere, where he has cronies in every cafe. He lives largely on the food he grows and the dreadful rough wine he makes for himself.

Raoul

Raoul is a jack-of-all-trades, but makes his living mainly from selling local wines from his stall at the markets around the valley. Most of his customers are tourists, attracted by his free wine tastings and Raoul’s fluent but idiosyncratic English and Dutch. Out of the tourist season he works as an odd-job man looking after the plumbing and gardening and small repairs for the foreigners who live in the Dordogne all year round. He also works as a pall-bearer for the local funeral home, and since his divorce conducts a lovely romantic life through the lonely-hearts club of the Internet.
Michel

Michel is a former engineering officer in the French Navy who now runs the town’s Public Works Department which takes care of the roads and bridges and sewage systems and supervises all the building codes and planing permissions which makes him a very powerful man in the life of the town. A leading figure in the Chasseurs de St Denis, the town’s hunting club and a a member of the boards of the rugby and tennis clubs,, he devotes his spare time to good food and wine. He lives in a fine old house than used to be an inn and still has the rings embedded in the walls outside where the mules used to be tied up. Michel and his live on the uper floors. The ground floor, with its vast old fireplace and modern kitchen and large dining hall, is dedicated to the regular feasts of the hunting club.

Xavier

Xavier is Maire-adjoint, the deputy who does most of the administrative work, and also the golden boy of St Denis. His father runs the local Renault dealership and garage and his father-in-law runs the local sawmill. he is secretary of the tennis club, and still plays for the rugby club’s second XV. He want to ENA, the Ecole Normale d’Administration in Paris, an elite kind of business school that trains France’s future top civil servants and many of its captains of industry. Highly ambitious and with his eyes on a political career, he came back to the Dordogne to work in the sub-Prefecture in Sarlat and now runs the Mairie and chairs the crucial business development agency of the Conseil Regionale for the Dordogne. He also chairs the youth league of President Nicolas Sarozy’s party in South-West France and will stand for the the Assemblee Nationale at the next election. He expects to become Mayor in his turn, unless the new laws that seek to limit politicians from taking too many jobs prevent him. Whatever happens, he will be a key player in the town;s future and one of its richer citizens. Bruno admires him and counts him as a friend, but sometimes wonders whether Xavier’s personal ambition is stronger than his devotion to St Denis.

Hubert de Montignac.

Hubert’s real name is Laurent Lebrun, son of a humble woodcutter for the local sawmill, but everybody now knows him by his business name, which adorns what le Guide Hachette des Vins says is “a national treasure, one of the great wine shops of France.” His cave sells honest Bergerac and Bordeaux wine by the litre from vast vats, served by a kind of petrol pump into the plastic containers customers bring. he sells boxes of his own blends of slightly better wines, runs some small vineyards, and keeps one of the best collections of malt whiskies outside of Scotland, an extraordinary range of vintage Armagnacs and unbroken runs of some of the greatest vintages of France from the 1940s to the present day. his prices range from one euro a litre to over 2,000 pounds a bottle. After a series of astute partnerships with English and Dutch immigrants who bought local chateaus for the lifestyle more than for the wine, he ran their vineyards, opened his cave and is now a wealthy man, who likes to dress in the clothes of an English country squire, which is reckoned to be very chic in France. He and Bruno share a love of wine and food and are both highly eligible bachelors, although Hubert’s shop manager, natalie, is his mistress of many years.

Momu

Momu is short for Mohammed, the son of an Algerian who moved to Marseilles as a boy and later joined he French Army. Momu is the popular and much-respected math teacher at the local college, and while nominally a Muslim, takes llttle account of religion and is completely integrated into French life and is a devoted supporter of the St denis rugby club. His father’s gruesome murder is the core of the plot of the first in the Bruno novels, ‘Bruno, chief of police.’ He and Bruno became friend when Bruno’s rugby and tennis lessons for the local schoolchildren helped turn his son Karim from a sullen and rebellious adolescent into a star rugby players and a pillar of the community. Momu taught Bruno to make cous-cous and Bruno dines with Momu’s family regularly.

Karim

Karim, Momu’s son, is a big and powerful young man, and as the most powerful forward in the St Denis rugby team is regularly courted by big-city teams to join their ranks for an impressive salary. But Bruno and the Mayor managed to get his the financing and the tobacco licence to buy the Cafe des Sports o the outskirts of town, with loans guaranteed by the prosperous businessmen and car dealers who make up the rubgy club’s board of directors. Newly married to Rachida and staring a family, Karim sees Bruno as a second father, and Bruno sees him as a future town councillor.

J-J

Jean-Jaques Jalipeau is a Commissaire of Police and approaching retirement, the head of the detectives of the Police Nationale for the Deparmement of the Dordogne and based in Perigueux. he got to know Bruno when investigating St Denis’s only bank robbery, a crime swiftly solved with Bruno’s local knowledge. Taken to a memorable celebratory dinner at the region’s grandest restaurant, J-J and Bruno forged a respectful but sometimes testy friendship, tested by J-J’s belief that Bruno was more devoted to St Denis and to his own sense of justice than to the letter of the law. J-J nurses fantasies of being a contented country copper like Bruno, rather than a conventional policeman and administrator whose job involved more politics than he would like.

Father Sentout

Father Sentout is the plum and companionable priest of the lovely old romanesque church of St Denis and was groomed for high office in the church after a brilliant career as student and then as teacher at the great Roman Catholic seminary at Troyes. He spent five years at the Vatican on the staff of the Secretary of State before requesting assignment to a prish in France to be near his aging parents. He would have been made a Monsignor and promoted to greater responsibilities long ago had it not been for his devotion to the town’s rugby team and to the foie gras and truffles and cuisine of his native Perigord. His sermons are filled with sporting metaphors and now he has taken up golf, he finds himself practising the two-handed grip on his chalice,

The Mad Englishwoman

Pamela Nelson runs a small gite, or guest house, on the outskirts of the vast commune of St Denis. She keeps horses and gives riding lessons, and lives so quietly that the locals call her ‘the mad Englshwoman’ for no reason except her habit of dressing in formal riding clothes to ride into town on horseback each day for her breakfast at Fauquet’s cafe and to buy a copy of yesterday’s London Times, in order to do the crossword, which she usually completes before finishing her coffee. Divorced from her workaholic banker husband, she was a schoolteacher back in England before deciding to start a new life in France, where she has broken through Bruno’s prejudice against the grim reputation of British cuisine. being half-Scots, she is amused by her nickname, understanding that in small French towns where everyone must have an identity, being bestowed a nickname is halfway to complete acceptance.