Bruno, Chief of Police
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Vin de Bruno: Tome II

11/4/2018

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                                      Bergerac AOC 2014

Origin: On limestone and clay soils from the plateau dominating the Dordogne Valley. The vineyards are mainly facing south-west, therefore have an optimal sun exposure.

Harvest: Mechanical in order to harvest during the night, when the cold air protects our healthy grapes from starting fermentation.

Grape varieties: Merlot 80%, Cabernet Sauvignon 20%

Winemaking: We respect both the tradition and modern technologies: temperature control, reasonable extraction of tannins and colour, very detailed and specific tastings throughout the whole process.

Ageing: This wine is aged in French oak barrels for ten months. The attention to its evolution and the regular rackings are the base of a balanced and soft wine. 

Ageing potential: This wine is good to drink now but can wait 2 to 3 years to reveal its great complexity.

Tasting notes: This wine has an intense ruby colour. On the nose, it offers red fresh fruits with delicate aromas of plum, blackberry and biscuit. On the palate, this wine is medium bodied and offers chewy tannins giving this wine good texture and body. In terms of flavors, we have fresh red berries with a touch of vanilla. The finish is fresh, with a spicy note. The best match with food is to drink this wine with friends with some good charcuteries, meat, cheese or even desserts! 
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A Bruno dinner

28/9/2017

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This week I was sent a link to Diane'sCookbooks, a website in which the (I presume) eponymous Diane has put together a Bruno feast using the recipes on this site and taken from the Bruno novels.

She has done an absolutely wonderful job putting the meal together, and I thought I would share it with you in lieu of an English language cookbook (which we are still trying to make happen!).

To see the post in its entirety, please click here.
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Paris Expat interview

13/6/2017

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After a 25 year career as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian, a post once held by Alistair Cooke, and later for UPI Martin Walker has settled in to a very agreeable life as an author and unofficial Cultural Ambassador of Le Périgord, dividing his time between Washington, DC and Le Bugue.

We met for coffee and conversation on market day in Le Bugue.


Which came first, Bruno or the Dordogne?


The Dordogne came first. My wife and I have been visiting French friends in the area regularly since 1981 and we bought our own place 15 years ago. I began writing Bruno books in 2007, after I had made new friends in and around our small town, through the rugby and tennis clubs and the kindness of neighbours. Our local policeman, Pierrot, is also my tennis partner and the kind of wise country copper who never wears a gun, hates to arrest anybody, knows everybody and most of the secrets. He was the inspiration for Bruno, although he’s older, married and rather beefier around the tummy than Bruno. He’s also, like Bruno, a keen hunter and excellent cook.

To read the rest of the interview, click here...

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Ich bin ein Berliner...

23/5/2017

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​A very enjoyable reading at Berlin's i31 hotel with host Zeev Rosenberg and German actor Oliver Betke.

​Photos by Heidi Dehl of Neues Deutschland, an old friend who visited us in the Perigord.
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Next Bruno: The Templars' Last Secret

12/2/2017

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The next novel in the Bruno series, The Templars' Last Secret, will be published in the US and the UK in June 2017 (exact dates tbc). 

The chateau de Commarque, which you can see in the video below, features prominently...
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Bruno is Foyles' staff pick!

9/12/2016

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?⭐️⭐️VIDEO STAFF PICK ⭐️⭐️? Christian from our flagship History and Transport sections recommends Martin Walker's crime fiction novel 'Fatal Pursuit.' from @quercusbooks To watch the full video visit our YouTube.com/Foyles #staffpick #youtube #recommendedreading #bookstagram #igreads #igbooks #readinglist #bookworm #book #bookshop #foyles #fatalpursuit #martinwalker

A video posted by Foyles Bookshop (@foylesforbooks) on Dec 6, 2016 at 6:51am PST

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Lascaux IV

7/12/2016

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Martin at the Lascaux IV exhibition.
Just had a wonderful tour of the spiffing and high-tech new Lascaux IV museum, guided by director Guillaume Colombo.

The new copy of the cave is brilliant, much larger and with more of the save than the old Lascaux II and the virtual reality ride is a thrill. The use of new technology to reveal the intricate engravings between and among the 17,000 year-old cave paintings is a revelation. I just got my invitation from President Francois Hollande to join him Saturday for his formal opening of this spectacular new building.
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BookPage summer reading

28/7/2016

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BookPage recently asked me what I am currently reading for a rolling feature of theirs:

In Fatal Pursuit, Martin Walker continues his beloved Bruno, Chief of Police Series, set in the beautiful Dordogne region of France. Our reviewer writes, "Martin Walker’s engagingly droll series featuring Bruno, Chief of Police, is a longtime favorite of mine."(Read the review.)  
​

Walker and his wife split their time between France and Washington, D.C., and he wears many hats as a journalist, historian, editor, broadcaster and basset hound owner. We asked Walker to tell us what he's been reading lately. 

Click on the link below to read the piece.
WHAT THEY'RE READING: MARTIN WALKER
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Bruno fans in Australia

9/6/2016

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I recently had the pleasure of meeting Frances Butcher (centre, below), who claims to be my biggest fan in Australia. We met not far from St Denis, where she gave me the below photo of a Bruno reading evening.

It's always a delight to meet people who love Bruno as much as I do!
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An essay on crime novels

20/5/2016

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This was originally written for  this weekend's Innsbruck crime fiction festival.

There is no genre of fiction that contains so many sub-categoroies as crime novels. There is the locked-room mystery, like Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, the courtroom drama and the police procedural, now joined by its own sub-genre of the forensic pathologist. There are country-house murders, murders on trains, on ships and on aeroplanes, murders by knife, by poison, by gunshots and explosives. There are also thefts and frauds, crooked lawyers and false wills, crimes of passion and of long and exquisitely slow revenge. The private eye stories have their own sub-genres, from the lone but brilliant civilian like Sherlock Holmes or the war-damaged aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey, to the classic but honourable tough guy of Philip Marlowe.

The genre is very old. The earliest, fragmentary collection of the Tales of Scheherezade, or the 1001 Nights, dates back to the 9th century, and The Three Apples is classic murder mystery of the butchered body of a young woman in a locked box. Certainly Scheherezade gives us the first courtroom drama, with The Hunchback’s Tale, in which twelve different people find themselves in court, accused of killing the Hunchback, the Emperor’s favourite jester. In the end, of course, no-one is responsible. He died accidentally by choking at a dinner party, and each of the people in court subsequently finds the body and believes they were responsible for the death.

The genre is also international, As well as the Persian-Arabian tales of Scheheredzade, we have the long Chinese tradition of the Gong’an, of court reports, starting with the 14th century Yuan dynasty, and continuing through the Bao Gong’an of the Ming dynasty and the well-known Judge Dee stories of the 18th century, which spawned their own western versions.

Crime fiction is certainly popular, but analysts have trouble in defining it. A survey by the US-based creative search group Mediaworks found that 11 percent of all the 2.6 billion books published in the English language were categorized as mysteries. But a report on sales in the US book market by Simba Information gave (for 2014) sales of $80 million for horror; $590 million for Fantasy-SF; $720 million for religious and inspiration books; while crime and mystery books outdid them all with sales of $728.2. (But the runaway market leader was romantic and erotica, with $1.44 billion.)

This popularity should come as no surprise. Crime stories have a number of built-in advantages. First, they trace a logical and coherent sequence of events, rather like a successful search. There is a crime, somebody investigates and the guilty person is eventually found. Such stories follow the classical dictates of unity of time and place. They end, if not happily, then at least with the satisfying prospect of truth being unearthed, and of justice being done. They usually contain elements of a puzzle, which the reader has to try to solve alongside the detective. There are different clues to be analysed and different potential criminals and their motives to be investigated, their opportunities and abilities to commit the crime to be assessed.

Crime stories are moreover splendid vehicles for social observation and comment, for delving into different lives and locations, different social classes and ethnic groups. A good crime story usually includes a satisfying sense of place, like Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles in the 1930s, or Sherlock Holmes’s London of the Victorian era, or Arkady Renko’s Soviet-era Moscow or Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh of our own time. A crime story blends happily with historical fiction. Lindsey Davis’s detective Falco plunges a hard-boiled private eye into the Rome of Emperor Vespasian. C J Samson’s hunchbacked lawyer Mathew Shardrake brings to life the 16th century London of King Henry VIII.  

Above all, there is the searcher, the truth-finder, the detective. Crime writers have extraordinary freedom in this regard to create any form of crime-solver. They can be heroes or anti-heroes or villains. They can be male or female, very young or very old, armed with official status as police detectives or civilian busybodies like Miss Marples or journalists like Stieg Larson’s Mikael Blomkvist or lone wolves like his Lisbeth Salander. They can be monks, like Chesterton’s Father Brown, or alcoholics, like Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole, or happily married like Donna Leon’s Brunetti. They can be eccentric, like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, or crippled like Perry Mason, or even stuck in a hospital bed like Josephine Tey’s Scotland Yard detective who sets out to discover whether King Richard III was as bad as Shakespeare depicted him and really murdered the two princes in the Tower. They can be gourmet cooks, like my own Bruno Courreges, or live on beer and canteen sandwiches like Inspector Morse.

A good crime story can make us feel at home anywhere, can make us feel we recognize something familiar in the strangest of places, amid the most monstrous of crimes, in the company of the most engaging or unpleasant of detectives. Here lies much of the charm of the crime story, the infinite variety of criminal, of crime, of place and of the personality of the character who solves it. But the real charm lies in us, the readers, who understand instinctively that every crime story is about us: about our passions and our weaknesses, about our temptations and our decencies, our sense of right and wrong and of justice. All human life is there – along with the death that must come to us all. 
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