Book Festival: Why author Allan Massie turned to wartime France for his inspiration

Massie is a polite man, so he doesn’t bother pointing out that every page of his novel has been written to show the realities of invasion for  people in the occupied country, that its whole point is to examine how they would cope with the moral turmoil invasion brings in its wake. His questioner, he says, must be an optimist about human nature; he is more of a pessimist himself.

So too, one suspects, is Jean Lannes, the  Bordeaux detective superintendent who is Massie’s central character in what he hopes to be a four-book series set in occupied France. In the first volume, Death in Bordeaux (2010), Lannes keeps his job thanks to his links with a high-placed  official in the just-established Vichy regime; in Dark Summer in Bordeaux, one year later, that same link has become even more crucial. This is precisely the kind of collaboration to which that questioner implied the British would never have stooped. What Massie shows is how inevitable it is.

Massie – who is The Scotsman’s chief fiction  reviewer as well as Scotland’s finest historical novelist and probably its most productive journalist – certainly knows his subject: in 1989 he wrote about Vichy France in A Question of Loyalties, which some critics hail as his finest novel. He is also finishing The Spectre of Vichy, a history of the  influence of the collaborationist regime on post-war French politics which he hopes will be published next year. And while it’s important to emphasise that the Death in Bordeaux novels work in their own right as fast-paced, well-plotted crime novels, I can’t help thinking that in Vichy France he has found his perfect setting.

Why? Because in Massie’s novels, questions of moral behaviour are central: and how much more central can they be than when the very times they are living through – as with Vichy – demand that the characters constantly rethink their politics and priorities?

We meet over lunch and he treats me to an engrossing masterclass on the history of Vichy that makes me realise what a fine speaker he is: concise, clear, and usually with a compelling quote or killer fact to hand. “Vichy is really an extraordinary period,” he says. “In 1940, there was hardly any resistance to the Nazis and very few people would know anything about de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French. By 1941, there still isn’t much and it mainly consists of printing anti-German pamphlets and the like. But then  Hitler invades the Soviet Union, the French Communists are ordered to start killing Germans. In 1942, the Germans occupy the free zone, which boosts the Resistance still further, and in 1944, France is liberated by the Allies. But even at the height of the Resistance, only one per cent, at the most, were in it.”

And the rest? The rest weren’t taking to the hills and never surrendering, no matter what myths the Resistance like to spin about themselves. They weren’t escaping to join that crazy, one-star general in London who said that in 1940 France had just lost a battle not the war. No, they were loyal to the man who had led France to triumph in the First World War, Marshal Pétain, and the government the Germans had allowed him to set up in Vichy. A French government recognised by practically every other country in the world, with its own army and its own colonies – and its own victories against the Allies, come to that – even though its writ ran in only a quarter of the homeland.

This is the world that Massie’s Death in Bordeaux series starts to open up. Bordeaux is, of course, outside Vichy, and therefore under German occupation, but one can see Vichy’s appeal. Because for once, the Nazis had been almost reasonable. They had prevented the French from uniting around an exiled leader, and stopped France’s massive colonial armies from turning against them, all by granting them their own mini-state. Vichy would handle negotiations for the  return of 1.5 million French prisoners of war (men like Jean Lannes’s pro-Vichy son Dominique), and together with Germany, the new allies would put their awkward past behind them and forge a New European Order.

Forgive the history lesson. You don’t get anything like it in the novel. But Vichy was a complicated time and that is precisely why a literary novel that is also a thriller works so well in this setting.

“For a long time I wanted to write a crime novel,” says Massie, “and I rather liked the idea of writing a French one. I started off with a policeman who has no fixed political position. Well, he believes in decency, I suppose – but the problem is how do you practise decency in a situation such as Vichy. In both the novels I have written so far, the crime has political implications, and there are people senior to him who are anxious to close down the investigation. So I have written a couple of  detective novels in which the detective isn’t  allowed to solve the case – which is, I think, agreeably orthodox!”

He set the series in Bordeaux because it needed to be in the Occupied Zone, because there were probably too many novels set in wartime Paris, and because he recently visited the city. “Probably the main reason though is that a few years before I started writing the book, there was the case of Maurice Papon, the deputy prefect of Bordeaux during the war, who was, as a very old man,  arrested and tried for crimes against humanity for his part in the deportation of the Jews.”

Why turn to the France of 70 years ago rather than, say, to contemporary Scotland? “Two reasons. First, that would be hard to do without a fair amount of police procedural stuff, and that rather bores me. But the other thing is MacDiarmid’s line that the trouble with Scotland is that there is nobody worth killing.

If you want to write a crime novel in which political questions are also raised, well you certainly CAN convincingly imagine someone murdering a French politician in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, but it’s quite hard imagining anyone trying to murder a Scottish politician for ideological reasons.”

“The whole point about writing a novel about the past,” says Massie, “is that your characters don’t know the future, so they have no idea what the effects are going to be of their decisions. Historians sometimes forget this, which is why they sometimes talk about the course of history and so on.”

So Hitler invades the Soviet Union and, in the bars of Bordeaux, some of the drinkers are talking about the end of the war being in sight. Don’t be so stupid, they are told: remember the First World War, how the Germans smashed the Russians? Well, their army is twice as strong now, so they’ll do it easily. Better get used to the Krauts: they’re the masters now. Which side would you have listened to? Really? How would you know?

Suppose you, like Lannes, have a son, an 18-year-old romantic who grew up hooked on adventure after reading Dumas and is set on joining the Free French. Do you dissuade him? What do you tell his twin sister when she goes on a date with a perfectly nice German soldier? What do you tell your boss when he asks you to hand over some homosexual – he’s not too fussed which one – because the Germans are looking for someone to blame after one of their officers committed suicide rather than be blackmailed over a gay relationship?

If all of these characters were stereotypes, you wouldn’t particularly care. If there wasn’t enough of a sense of the past it wouldn’t matter. But Massie, though he has never lived in France and it still takes him a while there before he can start speaking French with any confidence, has the ability not only to show what it must have felt like to live, burdened by moral ambiguities, in France’s darkest days in the 1940s, but to tell an engrossing and shocking story too.

l Allan Massie is at the Book Festival at noon today.