Review: Is there such a thing as cozy noir fiction?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 4, 2014
Elly Grant's Death in the Pyrenees is an odd, if not unique, combination of genres - cozy mystery, police procedural and psychological noir fiction. And, while it's short easy-reading almost simplistic stuff, it definitely works and is strangely compelling to the point that it could be classified as a page-turner.Elly Grant's heroine, Danielle, is a female police officer in a small tourist town in the Pyrenees in southwest France. While Danielle is portrayed as a heterosexual (frankly, I'm not convinced and I don't believe that Danielle is either), her life "partner", Patricia, is a confirmed lesbian. That is to say, Danielle and Patricia live together, frequently express their love for one another and their complete satisfaction with their life together but also routinely assure themselves and others that the relationship is platonic. Murder and "mayhem" regularly invade Danielle's precinct and each crime is "solved" but with an interesting two-part noir closing twist that is clearly the signature MO for the entire Pyrenees series. The first part of the dénouement is Danielle's confession to Patricia of the facts of the case but the final revelation is a sotto voce aside from Danielle directly to the readers in which she reveals that her confession to Patricia wasn't quite the full disclosure that she had made it out to be.This is an interesting, if somewhat sneaky and underhanded, way to close out the mystery but it does seem to work and provides for several hours of entertaining reading.As a seasoned traveler who has visited this part of the world, I would ask Ms Grant to add more culture and colour to her stories - food, markets, shopping, festivals, descriptions of towns and architecture, the odd combination of French and Spanish that becomes the local Catalan dialect, a clearer mental picture of the spectacular mountain scenery and so on. What is there is good but I want more, more, more. (I confess I drooled over a wonderful description of cassoulet - that rich, slow-cooked casserole  containing meat (typically pork sausages, goose, duck and sometimes mutton), pork skin and white beans.I really must take a moment to point out two moments of particular stand-out humour. The first instance occurred when a local merchant offered Danielle a gift (read "bribe") of local Catalan sausage as a less than subtle thank-you for Danielle's cooperation in ensuring that his visits to the local whore house did not become public knowledge. After agreeing upon a reasonable explanation for her having the sausage, Danielle left the merchant with the brilliantly witty closing line, "After all, we don't want a sausage to get you into trouble, do we?" The second belly laugh came when Danielle and Patricia, on their return from a visit as French tourists to London, England, turned stereotypes on their head by talking about how stiff, cold and abrupt that Englanders could be. Turnabout is fair play, of course.Good work, Ms Grant. I'll look forward to reading the next installment in the series.Paul Weiss