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Author Martin Walker talks to us about his latest novel Bruno's Challenge & other Dordogne tales and shares a Dordogne-style recipe.
Martin Walker will be well known to Suffolk readers as the author of the popular Bruno detective series set in the Perigord region of France where he lives. Martin has also written several non-fiction books on a variety of subjects, including The Cold War: A History and America Reborn.
His latest Bruno book, Bruno's challenge & Other Dordogne Tales is published by Quercus on 25th November and is available from our catalogue.
My heroes were Robert the Bruce, Robin Hood, Richard Lionheart and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I still love Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Treasure Island, and Allan Quartemain (of King Solomon’s Mines). These were all books that I read with my grandfather, who also introduced me to Sherlock Holmes. I then devoured Conan Doyle’s history novels, particularly Sir Nigel and The White Company, terrific books of the Hundred Years War, and the adventures of Brigadier Gerard in the Napoleonic Wars. My father introduced me to Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and to the Hemingway novels. My mother tried to persuade me to persevere with Jane Austen, when I really wanted to read all the ‘Just William’ books. She started me reading Georgette Heyer and then it was an easy step to Jane Austen.
I began writing very young, trying little stories when I was seven or eight, tales of Knights in armour and dragons, of pirates and men o’war. My grandfather’s stories of the First World War, and the funny (never serious) yarns that my father and uncles always told of their times in World War Two, always entranced me and sent my young imagination soaring around the family table at Christmas and birthdays. My favourite was my mother’s tale. As a nurse in WW2, she was posted to one of the new hospitals built to receive the expected casualties of D-Day. Late on June 6, 1944, they heard the ambulance bell and most of the staff gathered at the steps or gazed from every window as the ambulance delivered its first wounded hero from the Normandy beaches. It was an infantryman and he had a broken ankle. ‘How did this happen?’ he was asked. ‘We got ashore and things went quiet after a bit and so while waiting for orders, we started a game of cricket and I tripped in the sand,’ he replied.
As a foreign correspondent, I wrote anywhere and everywhere, on military trucks and jeeps, trains, from inside the Kremlin and the White House and aboard Air Force One. Covering the Sahel drought in the 1970s, I had to write out my reports in capital letters and give them to the pilot of the aid aircraft who would take them to a post office back in Timbuktu or Niamey to be telexed back to the Guardian. In the Iraq war, I even wrote in trenches. But I usually reckoned to be writing at least a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand words a day as a reporter. So I have no routine, no fixed place to write, just a daily target of a thousand words, or three pages. Sometimes I write by hand, usually on a laptop.
Thanks to the magic of the Perigord, Bruno has not aged at all, and nor have his friends. Only his dog goes from being a puppy to becoming a father in his turn, and the grapes ripen each summer to be made into wine. But I think Bruno is a little wiser, more skilled at navigating French bureaucracy, and very much more his own man. In one novel, Bruno is pursued by an attractive female villain who seeks to seduce him for her own nefarious purposes.
In my plan, since Bruno is only an average man, whose appetites can be stronger than his will power, he was supposed to succumb to her wiles. But when I came to write the scene, it was as though a force field came from my desk and Bruno balked. He simply refused to comply, so I had to rethink the ending. It was at that point I realised that my character had developed a mind of his own and he knew it better than I did. So I follow his instincts, which usually tell him to trust his friends and neighbours and the community that sustains him, and to remember that justice is not always the same thing as the letter of the law.
This is a collection of short stories, some initially written for the German-language cookbooks or for other German collections, and one to provide a theme for a music play being staged by friends in a German jazz-rock band. Two have appeared as Kindle Shorts, which for reasons I don’t quite understand are not available to readers in many counties. Most of the stories, however, are new and written especially for his collection. I think of them as Covid tales, since being unable to go on my usual book tours and being restricted in travel, I had time to try some new ideas and themes. I had great fun devising a gourmet meal cooked with Neanderthal tools, methods and whatever foodstuffs were available some thirty-odd thousand years ago. That involved some intriguing research into the nutritional benefits of duckweed and other neglected plants.
Another tale drew on my experience as a member of the jury to select the best Bergerac wines of the year to think how a villain might try to cheat the system. Another story explores how a market and local businesses react and adjust to the coming of a new kind of competition from an immigrant community. Yet another explores the complexities of collaboration and Resistance in the Perigord in World War Two, with a walk-on part for Gertrude Stein, the American poet who managed to live out the war in France, untroubled.
I have two projects. One is a non-fiction book about the Perigord, its history, traditions and culture, which may include my own idiosyncratic guide to the region, its caves and castles and vineyards. The other is the novel that should be published in 2023, which is now about one-third written. Drawing on the way the people of Castillon each year re-enact for locals and for tourists the historic battle in 1453 which finally expelled the English from southwestern France, I begin with a similar re-enactment of the battle which freed Sarlat from the English in 1370. On the opening night, with Bruno and his friends in the audience, an accidental tragedy takes place. But was it accidental? And what role is played by the secret French electronic intelligence monitoring site at the nearby medieval town of Domme?
We use a lot of honey in the Perigord, and often mix it with old-fashioned mustard (which contains the mustard seeds), using 2 spoons of mustard for one of honey. I like this with eggs mimosa: hardboiled eggs, peeled and halved, scoop out the yokes and use a fork to mash the yokes together with the honey mustard and a pinch of salt. Then replace the yolk mixture into the hole scooped in the cooked white of egg. For extra interest, you could add some crushed bacon bits. This can also add something special to fried chicken or pork. Slice the meat to the thickness of your little finger, then smear it with the honey mustard and then dip it into a batter made of milk, salt, pepper and a beaten egg, then roll it into a bowl of flour and fry gently in a mix of oil and butter.
The result is a kind of schnitzel but without paying the price of veal to make real Wiener Schnitzel. The adventurous might try using horseradish instead of the honey-mustard for a real kick.
The happy surprise that people in many different countries are prepared to fork out good money for the stuff I make up, since the invented material is just a small proportion of the documentary on the way we eat, drink and live in the Perigord.
I love sports but have never been very good at them, although I certainly try. But when I was much younger and fitter than today, I played rugby and rowed in the eights boat for my college at Oxford. And when in the USA, I represented Great Britain in the highly unofficial global Frisbee championship that was held on the P Street Beach in Washington DC in the summer of 1971. I did not make the finals. Sorry.
