Corsavy, a place of culture, heritage and sport, also happens to be at the center of a detective novel, “Le terminal des ambitious” by Christian Gau (published by Les presses littéraires).
A lawyer, a police commissioner, her team from the Perpignan judicial police, and their cross-border colleagues from Perthus, are leading the investigation into a disappearance which turns into a case of money laundering. The threads drawn from the investigations will guide them from Perpignan to the Catalan coast, Toulouse, to finish in… Corsavy.
Very visual writing
Christian Gau, former judicial police officer at the Narbonne gendarmerie research brigade, left the army, but has not given up sharing his knowledge of crime through his detective novels, his values through the traits of its characters, and its favorites, like Corsavy and its surroundings. “My son worked in Amélie-les-Bains and one evening, to visit the Vallespir, we went to sleep on the heights. It was an immediate crush. When I saw these landscapes, some with particularities out of the common, I had a flash. I took photos and told myself that I had to write something about these places. And finally I did it.
Style-wise, Christian writes in a very visual way. Inspired by action cinema, the novel is constructed like a cinema script. “I write what I want to read and I'm a fan of Olivier Marchal, his films, his characters. Something always has to happen. All the protagonists have their importance, everyone brings their own stone to history.
Basically, the idea is to make readers understand technical operations in order to perceive the society around us. “I choose a family of offenses in the Penal Code and I add an underlying subject on human turpitude. These are actions which remain simple, like here money laundering, corruption. It is not a question not to judge, but on the contrary to show that everything is not black and white. So, without giving away the plot, what is Corsavy doing in the midst of a dark money laundering story? The author wanted to share his discovery of this place with his readers. “These are magnificent places and I was fascinated. I made it a key place in the story to discover between my lines.”
And this is how, as we read, we discover, like watching a film or a series, the mysteries of an entire world, but also enchanting places full of history.
France
Books
