After “La cour des grands” in 2010, he declared that he no longer wanted to publish anything. This spring, however, the Vaudois author Jacques-Etienne Bovard has signed “Passed under silence”, a local thriller where a mysterious sniper, a legendary weapon, cretin hunters and various contrabands intersect.
Chief Inspector Borgeau, of the Vaud Security police, flanked by the young midshipman Morisetti, is responsible for investigating long-range rifle shots in the Jura and the Lake Geneva region. No casualties to deplore, except a hunter’s pick-up with holes in it, a fishing boat thrown into disarray or a cauldron of soup riddled during a meal offered by a trustee championing the eradication of the wolf.
One detail, however, intrigues Borgeau: the impacts are too impressively precise to be accidents or failures. Who is the shooter? And most importantly, what weapon is capable of such a feat at a distance of 500, 600 or 775 meters? “What interested me was to write about a sniper who doesn’t kill,” Jacques-Etienne Bovard immediately specifies in the QWERTZ podcast of May 10.
The interrogation will lead the investigator and his young associate into a typically Swiss universe, made up of standard weapons, shooting companies, mushroom trafficking, hunters worthy of a Cohen brothers film, history Switzerland and the famous national reduction desired by General Guisan. We are on the trail of a legendary weapon, the Tell 40, and a secret organization called Hydra.
The Tell 40 which appears in this novel was designed based on the orderly rifles distributed to the Swiss army in the first half of the 20th century. Like the eponymous hero, he never existed
Here, it is the whole ambiguous relationship that some of the Swiss maintain with standard weapons, shooting ranges and this mixture between the violence of an object, and the discipline, close to Zen meditation, necessary to its use. A weapon which takes on, under the pen of Jacques-Etienne Bovard, an almost erotic dimension: “Borgeau seizes his with an indefinable emotion, weighs it, caresses the dark wooden barrel. Since when has he caressed something other than book bindings, or the curves of wine glasses?”
National discount
The Morisetti-Borgeau duo is therefore taken on a case which seems at first glance insignificant. And yet: something in these shots tickles the chief inspector, especially since Bonzon, from the scientific police, hypothesizes that the weapon could be the Tell 40 rifle, developed in 1940 on the basis of the carabiner , for snipers of the Swiss army. Mandate imposed on the constructor: “a head at a thousand meters”. More than 4,000 were manufactured as part of Operation Hydra, which was to allow Switzerland to give the Germans a hard time in the event of Operation Tannenbaum materializing, where the Germans and Italians were to simultaneously invade Switzerland.
Those who experienced the Mobilization and who came a lot are no longer there, and the others are less and less interested in this period. It’s like that
“Passed under silence” is a local novel, dense but incisive, funny but informative, from which emanates a real desire, on the part of its author, to provide a subtle and nuanced reflection on the position of Switzerland during the Second War worldwide. A novel which pays homage to this Switzerland of the Mob, too often ridiculed by the younger generations. A novel about a world that is disappearing, or rather two worlds that can no longer meet.
Ellen Ichters/olhor
Jacques-Etienne Bovard, “Passed under silence”, ed. Bernard Campiche, March 2024.
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