MEMOIRS OF A GENDARME

He was born in a mud-and-wattle hut on the edge of a poacher's pond. He became the law itself, walking about in a pair of boots. Memoirs of a Gendarme is the forgotten masterpiece of Pierre-Alexis de Ponson du Terrail - the most widely read novelist in 1860s France and creator of the legendary Rocambole. Now translated into modern English for the first time as part of the Lost French Thrillers series, this is not a tale of cursed valleys or secret societies. It is something far rarer: a police procedural written in 1867 that reads exactly like one. Jean-Nicolas Sautereau begins life as the fourth son of Martin the Eel, a violent poacher in the savage Sologne. The first ten chapters are the best thing Ponson ever wrote about being poor. Then Nicolas escapes - enlists in the Chasseurs d'Afrique, is captured by the Hadjoutes, and spends a season as a slave in a tribal camp - only to return home and spend the rest of his life arresting men exactly like his brothers. The cases are the body of the book, and they are properly built. A mail driver is shot on the road and the mailbag is empty. A cattle drover disappears somewhere between one market and the next. A family called the Wolves holds a hungry farm for twenty years without ever going hungry. A baroness at the château de Beaurevoir has a lady's maid whose cousin is a poacher. Sautereau works them the way a country policeman does: slowly, on foot, by knowing everybody, and by sitting in taverns. He does not moralise. He does not dramatise. And he notices everything. Sofia E. V. Hamett has rendered the novel into the natural English of a modern thriller: faithful to the plot, the characters and the events, but written to feel alive to a reader today. Nothing has been abridged. Distances are in miles, nicknames are translated, and the technical jargon of the gendarmerie has been turned into plain speech. The result is a novel of astonishing modernity, pitiless realism, and quiet, relentless justice. For fans of Les Misérables, C. J. Sansom, and the hard, clear eye of historical true crime.