Had Graeme Macrae Burnet not made last year’s Booker shortlist with his previous novel, His Bloody Project, you probably wouldn’t be reading this review: it wouldn’t exist. After all, Burnet’s Maigret-influenced debut, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, went unnoticed outside his native Scotland. But the enterprise of his publisher Saraband (once of Glasgow, now based in Salford), the wisdom of the 2016 panel – and the quality of His Bloody Project, about a crofter’s son bound for the gallows after a triple murder to which he has confessed guilt but not motive – have won Burnet a keen audience for his next move.
His new novel revisits Georges Gorski, the police chief in a sleepy Alsace town featured in his debut. One autumn evening he’s disturbed in his routine of solitary drinking when Bertrand Barthelme, a respected solicitor, ploughs his Mercedes fatally into a tree on the road from Strasbourg.
Neither Barthelme’s widow Lucette – younger than Gorski expects – nor his 16-year-old son Raymond seem moved by the news, which Gorski delivers in person on account of the man’s social standing. Lucette even seems to be flirting, discussing her sleeping arrangements – Gorski’s eyes straying here, his wife having walked out on him with their teenage daughter.
The narration has the simple momentum of classic crime writing, heavy on lit cigarettes, light on subordinate clauses. Irresponsibly drawn to Lucette – he knows he’s a fool – Gorski digs for dirt on Bertrand, who at the time of his death was not (as his wife believed) returning from a traditional midweek supper with colleagues. That was Bertrand’s cover story – but for what? Why did he secretly withdraw a large wad of cash every Tuesday morning? And isn’t it odd that the damage to his Mercedes doesn’t seem consistent with hitting a tree?
Hanging over Gorski’s attempt to answer these questions is always another – whether the suspicion of foul play is only a product of his desire. At the same time, Raymond – a kind of cousin to the troubled teenager in His Bloody Project – has questions of his own after a search of his father’s papers turns up an unknown address carefully preserved. Hopped up on Jean-Paul Sartre novels, he follows the trail to an apartment block in a nearby town, stalking one of its residents with a stolen knife as he turns his back on the sort-of girlfriend he’s been with for years.
Unflashy yet highly accomplished, The Accident on the A35 works on several levels. It’s the story of a bereaved schoolboy going off the rails and a middle-aged man whose wife has had enough – and his subsequent poignant need to return to his boyhood home to live with his widowed mother, who has dementia. It has a denouement like something out of Greek tragedy but delivers as a proper police procedural too, with further mystery when Gorski is drawn reluctantly into the unsolved case of a Strasbourg woman strangled, it turns out, in the unaccounted hours before Bertrand’s death.
His Bloody Project was presented as a collection of documents unearthed by Burnet as he traced his family tree. This time he’s the translator of a French writer named Raymond Brunet, who after publishing The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau killed himself in 1992. Two decades later, on the death of his mother, lawyers acting for Raymond (mark the name) sent his publisher a parcel containing the manuscript of L’Accident sur l’A35.
Burnet’s cleverness doesn’t get in the way of your enjoyment but playfully adds levels of meaning. The biggest teaser is the revelation that L’Accident sur l’A35 was only one of two manuscripts in the package. What the other one was, he doesn’t say; I doubt I’ll be the only reader keeping my fingers crossed for another Gorski.
• The Accident on the A35 by Graeme Macrae Burnet is published by Saraband (£12.99). To buy it for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
