I picked up ‘The Missing Corpse’ to read while I spent a few days in Brittany. It was my first visit with Commissaire Dupin and it will be my last. I found myself having the same reaction to this book that I was having to the endless offers of Moules, Oysters, Shrimps and other ‘fruits of the sea’ that the local restaurants present me with: I can see that people love them but they’re not to my taste.

The ‘Brittany Mystery Series’ is sold as a cosy crime series featuring an eccentric Commissaire and has plots that make full use of the Breton culture.

I can see that ‘The Missing Corpse’ delivers on all of those promises but it does it in a way that doesn’t work for me.

The cosy part works. At the 40% mark where I abandoned the book, two men have been murdered, one of them very violently (the corpse of the other man was still missing when I stopped reading, so I don’t know how he died.) but the violence all happened off stage and there is no emotional investment in either of the dead men. Their deaths and the disappearance of one of the corpses are simply elements of an intriguing puzzle that Commissaire Dupin has to solve.

Much of the success of the novel depends on how the reader feels about Commissaire Dupin. If you can see him as an eccentric but passionate and intuitive man with a talent for unearthing the truth, then this book would probably work for you. Unfortunately, I see him as an annoying, undisciplined, emotionally erratic man who follows no methodology, makes very inefficient use of the teams working for him and solves cases by blundering around until he bumps into the solution. I can see he’s meant to be charming, maybe even amusing and I know I shouldn’t be grinding my teeth as he wanders around aimlessly following his instincts rather than the evidence. I don’t dislike the man. He’s well-intentioned. He’s loyal to his people. He’s endlessly curious, He’s also very tiring to spend any time with.

The novel delivered a lot of information about Brittany and Breton culture. I found some of it quite interesting, especially as I’m in the middle of this culture at the moment. The style in which this information was delivered didn’t work for me. Dupin romanticises Bretons the way some American film directors romanticise the Irish. To me, it feels patronising. Dupin is not a Breton but the members of his team are. He draws on their knowledge of the local culture and history but at the same time is amused by their passions and disdains their beliefs.

Jean-Luc Bannalec sells a version of Brittany that could have ‘Tourist Board Approved’ stamped across it but doesn’t speak to any of the problems and issues that Brittany faces within France. I felt like I was getting the tourist T-shirt and Postcard version of Brittany rather than what I actually see around me.

What finally lead me to abandon the book was a lecture on the oyster industry that extended over several pages. I’m sure it was providing information that will turn out to be central to the mystery but it was done clumsily. Jean-Luc Bannalec tried to make it less static by giving Dupin the data from two people rather than one and by trying to lighten the load by inviting me to be amused at how passionate one of Dupin’s team was about the industry and his knowledge of it but that didn’t help. It just reminded me how irritating Dupin was.

So, Commissaire Dupin and I are parting ways and I’ll never know why the corpse went missing or if they found it again.