A Case of Matricide is the final novel in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Gorski trilogy—the others being The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017). As such it sees the culmination of all that has come to define the series as some of the most captivating, psychologically realized crime fiction on offer. Once more set in the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, the novel follows the ever-troubled Inspector Georges Gorski in his convoluted, tipple-fuelled investigations. With Literary Review identifying the Barthesian qualities of his works, and The Irish Times noting how it “owes as much to Albert Camus as to Georges Simenon,” I was excited to discuss the rich literary allusions in the novel with the twice Booker Prize–nominated author himself. Burnet more than sated my curiosity, reminding me not to forget the pleasures of reading and writing in the face of more cerebral metafictional puzzles.
This interview has been edited for clarity and space requirements.
Benjamin Parris: Let’s talk about the setting of Saint-Louis, and how this is the last book in the trilogy. You find yourself saying goodbye to the setting and the characters. Did you find writing this novel an emotive process? Did you find it difficult in that sense? Or are you the kind of writer who can very quickly compartmentalize projects, who can say, “This is done now, let’s move on”?
Graeme Macrae Burnet: When I was writing these books, they were planned as a trilogy, so I knew this was the last one. I became more and more fond of Gorski over the process of writing them. I really like Gorski as a human being, a fictional human being. So yeah, there was an emotional feeling of leaving Gorski behind, and also the town. I became more and more fond of the town, although I’m very rude about it in the books, partly because I’m writing under the persona of Raymond Brunet, a guy who is trapped there and feels it to be tremendously constrictive. I enjoyed my visits to Saint-Louis and wandering around the streets and feeling like a very weird outsider there, because why would you be there? Taking photographs of the most mundane buildings, checking the street names, and being in very innocuous places. I always feel there’s the opportunity to go back to Saint-Louis, and I would hope at some point I’ll go back. I’ve visited the lycée there twice and spoken to students about the books. So yeah, there was definitely a feeling of emotional ending, a bit like ending a relationship, but not in a bitter way, it’s just time to move on. And it is time to move on for me as a writer.
To answer the second part of your question, about whether I quickly move on once a project’s finished: Yeah, I move on mentally very quickly to the next project, and I start reading around that, doing whatever research is necessary. The strange thing is, of course, that somewhat later the book I’ve just been working on is published. Then you have to go back mentally to the space—in this case A Case of Matricide—and start talking about it again. When actually, once you’ve finished, once you’ve gone through the editing process and all the business with the publication, you don’t want to think about it, because you always remember the little flaws and things you wish you’d changed. You’ve just got to set it aside and move on. So yes, I move on pretty quickly in that sense.
Do you find interviews like this difficult, then—having to talk about something you have mentally moved on from? Is it difficult to transport yourself to that previous mindset?
I always feel very fortunate when somebody like yourself wants to do an interview, because there are so many books out there, so many authors. It’s not about craving attention for yourself. All these things help to spread the word about your books. I’ve been a bookseller, and I know how important the role of bookshops and booksellers are in the way I buy books, and in how people buy books. My biggest book is still His Bloody Project, which will be ten years old this year, and last year I talked about it in a BBC Radio 4 book club. That’s a bit more challenging because I wrote that book eleven or twelve years ago, and people ask you about the research you did for it. You’re not always on top of the technical detail. But again, it’s always a pleasure when people want to talk about a book that you wrote.
You mentioned how you tell this story, and several of your other stories, in the guise of another author. Do you feel that when you assume a pseudonym, when you say this narrative is somebody else’s work, that it puts an extra level of distance between you and your reader? All authors can create a mask, but you very explicitly create another level.
There is a metafictional structure around these books, which have purportedly been written by Raymond Brunet, a dead French author. I think once a reader is engaged with the novel itself they probably pretty much forget about that structure. It’s like when you watch an old noir film and it goes into a long flashback. Very quickly, you forget that you’re in a flashback. In terms of it creating a distance between me and the reader, this is in a sense deliberate. Even in the first book there’s a short biography of Raymond Brunet at the back. I’m encouraging readers to interpret the events of the book in relation to events in Brunet’s life, and the second two books deal directly with such events. So I’m playing with the idea of the death of the author and, to some extent, playing with how we interpret text in relation to the life of the author. Which is something I find quite tiresome, not in relation to me and my own work, but as a reader and as a previous student of literature. As a student I wasn’t interested in the life of the author, and I’m not interested in the author’s intentions. I’m interested in my engagement with the text and what meaning it may or may not have for me. I’m very Barthesian in that sense. The Raymond Brunet device plays with all that, but it also kind of liberated me, allowing me to be very rude about Saint-Louis. As an outsider to that town, I write that somebody or anybody who lives there is a loser, and that the place is completely unexceptional. I may feel kind of bad about writing it, but I felt obliged to do it because this is how Brunet feels at the time. Especially with the last two books, I was very consciously writing Raymond Brunet’s books.
That’s fascinating. You know what you want as a reader—you can go in and are able to shape your own textyet you are still aware of other reader’s expectations and their reading process. Keeping all that clear in your head must be interesting.
I get asked about metafiction all the time, and it’s my fault because I put it in the book. What I think of as real novelistic stuff is character, story, and setting—and, hopefully, half decent prose. So although I enjoy the metafictional devices, and I hope they add another layer to the books, I’m not really thinking that much about it.
But then, as you say, you still put it in the books, and you’ve previously talked about your inspirations from other metafictional writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The thing is that this approach was all very normal in the nineteenth century. Every nineteenth-century novel you open begins with “I found this casket of letters underneath my mother’s bed after her demise, and I will now present the material contained therein.” Different people narrating different parts of the story: It’s completely every day in the nineteenth century novel, and I do it in His Bloody Project. You find the device of having different narrators in Wilkie Collins. If you read The Moonstone, each part is narrated by a different character, and as we get the narration of each subsequent character we come to doubt the truth of what we may have been told before. It is a tremendously interesting thing that is going on in The Moonstone.
That’s a really good point. It is very much a trope, a common structural device in a lot of nineteenth-century literature, not just within genre fiction but across the board. I want to talk more about genre. Do you do you view A Case of Matricide as a crime novel, the series as a crime series?
I do. I think they are all crime novels. I just think they’re not entirely typical crime novels. I don’t think of my other books outside this series as crime novels at all, even His Bloody Project, which is about crime, much more so than any of the Gorski books. I see the Gorski books as using the structure and conventions of crime fiction. Without necessarily having analyzed it, we understand the conventions of the crime genre as readers, or as viewers of films. We understand that if there’s a crime, there will be a person acting as our surrogate in the narrative who investigates on our behalf, and by the end we will have gone from a point of not knowing something to knowing something: You know who did it, and you get the answers to the mystery. So I know that there is an expectation from readers. I play with that expectation, though, to the point where I very clearly don’t deliver the normal denouement. But I think perhaps some readers find that a bit annoying; they want the crime novel they’re reading to deliver on their expectations. But I’m deliberately not doing that. I’m much more concerned with character than I am with crime: with the impact of the events—the crime, if you want—on the characters, rather than the crime itself.
That makes sense. I wanted to ask you about the sense of fatalism I get from reading A Case of Matricide. Without spoiling too much, a big part of Gorski’s character is how he doesn’t want to be like his predecessor as Chief of Police. He doesn’t quite get his wish.
At the beginning of the series, Gorski defines himself in opposition to the former Chief of Police in Saint-Louis, Inspector Ribéry. He doesn’t take part in the sort of petty corruption that Ribéry would have taken part in. Ribéry would pin a crime on somebody because he doesn’t like the look of them, whereas Gorski makes following proper procedure, and not eliminating any possibility without evidence, his credo. But slowly, and as a human being, Gorski slips into the habits of Ribéry. He has lunch every day in the same restaurant, Restaurant de la Cloche, in fact sitting at the same table Ribéry did. Ribéry spent his afternoons drifting around the bars of Saint-Louis, and that’s pretty much what Gorski does as well by the end of the story. So despite his rebellion, Gorski has almost become Ribéry. It’s funny that it never struck me before, but the other parallel—Gorski’s real struggle, and the reason he thinks he became a cop—is, of course, his father. In this book we find Gorski back at home living with his aging mother in his childhood apartment. His mother, suffering from some kind of mental difficulties, constantly calls Gorski by his father’s name. There are other aspects in which we find Gorski has singularly failed to differentiate himself from his father. He very much returns to his father’s place. So it’s interesting that you mention this pattern.
What does that mean for characters’ agency in this trilogy? When you finish a crime novel, there is that classic feeling that it couldn’t have gone any other way. Is Gorski sliding into these patterns inevitable, unavoidable, just the nature of human character?
It’s a brilliant question, and it’s the key question of all my books, I think. I don’t do it deliberately, but there’s this question for Gorski as to what extent does he have agency over his own life? As a younger man, he feels he is becoming somebody. He’s appointed chief of police; he marries above his station; he finds himself rising in Saint-Louis society. But as we’ve discussed he then finds himself thinking and living backwards. As a reader, the thing that fires me is twentieth-century existential fiction, and the Sartrean idea of “We are all condemned to be free.” With freedom comes a sort of responsibility and weight and angst, because being free is pretty troublesome. There is this big dialogue between the idea that we exercise free choice over our lives and another strand that runs through all the books in the trilogy, especially in A Case of Matricide.
There are various references to the work of Émile Zola, specifically his great novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart, which set out to show that nobody can transcend their heredity or the social circumstances of their life. In every Zola novel, somebody strives to transcend their background, but gets drawn, sucked, inevitably back into the sort of bog from which they emerged. Gorski’s father’s favorite novels are the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, which he read and re-read every year. So I’m pointing to these ideas. Zola, of course, is the great anti-existentialist before the word was born. He’s a determinist, so this overarching dialogue is between a sort of existential idea of free will and Zola-esque determinism. I think from the way the novel ends that it’s more Zola-esque than Sartrean. [Laughs] That’s the most intellectual thing I’ve ever said.
No, no, it’s very impressive. Let’s bring it back down to Earth, then. You talk about how much your experience as a reader informs your writing. Are you reading anything good at the moment?
I recently came across a book which absolutely blew my mind: Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes. It’s been published in English for the first time; I think it was written in 1953. It’s a masterpiece. It’s a domestic novel about a housewife in postwar Rome, and her relationship with her children and father. I will read everything else of hers that is published in English. When I was writing A Case of Matricide, I read four or five Zola novels. I haven’t read the entire Les Rougon-Macquart, but as I said I like to immerse myself in them. There are little scenes in A Case of Matricide that were inspired by Zola, but that’s a kind of private pleasure for me. For example, there’s this three-page description of the social stratification of Saint-Louis, and it was very much inspired by reading an early Zola novel, The Fortune of the Rougons, which is set in a small town, and Zola describes the social classes.
I’ve also been rereading the Beckett trilogy, which I first read as a student. I had what can only be described as a literary crush on Samuel Beckett. I just adored Beckett, not just his work, but the idea of Beckett: this craggy old Irish guy sitting in cafes in Paris. It was everything that I thought a writer should be at that time. The Beckett trilogy is an extremely challenging piece of work to read. I’m impressed with my younger self, that I read it back then, and I think I’m almost less able to read it now, to meet the level of concentration required. I’m not a great reader of audio books, but I am listening to an Irish actor read Molloy, the first part of the trilogy. It’s absolutely stupendous because you feel like you’re in a theatre listening to a play without pictures, and he brings it to life in a way that I can’t quite do as a reader myself. That’s been a really amazing experience for me, revisiting a text I read thirty years ago but in a very different way. I’m in the middle of Malone Dies at the moment. Have you read it?
I started it in my undergrad, and I just remember it getting more and more impenetrable as you go along. I feel that Beckett is always writing with half an eye on performance and dramatization, even in the novel form, so using an audio book really makes sense. I see a lot of my students getting to grips with texts by using audio books as a companion piece, but also to enrich the original reading experience.
That’s exactly what it’s done for me in this case. I’m really getting the actor’s interpretation of the text. Molloy is laugh out loud funny. I think I’d missed that the first time around.
Fantastic. Just to round up, can I ask what you’re working on at the moment?
I’m working on a novella for The Darkland Tales, a series including Rizzio [by Denise Mina], Queen Macbeth [by Val McDermid], and Columba’s Bones [by David Greig]. It’s called Benbecula, and is based on an almost completely forgotten case I actually came across when doing my research for His Bloody Project. In 1857 a twenty-five-year-old crofter killed three members of his own family. The book will almost function as a companion piece to His Bloody Project. One of the many interesting things to me is how, whilst His Bloody Project was a documentary-style presentation of a fictional case, this is a fictionalized narration of a true case.
So you turn your original approach on its head. That sounds really exciting for you; you almost get to play with your own skillset as a writer.
Yes, I do. I actually went to Benbecula [the Scottish island on which the novella is set]. I just wanted to be in the landscape. I used (you will love this) a hand-drawn map from the archives, and went looking for the ruins of the house where the murders took place. I genuinely believe I found it.
You are Indiana Jones crossed with every literary academic’s dream. I love it.
Benjamin Parris is a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews, whose research focuses on crime fiction. He is also a bookseller.
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