Call me unconscious. Just in case I had few books, I gifted myself three books by Sébastien Japrisot:
The Sleeping Car Murders (Compartiment tueurs);
Trap for Cinderella (Piège pour Cendrillon);
and Rider on the Rain (Le Passager de la pluie).
If the name Sébastien Japrisot doesn’t ring a bell, you can find the following information on Wikipedia:
Sébastien Japrisot (4 July 1931 – 4 March 2003) was a French author, screenwriter and film director. His pseudonym was an anagram of Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name. Renowned for subverting the rules of the crime genre, Japrisot broke down the established formulas “into their component pieces to re-combine them in original and paradoxical ways.” Some critics argue that though Japrisot’s work may lack the explicit experimental element present in the novels of some of his contemporaries, it shows influences of structuralist theories and the unorthodox techniques of the New Novelists. He remains little known in the English-speaking world, though all his novels have been translated into English and all but one of them have been made into films.
Bibliography: The 10.30 from Marseilles (1963) aka The Sleeping Car Murders; Trap for Cinderella (1964); The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1967); Goodbye, Friend (1969); One Deadly Summer (1980); Women in Evidence (1990) aka The Passion of Women; A Very Long Engagement (1993); and Rider on the Rain (1999).
I’m looking forward to reading The Sleeping Car Murders. Stay tuned.
Description
When the night train pulled into Paris, she was dead. And the riddle began . . .
A beautiful young woman lies sprawled on her berth in the sleeping car of the night train from Marseille to Paris. She is not in the embrace of sleep, or even in the arms of one of her many lovers. She is dead. And the unpleasant task of finding her killer is handed to overworked, crime-weary police detective Pierre ‘Grazzi’ Grazziano, who would rather play hide-and-seek with his little son than cat and mouse with a diabolically cunning, savage murderer.
Sébastien Japrisot takes the reader on an express ride of riveting suspense that races through a Parisian landscape of lust, deception and death. With corpses turning up everywhere, the question becomes not only who is the killer, but who will be the next victim . . . (Belgravia Books)
A Crime is Afoot 