Die Around Sundown, by Mark Pryor

The misophonic detective.

A Paris detective in 1940, during the occupation, must find the murderer of a German SS Officer or face severe consequences, i.e. a firing squad. Die Around Sundown is a fast moving mystery during which Henri Lefort, the detective, turns over one surprise after another on his way to a stunning discovery of the identity of the perpetrator. For success, he must not only be clever but must also endure the distractions of crunching celery, fingernails tapping on a wine glass, gum chewing, and a secret from his past that haunts him.

Mark Pryor has a straightforward and engaging style that makes his stories compelling. A reader isn’t obliged to wade through bombastic prose that distracts from the tight plots from which his mysteries develop. Readers of Pryor’s Hugo Marston novels will be thrilled to learn that Die Around Sundown is as thrilling as The Bookseller and its sequels. And Pryor’s writing has evolved to a higher plane; his protagonist in Die Around Sundown, Henri Lefort, is a more complex character than Hugo Marston. Lefort has a troubled past. He has made mistakes, and is full of enough guilt and anxiety that he makes an easy candidate for a psychotherapists couch. This brings a depth to the novel that is literary, putting Pryor into the good company of writers like Joseph Kanon. Lefort is certainly a literary character commensurate with Martin Keller in Kanon’s recently published The Berlin Exchange. Readers of Die Around Sundown will remember Henri Lefort and the story’s other characters as well as they will remember the novel’s brilliantly plotted ending.

In Die Around Sundown, Pryor has further honed his skills as a master of dialogue. His characters’ interactions are never a distraction from the plot, which is so complicated as to involve murders decades apart. In a scene near the end of the story, Lefort is asked whether with respect to one crime, “ . . . you feel all right looking the other way?” And Lefort responds, “I’m

not . . . I’m looking right at it . . . I rather like the irony.” The interaction demonstrates that Lefort is a multi-dimensional character, not just a detective who judges everything as right or wrong. And it is the gateway to an observation by Lefort concerning his service in the trenches in World War I: “Ironic, then, that the moments of actual peace, of real respite, in this awful blood-soaked war would come at sundown, both sides tired of raining bombs and bullets on each other all day, grateful for that still beautiful moment when the blood stopped flowing and the only red we saw spread itself across the horizon as a signal that we managed to live a little longer.” There is a magnificent coupling of the trenches in the first world war and the German occupation in Paris in the second world war, both of them horrendous in their own ways, and a fitting basis for the novel’s title.

There are two stories in Die Around Sundown that Pryor carefully melds together. As suggested earlier, the novel contains a backstory that takes place during Lefort’s experience in the first world war. The two stories move in tandem toward two stunning outcomes, all brought together in the novel’s final pages. The imagery used by Pryor is extraordinary. He describes how the Nazi occupation of Paris had “sucked the vitality out of Paris herself, left behind like an abandoned woman – still beautiful, but sullen without that which fleshed out her spirit.” And there is a well in no man’s land between the trenches years before; Lefort observes that an “Image of gray, rotting and water-logged flesh hung in my mind like a ghastly tapestry, slowing rippling in the breeze like something alive.”

Henri Lefort has his demons, what one would expect for a man surviving such perilous times. A reader should not be surprised that Mark Pryor is an Assistant District Attorney. He has many years of experience looking into crime. Perhaps it is that career that has made him such an astute observer of the human condition. Henri is a nuanced character, highly developed from a mix of small foibles and dark regret for past actions. He knows that small occurrences annoy him. A woman’s fingernail clicking on a wine glass is for him like shards of a broken bottle poking into his brain stem. More serious are the nightmarish memories of the death of his brother. So the careful reader isn’t surprised that Henri has the perspective to see that, “Life and decency were cheapened by war, and if a group of patriots had killed a traitor, either to help France through this war or just so they could survive another day, I was able to leave it at that.” This makes him a detective who understands that in some cases a crime has a place. A reader can only hope that Henri will soon start work on his next case.

For more about Mark Pryor, visit his website at http://www.markpryorbooks.com.