Pel and the Party Spirit - Hardcover

Hebden, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312054912 ISBN 13: 9780312054915

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1991

Synopsis

Two corpses and a large shipment of drugs from Marseille disrupt Inspector Pel's quiet day, leading him to the town of Puyceldome on the night of its wild 730th anniversary to hunt his quarry

About this title

About the Author

John Harris, who also wrote under the pen names of 'Mark Hebden' and 'Max Hennessy', was born in 1916. He authored the best-selling and later filmed 'The Sea Shall Not Have Them', a story of survival and rescue from World War II which continues to be periodically screened on TV. He was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher. During the War Harris managed to serve with two air forces and two navies. After turning to full-time writing, he wrote adventure stories, war novels, political thrillers, and also created a sequence of crime novels around the quirky French Chief Inspector Pel, centred primarily in Burgundy, but occasionally Paris and elsewhere. Harris was unusually versatile and wide ranging as an author. Epics such as 'China Seas', which deals with human tragedy, war and revolution in an authentic historical setting, and the three trilogies written under the pseudonym Max Hennessy - one of which, the Kelly Maguire series commencing with 'Lion at Sea' is reckoned to be amongst the finest modern war-at-sea stories written - along with African adventure novels, wide-ranging crime, mysteries and historical fiction, all guarantee a whole library of diverse and entertaining reading full of dry wit and gripping prose.

From Publishers Weekly

The police procedurals following Chief Inspector Evariste Clovis Desire Pel as he pursues the criminals of Burgundy are unusually fine in their illumination of modern French character and mores. Last seen in Pel and the Picture of Innocence , Pel and his men here suffer the August blues while the rest of France, it seems, is on vacation, when a 30-year-old corpse is discovered in a tower in the ancient town of Puyceldome, which is preparing to draw tourists to its 730th anniversary festivities. At the same time, a motorist is found stabbed to death in the woods near a highway. The body in the tower is linked to a shipment of gold coins missing since an attempted coup against De Gaulle; the motorist may have been killed by two teenaged girls armed with butcher knives. As the investigations continue, a policeman is killed and a young girl kidnapped, and the threads of all the cases draw Pel back to Puyceldome in the midst of its celebration. In Pel and his men, Hebden has created a likable lot, in each volume revealing a little more about their private lives and the politics of provincial France.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0312054912
• ISBN 13: 9780312054915
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1