The Lost Son

London. Leonard Spitz is thirty years old and missing. Mrs Spitz is a worried mother, Mr Spitz a resigned father, and their daughter Deborah as proud as her looks and as cold as the family's money. All reckon the missing man has succumbed to his fondness for drugs again. Only, Xavier Lombard finds out that before vanishing Leonard had got involved with people who get up in the morning to peddle children for a living. Meanwhile, Bill the pet shop owner gets himself a puppy for company, Perkins the butcher-landlord has to raise his rent, and three bored Los Angeles teenage girls kill time in a children's playground. And on Hampstead Heath, a little man with a cell-phone and a pony-tail finds life really hard trying to shoot a movie scene... This first novel by Eric Leclere, is the first Xavier Lombard story. It was turned into a movie starring Daniel Auteuil and Nastassja Kinski in 1999.

‘Here we go again,’ said Deborah De Moraes; ‘Simplify and damn.’
‘Don’t you believe in simplicity,’ asked Lombard.
‘Should I?’
‘We all have to like what we become, Mrs. De Moraes. Cowards included. We achieve this by complicating things a little. But it’s never that complicated really,’ replied Lombard.
‘Huh!’

This first novel by Eric Leclere may be a crime novel, it may be a private detective story, it may also have a gripping plot which keeps you hooked and a central character, Xavier Lombard, who is firmly in the old-fashioned hero mold and with whom, once acquainted, you very much want to remain intimate. But as so often with the best crime novels, it attains what so many literary novels fail to achieve - those dark poetic moments, both frightening and uplifting, that cause the chest to constrict around the heart and induce a strange sense of pride in being human. Although a £6m movie based on Leclere's original screenplay and starring Daniel Auteuil and Nastassja Kinski was released around the same time as the book, there was no mention of the film anywhere on the book. For reasons that would take too long to go into, Leclere refused to endorse the movie in any way whatsoever, considering it a gross misrepresentation of his original work. As Anne Billson put it in her Sunday Telegraph review of the film : "Eric Leclere, who wrote the novel on which this was based, has disowned it, and you can't really blame him."

Some things they said:

"This by-the-pulses thriller by a talented new writer promises a body of work that will provide a new generation with maximum satisfaction.”
—Robert Stone (Author of Dog Soldiers, Damascus Gate)

“... A stylish and gripping first novel ... [the film is] a total waste of a great character like Lombard..."
— Cosmo Landesman (The Sunday Times)

"Raymond Chandler lives again in Eric Leclere’s hard-boiled Xavier Lombard."
— DEL HARVEY, filmmonthly.com

"Hard to put down … Absolutely compelling … The novel is a hymn to lost innocence. …"
—Julia Pascal (The Jewish Chronicle)

“Leclere fashioned Lombard into one of the more memorable crime fiction characters of late ... The Lost Son is a first rate story with Lombard the unforgettable star ... A rare find...”
—Larry Chollet (The Bergen Record - New Jersey)

“... The Lost Son is the story of French Detective Xavier Lombard ... Leclere has created in Lombard a man with the same headstrong integrity and occasional pig-headedness of Chandler’s Marlowe ... a compelling and rounded character who has you rooting for him from the word go. His investigation is filled with twists and turns which leave you begging for more...”
—Catherine Etoe (The Camden New Journal)