Dead Behind the Eyes locations in Tours

Submitted: 18th September 2024

Dead Behind the Eyes – Tours

I love a city. Big cities for sure, London, Paris, New York – the perfume trail I call it. But size doesn’t really matter. A great city must have a number of faces, show its different moods, wear its history with pride and hide darker, hazardous recesses where the pulse quickens.

Locations in Dead Behind the Eyes

Pl. Plumereau, Tours

Locations in Dead Behind the Eyes

Tours, in the Loire Valley in France, has all of that in spades and so was the natural choice as the main setting for my Juge Lombard crime novels. It’s more than a setting though. The French word for setting is ‘cadre’, the same word they use for picture frame. I like that linguistic coincidence; a decent picture frame sets off a painting, elevates it, complements it. Tours then is more than a setting, it’s a character and a personality in its own right; it’s inhabitants, from the residue of aristocracy through to the dogs-on-strings squatters via students, fashionistas and that curiously French creature, the conservative bohemian, Tours has them.

Locations in Dead Behind the Eyes

If I make it sound like a place with an identity crisis, then that’s what I want from one of my principal characters. I want it to doubt itself one minute and project a confidence the next, one minute hormonally adolescent, the next wise old sage. Tours occupies an almost unique place in France and its history. It’s the former medieval capital of France, the site of a Europe-defining battle in the tenth century, home to saints and pilgrims and the playground of monarchical excess.

Ian-Moore

Locations in Dead Behind the Eyes

Its background in the arts, food, viticulture and architecture in what is essentially a quite small place, make it a powerhouse. A powerhouse and location that attracts: JMW Turner painted on the riverbanks, the former Plantagenet kingdom surrounds it, François Rabelais was born in the Touraine, the US Army corps was based here, Leonardo Da Vinci died down the road, Fritz the elephant ran amok in 1906 and Joan of Arc had her armour panel beaten in the rue Colbert. Tours is the modern underdog that punches above its weight, while its history allows it to look down its nose at lesser places.

Locations in Dead Behind the Eyes

I wanted my main character, Juge d’instruction Matthieu Lombard to reflect all of these qualities. Honoré de Balzac, also born in Tours, wrote that the Juge d’instruction was ‘the most powerful man in the world.’ Like the fabled, all-powerful district attorneys in the US, the French Juge d’instruction is above the police. The juge is their guiding hand, directing their investigations and deciding on the truth from the evidence they present. Usually the juge does this from the sterile, dusty and intimidating offices of the Le Palais de Justice, but Matthieu Lombard is not your usual Juge.

Le Palais de Justice

Locations in Dead Behind the Eyes

Not that he always carries himself with that kind of confidence, however. Tours maybe the place he has lived for most of his life, but by virtue of being half-English, he’s the outsider. The French don’t completely trust him, and nor do the English expats, of which there are many. None of which mattered while his wife Madeleine was alive, but she has been dead only a year when he is blackmailed back into work. Dead Behind the Eyes is his second investigation since his return and it takes him from the rich, protected, gated chateaux to the squats and the no-go estates still licking their wounds from violent riots. All of Tours, the good and the bad if you like, though which is which is the question he must answer.

Old Tours

Lombard is my physical representation of the city itself. He’s a sensitive intellect at a crossroads. Consumed with great memories and passions, but uncertain of his place in the modern, real world. Lombard is to Tours as Morse is to Oxford, Marple to St Mary Mead, Brunetti to Venice, could one even exist without the other? I go to Tours at least once a week, sit at Lombard’s favourite bar, and ask myself that exact question.

Thanks so much Ian!