Image by Paul Henri Degrande from Pixabay
There's a saying in French: Les cimetières sont pleins de gens irremplaçables (Cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people). A good example of antiphrasis - using a sentence to mean the opposite of what it says. The saying was coined by Georges Clémenceau, who knew a thing or two about cemeteries - appointed Président du Conseil in 1917, he oversaw the final year of the French contribution to the First World War.
No one, of course, is irreplaceable, not even the main character of a novel. Nonetheless, I did have doubts about replacing Magali Rousseau. We've been together nigh on five years, grown to like and respect each other, and parting ways now would be a wrench for us both.
But along the path she's taken me down, I've gone about as far as I want to go. It's a dark path, a forbidding one, and there were times when I found Mystery Manor hard to write. I'm very glad that I did - even within the genre of noir, that particular theme, and the way it is handled, is uncommon. But for the moment at least, I'm not all that keen to go there again.
So Magali now has retired. The best way to retire a character completely is to kill them, but I haven't the heart to do that, not with Magali. There were enough deaths in Mystery Manor already, without adding hers. Of course, not even death is necessarily final, as Arthur Conan Doyle found out to his cost when he tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes. The fans weren't about to let him get away with that. But unless you've established the rules from the outset, the retcon device - retroactively changing part of a story you've led your readers to believe - is at best clumsy and can be infuriating. As this list of movies shows.
Though not quite irreplaceable, Magali is still there, retired but keeping her ear to the ground, ready to step in and help. It's not an abrupt departure, it's a transition, not just from Magali to her daughter-in-law, Sophie Kiesser, but from one genre to another, noir to cozy (at first I baulked at writing that with a 'z' but most of my readers are in the US, where the genre is more common than in the UK, and now I've grown used to it. Heck, I even like it).
Whether Truffle Trouble, first in the new Sophie Kiesser series, ticks all the cozy boxes is questionable. There aren't any quilts, cupcakes or cats. But there's a dog, central to the plot, and truffles of course, so I suppose it could be classed as culinary. And humour - Sophie has a good dose of that. Less gore, more jokes - I reckon that's close enough to cozy. It certainly got me off that path of darkness and into much brighter terrain.
Truffle Trouble is due for release on April 3rd. But if you're up for a little darkness in the meantime, the complete Magali Rousseau series is now available as a box set.
The Perle Quartet is available from