Title: The Green Muse: An Edouard Mas Novel
Author: Jessie Prichard Hunter
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Historical
Release
Date: February 3, 2015
Publisher: Witness Impulse an imprint of HarperCollins
~Synopsis~
In Belle Époque Paris, the morgue is the place to see and be seen …
"This morning I was called upon to photograph the dead again." So begins the story of Edouard Mas, a photographer's assistant with a detective's soul. Edouard's job is to take pictures of corpses before they are carted off to the Paris Morgue. If the bodies are unidentified, they will be put behind glass for the whole city to view, in a morbid display of lost and found.
Edouard begins to come across more and more bodies stripped of their identification and laid out in methodical poses, and he knows he is dealing with those who dabble in art—the art of death. The morgue—their museum.
Edouard's investigation takes him from the sterile halls of La Salpêtrière to the opulent, smoke-filled soirees of high society, but he must do everything in his power to stop the artists of death, before they go after somebody he loves …
In exquisite prose—so vivid you can almost taste the absinthe and hear the rustling skirts of the Moulin Rouge showgirls—Hunter tells an unforgettable tale of murder and lust in the City of Light.
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Review by Jeanne Obsessive Pimpette
I received this arc through Obsessive Pimpettes for an honest review. I don't like to give the story away, so don't expect a revelation of the ending from me! The Green Muse Is a story that intricately entwines the lives of people from different walks of life. The characters are well rounded, at times with almost a little too much detail. Edouard, a photographer of the deceased at crime scenes, Augustine, the innocent country girl that seeks a better life in Paris; V & Charles, who morbidly enjoy watching the unclaimed deceased on display in the Paris morgue. It's quite a vivid tale of murder & mystery, a must read if this is the genre you enjoy!
This morning I was called
upon to photograph the dead again.
The messenger boy came at
five-thirty. His name is Martin. I gave him a few sous: Martin works hard for
his sous, running errands all over Paris for the Prefecture of Police.
I sent the lad off and
packed up my camera and plates; I took the omnibus to the rue Mazarine, in the Ninth Arrondissement.
The building, number 21, proved to be a dreary four-story tenement. Police Captain
Bezier was there; he led me around to the back courtyard. The morning sky with
its huge racing clouds seemed far away. The windows no longer went up in
straight lines but listed as though the whole building were a rocking ship.
There was an empty wheelbarrow; there was a tunnel leading to the front of the
building; there were two dirty awnings; there was offal on the ground.
Of course a crime scene
cannot be photographed at night, but the dead can wait till morning. It is all
the same to them. I change nothing, other than to cover a naked body. We must
preserve the setting quite exactly as we find it but a sheet disturbs nothing,
and I cannot bear that the dead be subjected to indignity.
Capt. Bezier motioned me to
a patch of darkness under one of the awnings. Night had not left it yet. A
woman lay there.
I checked the camera’s
register to see if the magazine was full: eighteen plates. It was just a habit,
a necessary part of the ritual; I have never gone out on a job with an unloaded
camera. The night before, I had treated cotton papers with albumen and sodium
chloride, dried them, and dipped them in a solution part silver nitrate, part
water, to render the paper sensitive; I had again dried the paper, then fixed
it carefully against the glass plates that it might be ready for my camera when
I awoke. There is always a stack of newly treated plates in my darkroom, as I
never know when I may be called upon. I am naturally in need of but little
sleep; sometimes I think that the city wakes me early, like a lover, because
she knows that there is so much each day to be seen and experienced together.
And sometimes I awaken so refreshed, so eager, that I almost feel I might
indeed have been kissed awake by this city I love so much.
But now I readied myself to
kneel in foul semidarkness and see the unbearable.
“Have you questioned the
tenants?” I asked the captain.
“No,” said Capt. Bezier. “There
will be time for that. It’s not likely to be someone from the building, anyway.
Why leave her here to be found?”
The captain is something of
an ass.
I ran my right hand up and
down the pebble-grained leather of the side of my camera box, once, as I raised
it to my eye: another facet of the ritual. I walked around the body, looking at
the corpse through my lens. Through the round aperture,everything recedes
except sight, and you are alone with the image before you.
And yet the image is made
distant, merely a collection of lines and angles of light. This distance is
necessary if I am not to be overwhelmed by pity, anger, and disgust. For my
day-to-day existence I work part-time in a fashionable studio where tintypes
are turned out as though they were loaves of bread. I also make sentimental
portraits of those who die in their beds, either peacefully or after long
illnesses. Sometimes I photograph them before they die, that the family might
having a living subject for their memento instead of a dead one. For the police
I record the scenes of murders. Sometimes, if the victim is unknown or well-known,
my photographs are put up on flyers all over the city. More commonly they are
filed with the police and used later, as a tool to incriminate the murderer.
I stooped to capture the
image before me.
The woman was young; she was
lying on her back with her hands folded over her heart, and her head was turned
away from my camera. She was wearing a black bolero jacket and a sky-blue silk
waist; her skirt was dove-gray. Her shoes were of leather too soft for these
streets. It is difficult not to put a story to the posture, clothing, and
obvious social standing of the dead: This woman did not belong here.
I took a shot; then I lifted
the back of the camera and held it at the proper angle to let the exposed slide
drop down from the magazine so that the next slide would be before the lens. I
do not always like my job. The simple, mechanical tasks associated with it
soothe me and enable me to maintain both composure and a seeming objectivity in
even the most hideous of circumstances. I moved slowly around the side of the
body. The woman’s hair was loosed from its pins and flowed in a yellow cascade
across the dirty ground. There was blood in it.
“The identity of the victim
gives us the identity of the killer,” Capt.
Bezier said. He said
that every time.
There was blood on her
dress, on her folded hands. I did not want to see her face. I knelt by her side
and focused my lens on her neck, which had been severed. The blood there was
dull and clotted, and the wound looked like nothing more than a cut of meat.
“—not a gentlewoman,” Capt.
Bezier was saying. “A midinette, a shopgirl. A night of drinking, an argument
with her boyfriend. It is always the same story.”
My hand trembled, but I kept
my silence. Her long, curved fingers were not marred by the stings of the
sewing needle or the calluses of the shopkeeper. She was not as thin as the
midinettes, who have only a snack instead of a full midi lunch. She was not a
member of the upper classes, that much was clear by her manner of dress and by
the short lavender glove I noticed beneath her left hip and pointed out to the
captain. Ladies of the upper classes wear gloves that reach to the elbow and
are almost always of white kid.
I prepared myself to see her
face. Her dress was neither rich nor poor; perhaps she could afford a maid, and
that is why her hands were unmarred; perhaps she had children at home even now.
Capt. Bezier picked up the
glove and spanked it against his thigh to dust it off.
“Very fashionable,” he said
shortly. He brings his prejudices to his job. He does not approve of
fashionable women unless they are of the upper classes; he will make
assumptions about their morals from the cut of their gloves.
I stepped around the blood
that had gathered at her neck. She had not been dead when her killer brought
her here. I knelt again. I moved her hair away from her face. She had been
beautiful in life; she was not beautiful in death. Her features were very fine,
indicating a lively temperament; her forehead high and white, a sign of firm
yet maidenly intelligence; the space between her nose and mouth was somewhat
large, and the dint was so faint as to be nonexistent—the —angels had not
touched her there with their fingers that she forget heaven—what —visions had
she had while she was alive? She did not look as though she were seeing heaven
now. Her eyes were wide with evident horror, her mouth contorted with fear. But
from behind my lens I was reassured. Her agony was spurious, nothing more than
the effects of rigor mortis. It was death that had contorted her pretty
features into a grotesque mask. There was no way to tell what had been on her
face at the moment of her death—fear, —resignation, fury? In a few more hours
her hands, which lay so prayerlike now, would be trying to claw their way into
her heart. And within less than thirty-six hours all of these effects would
soften and disappear, leaving her once again unembattled.
I stroked my beard, which is
gingery and sharpens to a point in my hand. With my goatee and mustache I look
like any young man of my station, although perhaps somewhat more fair. I have a
photographer’s eye, made more noticeable for being exceedingly pale blue: I
must be careful not to appear always to stare. My features are quite regular,
which would seem to indicate a moderate, even modest, temperament. There is no
indication of the passion I feel for my work.
Capt. Bezier had gone over
the body and found no identification, and surely a woman dressed as she was did
not live in this sordid tenement.
“We will begin questioning
the tenants shortly,” he said.
No one will have seen or
heard anything. No one ever does.
Why here? I wondered as I dropped the
second-to-last slide into the tray. Perhaps the courtyard was a piece of the
puzzle. Perhaps not. I stepped back to take in the entire scene: the awning,
the piles of dirty clothing and human waste lying behind the body, the body
itself, which seems to float in the early morning light.
“Thank you, Edouard,” said
the captain. “I do not know what we would do without your work. The state of
the body at death is often what turns the jury toward conviction. And, of
course, we will pass the photographs out among the various police precincts, to
see if any of our contacts recognize the lady.”
“They will not recognize
her,” I said, closing my camera with a satisfying click.
“And why not, Edouard?”
Capt. Bezier thinks I overstep my bounds. I do although all I do is tell him
what my camera shows.
“Because your contacts are
all among the criminal class, and I would be surprised if this unfortunate
young woman had any such connections.”
“Ah, Edouard, you are such a
sentimental young man! A becoming figure, an abundance of pretty hair, and you
cannot believe that a woman could have contact with my criminals! It is a good
thing you are not a detective, young man—you —are far too idealistic. This
woman could be a whore, have you thought of that?”
“She is not dressed as well
as a whore,” I said shortly, then turned and busied myself with my equipment.
The entire equation was there in the foul-smelling tenement courtyard on that
drab spring morning, although I did not yet know the answer.
None of them can speak. I am
their voice.
You will no doubt see them in
the Morgue. But they do not tell their stories there, as they tell them to my
camera. In the Morgue the world sees only their empty husks. The dandies of
Paris who go to see the latest morsel of flesh are dupes to their own desire. The
dead show their secrets to me. They show nothing to the crowds: Even most of
death agonies have faded and altered by the time the bodies are transported.
The slightest movement displaces the original expression of death. I wish it
softened it. Sometimes I think of the one among the dandies and curiosity
seekers who may sincerely be looking for a lost loved one, and both fears and
hopes to find her at the Morgue. Of the one who stands waiting his turn on the
queue, not wanting to see, cursing sight that it can bring him to this. It is
my job to look at things no one else wants to. But I cannot not touch the
bodies. I have been asked, as I pack away my photographic equipment, if I would
be willing to lend a hand; and I’ve been curt in my refusal. I could not
violate these corpses that so lately were animate souls, I cannot move limbs
that have no more volition, cannot support a head or back, that the body be
taken where no living person ever lies.
“Captain Bezier, this young woman was not yet dead when she
was laid here. And yet there is a trail of blood, so she must have been wounded
elsewhere and killed here.” My voice was flat, as though I did not care. I
cared. She was evidently”—I wanted to say, obviously—“brought here from another location. If I were you, I
would look toward the tenements within a quarter-mile radius. Perhaps she was
on her way home late, after dinner with friends. She should not have been
walking alone after dark, but perhaps she felt herself emancipated, and not in
need
of an escort. Perhaps she found the wrong sort of escort. But I will tell you
this: that she was left with her hands thus folded at her breast indicates a
reverence for life or for death.”
“Oh, Edouard, you are such a
fool!” Capt. Bezier said complacently. “Always I have to hear your theories. It
is true that you have sometimes been right in the past. But you let your poetic
imagination rule your intelligence. Leave police work to the police, young
man.”
He would, of course, take
careful heed of what I had I said. But he would take blustery credit, too, for
any information he gleaned from me.
“I am done here,” I said
brusquely. I was not irritated by Capt. Bezier, any more than I was
intimidated. But I was done with the dead. High above the listing tenement the
wide sky of Paris awaited, the day awaited, and I was hungry for the day. I
glanced once more toward the young woman who had not seen this day come. And
turned away. Later, in the quiet of the darkroom, I would see her again.
And she would tell me her story.
About the Author
Jessie Prichard Hunter is the author of the psychological thriller
Blood Music, forthcoming from Witness Impulse. She currently resides in New York's Hudson Valley with her husband and two children.
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Derrick West spends winters on his sailboat in Florida, and summers at his cabin in the northern Rockies. He grew up in the Midwest, graduating from a large university there before embarking on an adventurer’s lifestyle working as a smokejumper, river guide, and mountaineer. He writes as an outlet for the innate sense of romance he believes lies within all of us.
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