Never Forget

By Martin Michaud, 2014, trans. 2020

Martin Michaud tries too hard and accomplishes too little in this police thriller. It’s disappointing because I wanted to enjoy it. It’s set in Montreal and evokes many details of the city in a realistic way. It touches on contemporary issues, such as the corrosive effects of the repression of the Quebec independentist movement, political corruption and continuing interference by the RCMP. It even has an insider’s view of realistic police work. I would have been happy if it had handled any of these with reasonably plausible characters.

Instead, Michaud tries to hook readers with tortuous murders depicted from the victim’s point of view, and bizarre plot points like the bow and arrow shooting in a Montreal cemetery or the CIA’s brainwashing experiments carried out in Montreal in order to avoid legal scrutiny. This is catchy plotting that draws the action from high point to high point, as if following the advice in a manual for successful detective thrillers, but it feels artificial and manipulative.

Worse, Michaud creates thinly drawn characters who over-react to everything in their lives. With characters of greater depth, I might have been drawn into the rest of the story, which has its intrigue. But it seems that each of the central characters has one quirk that becomes a defining feature. The lead detective is dealing (badly) with a fatal error from his past and its repercussions in his personal and professional life. His partner is a junk food junkie. Another detective is gnomic while the chief is supportive as he struggles with his wife’s cancer. These could be colourful details if there were more to the characters, but there isn’t. The characters are uniformly flat cartoons.

Apparently, Michaud is a popular writer in Quebec and perhaps his characters have more depth in their original language. I can imagine that they may well have lost something in translation, particularly as a lot of the characterization comes from the dialogue. The plot conforms to the genre conventions, and Michaud has won fiction awards in both French and English. So perhaps I’d concede that personal taste is a factor here – except that those characters (in translation) just don’t have the substance of, say, a well-crafted English police drama. (Is it fair to compare a translated novel to a well written English drama? Perhaps not.)

Maybe I just don’t appreciate the modern detective genre, but it seems to me that the mid-century novels of Phillip Marlow or Dashiell Hammett are just better written, even with their exaggerated language and convoluted plots. And the genre fiction of John Le Carré never leaves me thinking that the characters are flat cartoons, even when they are predictable types from his repertoire. Ultimately, I’m just not drawn to spend any more time with Michaud’s characters, even if there are aspects of his novels that are intriguing.