Nicolas Freeling: The Village Book (2002)

From the Publisher:
Nicolas Freeling has spent much of his adult life in Europe, achieving success first as a chef and later as a celebrated novelist. The Kitchen Book was the author's picture of his grand hotel years, which were essential to his life. The Village Book covers more than one writer's life, however; it also examines the history of one peculiar part of Europe. France meets Germany in the pivotal town of Strasbourg; Grandfontaine, the village outside it, is where Nicolas Freeling has made his home for many years. Here the creator of the ever-popular detectives Van der Valk and Castang explores his family's past while unearthing the history of his village and its context in the region, and in the new Europe being created today.

Nicolas Freeling is the author of 35 highly-acclaimed crime novels including, most recently, The Janeites, Some Day Tomorrow, and Because of the Cats, all published by Arcadia. He is the winner of the Golden Dagger Award from the Crime Writers' Association, the Grand Prix de Roman Policier and the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America.

'Freeling is the only British novelist of consequence to have tackled modern Europe. I have no doubt this expatriate Englishman joins Graham Greene and George V. Higgins as the great crime writers of the mid and late years of our century' -- Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph

'Here is an author who is as much concerned with the impulses and motives of the human heart as he is with the details of detection. The combination of elegant style and the continually interesting narrative give his novels their special flavour' -- P.D. James

'The mantle of Simenon seems to have been inherited by Nicolas Freeling. His Inspector Van der Valk - less rugged than Rebus, less parsonical than Dalgliesh, more Morse than Frost, and more Maigret than any of them - has become known as a placid but shrewd Dutch bourgeois with an interesting wife; at some point in the 1970s he metamorphosed into Inspector Henri Castang. Marvellous' -- Anita Brookner, Spectator

'Freeling's whimsical and atmospheric style is here in force, along with his personal asides on the trivia of our existence... a rather special book' -- Patricia Highsmith

Design: Discript
Front cover photo: © Freeling

Nicolas Freeling: The Village Book. Arcadia Books, ISBN: 190085063X (August, 2001), 220 p., £11.99, $14.95.