Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? (USA 2024)

From the Publisher:
From an Edgar Award-winning British crime novelist, this unsettling homicide investigation features the unorthodox French detective Henri Castang.

On a sultry summer night in a French provincial city, Insp. Henri Castang is summoned from his office at the Police Judiciaire to the site of a triple murder. The killer? A husband who came home unexpectedly to discover his wife and daughter in bed with another man. A crime of passion? Perhaps. Except the murderer in question, wealthy financier Gilbert La Touche, is cool and remote. His confession is as factual and bloodless as the crime is violent and deeply disturbing. As a detective, Castang must play by the rules to protect himself. But for an unconventional cop like Castang, that is virtually impossible. After all, there's more to murder than a few corpses and a killer, and Castang will follow every twist until he gets to the heart of the evil at hand.

Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? A Henri Castang Mystery. Early Bird Books / Open Road Media, ISBN: 9781504092784 (June, 2024), 262 p., $21.99.

Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? (USA 2023)

From the Publisher:
From an Edgar Award-winning British crime novelist, this unsettling homicide investigation features the unorthodox French detective Henri Castang.

On a sultry summer night in a French provincial city, Insp. Henri Castang is summoned from his office at the Police Judiciaire to the site of a triple murder. The killer? A husband who came home unexpectedly to discover his wife and daughter in bed with another man. A crime of passion? Perhaps. Except the murderer in question, wealthy financier Gilbert La Touche, is cool and remote. His confession is as factual and bloodless as the crime is violent and deeply disturbing. As a detective, Castang must play by the rules to protect himself. But for an unconventional cop like Castang, that is virtually impossible. After all, there's more to murder than a few corpses and a killer, and Castang will follow every twist until he gets to the heart of the evil at hand.

Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? A Henri Castang Mystery. Early Bird Books / Open Road Media, ISBN: 9781504089951 (October, 2023), eBook, 3200 KB (ca. 262 p.), $14.99.

Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? (2001)

From the Publisher:
A European city, bathed in the sultry heat of a summer afternoon and a telephone call announcing a triple murder. Henri Castang is called into action in this profound and disturbing crime fiction. To protect himself, he must play by the rules but if that were the case, then it wouldn't be Henri Castang. Criminals are more than just about the chase for the unorthodox Inspector.

Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? A Henri Castang Mystery. House of Stratus, ISBN: 1842328522 (January, 2001), 234 p., £6.99, $11.50.

Nicolas Freeling: The Bugles Blowing (USA 1976)

From the Publisher:
"This book, though it begins with murders, isn't quite a sensation story or a detective story. It has its own literary distinction, and is the best exposition I know of French criminal law." -- C. P. Snow

Henri Castang was sitting in his office in the Police Judiciare. He'd been thinking about Memphis. He didn't know much about Memphis, but he wished he were there. It would make a change. It was a hot summer weekend and half the country was on holiday.

The ringing of the telephone caught him in mid-yawn.
The voice on the telephone was one used to prompt obedience. "I wish to speak to the Commissaire," the voice said.
"Not here at present, I'm afraid," said Castang, and added that he was the officer on duty.
"I require your presence," said the voice. "I am a murderer."
"Who of?" Castang asked.
"My wife. My daughter. A man."
At first Castang thought the caller was crazy. But the caller turned out to be Gilbert La Touche, a government official -- an Inspector of Finance. And he was no crazier than any other murderer. Though more important. The case reached as far as the office of the President of France, and involved Castang fully. Even his wife, Vera, could not keep from being involved in it.

There is still a death penalty for murder in France -- and Nicolas Freeling, as he draws the reader into this remarkable novel, has a lot to say about punishment and life and death, in his own inimitable manner.

For:
They have halted Danny Deever by his coffin on the ground;
And he'll swing in half a minute for a sneaking shooting hound --
O they're hanging Danny Deever in the morning!
From "A Barrack-Room Ballad," by Rudyard Kipling

Jacket design by Michele Maldeau

Nicolas Freeling: The Bugles Blowing A Harper Novel of Suspense. Harper & Row, ISBN: 0060113545 (February, 1976), 216 p., $7.95.

Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? (UK 1975)

From the Publisher:
A sultry summer afternoon in a large European city. It is French, but could as easily be Edinburgh, or Hamburg. A police officer gets a telephone call to announce a triple murder. To protect himself, he must follow the rigid rules of procedure with scrupulous exactitude... But Castang is not like most policemen : criminals and their victims are more than just his bread-and-butter...

And so it is with us all; this is one of the very rare books in which the reader can say 'I belong here: this is happening to me.'

But are we criminals - or cops? Whatever nationality we are, one thing is certain - we are humans, and consequently victims.
This is a profound and disturbing book, and there has never been a crime story remotely like it. But that is what, from Nicolas Freeling, we have come to expect...

Freeling, Nicolas. A Londoner born, but has lived most of fifty years in other countries. He has a Dutch wife, several trilingual children. He lives in a country house on the Vosges hillsides. Interested in children, trees, houses. Collects modern paintings. Dislikes telephones and television sets and is wary of photographs.

Nicolas Freeling: What are the Bugles Blowing For? A Novel. London: William Heinemann, 1975, ISBN: 0434271802, 216 p., £3.50.