Historys-Crucible

Annette and I continue to make progress on our sequel to Murder in the Metro.  And no, that's not what turned my hair gray!  We have more than half of the book drafted now.  It became clear as we worked on profiling Dormoy's assassins that we needed to know more about the "Amicale de France," a Vichy propaganda organization.  I had the opportunity to attend a colloquium at the Chateau de Vincennes, just outside Paris, in March.  I'm giving a paper there related to my research on French Guiana, at a conference, "The Spiritual Geopolitics of the Early Modern World, 1500-1800."  I'm taking the opportunity to spend a few extra days in France, and to do some work at the Archives de Paris, where I will delve into the box PEROTIN 212 79/3/47, which is the box (about the size of a ream of paper) containing the classified documents on the Amicale de France.  As the very helpful archivist at the AP just reminded me, we actually have special permission to consult a total of 30 such boxes, which in themselves only constitute a portion of the material, much of it classified, that we are using for this book.  Wait . . . now I know why it's taking so long!

The man who ran the Amicale de France was Gabriel Jeantet.  He was the gunrunner for the Cagoule and the lover of Laetitia Toureaux.  

Our victim, of course, was Marx Dormoy.  Annette and I try to keep him in mind at all times as we work on this project, to remind ourselves why his murder was so important.

So on this trip I unfortunately won't have Annette in the archives with me - we'll have to wait for the summer of 2016 for that - but I will be getting some more material from the AP.