The Mystery of Henri Pick (Walter Presents)

Product Description

The delightful first title in a new collaboration with Channel 4’s Walter Presents: a fast-paced comic mystery enriched by a deep love of books

In the small town of Crozon in Brittany, a library houses manuscripts that were rejected for publication: the faded dreams of aspiring writers. Visiting while on holiday, young editor Delphine Despero is thrilled to discover a novel so powerful that she feels compelled to bring it back to Paris to publish it.

The book is a sensation, prompting fevered interest in the identity of its author – apparently one Henri Pick, a now-deceased pizza chef from Crozon. Sceptics cry that the whole thing is a hoax: how could this man have written such a masterpiece? An obstinate journalist, Jean-Michel Rouche, heads to Brittany to investigate.

By turns farcical and moving,
The Mystery of Henri Pick is a fast-paced comic mystery enriched by a deep love of books – and of the authors who write them.

Review

“A delight with a novel premise.”
— CrimeReads

”
The Mystery of Henri Pick is so ridiculously French that if it started smoking Gitanes while you read it, you wouldn’t be entirely surprised.” — 
The Sunday Times Culture magazine

“This book is light, funny and erudite: a delight.”
— The Guardian

“A charming literary caper… A playfully droll satire of the French publishing scene and a completely delightful jeu d’esprit.”
— The Daily Mail

“Written with humour, wit and intelligence, it’s set in a world of books and publishing. I really enjoyed it.” — 
TripFiction

”
The Mystery of Henri Pick manages the great gap between levity and profundity, between humour and seriousness. A beautiful farce.”
 — Le Figaro Littéraire

About the Author

Novelist, screenwriter and musician David Foenkinos was born in 1974. He is the author of fourteen novels that have been translated into forty languages. Several of his works have been adapted for film, including
Delicacy (2011).
The Mystery of Henri Pick is the first title in a new collaboration with Channel 4’s Walter Presents.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
In 1971, the American writer Richard Brautigan published
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, a quirky love story
about a male librarian and a young woman with a spectacular
body. In a way, the woman is the victim of her body, as if
beauty were a curse. Vida—for that is the heroine’s name—
explains that a man was killed in a car accident because of
her; mesmerized by the sight of this incredible passer-by, he
simply forgot that he was driving. After the crash, the woman
ran over to the car. The driver, covered in blood, managed
to utter a few last words before he died: “You’re beautiful.”
In fact, though, Vida’s story is less important than the
librarian’s. Because the novel’s most distinctive feature is that
the library where he works will accept any book rejected by
a publisher. For example, we meet one man who deposits his
manuscript there after receiving four hundred rejection slips. All
kinds of different books accumulate in this way, from an essay
such as “Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms” to
a cookery book compiling every meal eaten in Dostoevsky’s
novels. One advantage of this arrangement is that the author
can choose the spot on the shelf where his book will sit. He
can leaf through the pages of his unfortunate colleagues before
finding his place in this sort of anti-posterity. On the other
hand, no manuscripts sent by post are accepted. The author
must come in person to deliver the unwanted tome, as if to
symbolize the final act of its absolute abandonment.
A few years later, in 1984, the author of The Abortion committed
suicide in Bolinas, California. We will return to Brautigan’s
life and the circumstances that drove him to suicide a little
later, but for now let us concentrate on that library, born in
his imagination. In the early 1990s his idea became a reality:
one of his fans created a