Blog Tour: The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd

Thanks to Orion Books for asking me to be part of The Unwanted Dead Blog tour.

I love books by crime authors who study human nature, not through a filter of wishful thinking, but with an eye to the struggle between survival and being the kind of person we’d like to be. With the protagonist Eddie Giral, a French police detective who fought and was damaged in the many ways WWI spat out its survivors, Chris Lloyd has created a fascinating character, whose interest in life has been reduced to simply seeing justice done for four murdered men, even when the world he knows is falling down around him.

The Germans have taken Paris, most of the inhabitants have fled, leaving mostly the poor and the elderly behind, and Eddie has to find a way of doing his job under the heavy hand of the occupation. For us post war generations in the West, at least the more privileged among us, we‘ve never had to compromise our beliefs or integrity to survive. Eddie and his fellow Parisians faced such decisions every day. At one point he says to a colleague: ‘If we’re going to have a hope of surviving any of this, we’re going to have to find worse versions of ourselves.’

The Unwanted Dead is part police procedural, part spy thriller and so much more. The author Chris Lloyd beautifully evokes the setting of Paris in 1940 under Nazi occupation: ‘Everyone lives with a clenched fist in their pocket but does nothing about it.’ Nor could they. Eddie Giral tries in small ways to retain his humanity, his integrity, but so often fails even in that. What could be a bleak existentialist novel is, however, lifted by sparks of hope, by a promise of redemption. Eddie is given another opportunity to reach out to his only son, a boy he’d abandoned a long time ago when he walked out on his family. One of the many strengths of this terrific crime book is the wordcraft, the elegance and simplicity of style. The moment, where we find Eddie being particularly self-aware, is a good example of the author’s insightful approach to characterisation: ‘He was my son. He could have been the one thing that was precious to me if only I’d known how to cope with the one thing that wasn’t – myself.’

As Eddie discovers, it’s often easier to want to live when we care about others, when the survival of others depends on us and when we can play a part in the uncovering of truth and justice against the odds. I won’t give away the plot, but throughout the story you are keenly aware of the slow boiling menace of a spy thriller overlaying both the quest to find a murderer and to uncover the mystery of some secret documents people died to protect. Eddie is playing a deadly game where the Germans hold all the trumps. You might ask, what importance are four murders in a war where 85 million died, but to detective Eddie Giral they mean everything. 

The author Chris Lloyd is a graduate of French and Spanish and has spent 20 years living on the Continent where he taught and wrote. He has had a lifelong interest in WWII and the French Resistance. The Unwanted Dead is the first of what promises to be a new series. He has previously published a popular crime series set in Spain, featuring Elisenda Domenech, a Catalan detective. Chris Lloyd now lives in Wales where he works as a novelist and translator. The Unwanted Dead is published by Orion Fiction September 17th 2020 in hardback for £16.99 and in eBook.

(T. Forsyth-Moser) 

To follow the rest of the Blog Tour: