On the 20th of November 2014, a package addressed to Raymond Brunet’s former editor, Georges Pires, was delivered by courier to the offices of Éditions Gaspard-Moreau on Rue Mouffetard in Paris. Pires had died of cancer nine years earlier, and the parcel was instead opened by a young trainee. It contained two manuscripts and a letter from a Mulhouse-based firm of solicitors stating that they had been instructed to dispatch the enclosed documents to the publishing house on the occasion of the death of Brunet’s mother, Marie.
Brunet, the author of a single previous novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, had thrown himself in front of a train at Saint-Louis railway station in 1992. Marie Brunet, having outlived her son by some twenty-two years, died in her sleep at the age of eighty-four, two days before the dispatch of the package.
Despite (or perhaps even because of) the anachronistic nature of the submission, the trainee, who had not been born when Brunet’s earlier book appeared in 1982, did not grasp the significance of the contents. The manuscripts were logged in the usual way and consigned to the firm’s slush pile. It was not until four months later that a more senior member of staff at Gaspard-Moreau realised what they had in their possession. It is the first of these manuscripts, L’Accident sur l’A35, which you now hold in your hands.
The decision to publish was not taken in haste. It had first to be ascertained that Gaspard-Moreau was not the victim of a hoax. It was, however, a simple matter to confirm that Brunet had indeed lodged the manuscripts with a lawyer shortly before his suicide. The solicitor in question, Jean-Claude Lussac, was long retired, but he remembered the incident well and, as the only accessory to the scheme, had observed the rumours about the existence of unpublished works that followed Brunet’s suicide with a mixture of amusement and guilt. A simple test also showed that the manuscripts had been written on the typewriter that still sat on the desk of what had once been Brunet’s father’s study at the family home in Saint-Louis. Such proofs, however, are entirely redundant. Even to the casual reader, it is obvious that the style, milieu and thematic concerns of The Accident on the A35 are indistinguishable from those of Brunet’s earlier novel. And for those inclined to interpret the work as a roman-à-clef, it was quite obvious why Brunet did not want the novel to be published in his mother’s lifetime.
GMB, April 2017