Recommendsday: Books set in Paris

After my Parisian odyssey last month, I started thinking about books I’ve read that are set in the French capital, and here I am with a post as a result!

And we’re going to start with a classic, by which I mean The Three Musketeers. I wrote about the latest movie adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’s book earlier this year and I’ve read the first two of the three books featuring d’Artagnan and friends, and I have The Man in the Iron Mask on the shelf too. If you like swashbuckling, these are great – and although they are long there is plenty of plot and loads of action. And they’re cleverly fitted into actual French history so if you’ve studied any of that they’re fun on that front too. I also think it’s really hard to exist in the world without having seen some sort of musketeers adaptation so it’s got that familiarity going for it too. Also constantly referenced in pop culture is The Scarlet Pimpernel – and the actual book by Baroness Orczy is actually pretty good too. Set during the French Revolution is the story of daring rescues made by a man leading a double life. Sort of like Superman or Batman, except he’s rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine and he can’t fly. But he is a great swordsman so maybe that’s nearly a superpower?

The Scarlet Pimpernel leads me nicely on to the Secret History of the Pink Carnation, where a modern day history student who sets out to write her dissertation about the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian discovers another spy that the history books have missed – the Pink Carnation. I’ve written a whole series post about Lauren Willig’s dual timeline novels – so you should probably go and read that too!

It wouldn’t be in keeping with my love of mid twentieth century mystery novels if I didn’t mention Maigret. He’s a police detective in the homicide squad in Paris and they’re meant to be the second best selling detective series of all time – behind only Sherlock Holmes. I can’t claim to have read them all – because there are 70 plus novels in the series, but I have read a fair few in a mix of English and French. Penguin have reissued all of them in the last decade or so, which means they’re pretty easy to get hold of if you want them.

As well as detective novels, I also love a mid-twentieth century novel about women, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado is the story of a young American woman in Paris in the late 1950s. Sally Jay Gorce is a 21-year-old college graduate who is living in Paris and trying to break into the film industry. And it goes about as well as you might expect. I’ve got a lovely Virago designer hardback edition but there are plenty of other less inexpensive ones if you want to read it.

And finally, Ernest Hemmingway spent a lot of time in Paris in the 1920s with the literary set there, and as well as his own books set there, there’s also The Paris Wife by Paula McLain about Hadley Richardson, who became Hemmingway’s first wife and was at the centre of all of that. It was a BotW here back in 2015 and it’s definitely worth a read.

Happy Humpday!