Martin Walker’s Bruno, the French police chief at the heart of his best-selling Perigord mystery series, is everyone’s ideal cop – as well as the town’s most eligible bachelor and a talented host with an international award-winning cook book in his name . . . .

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Martin Walker talks about French charm, his passion for the Perigord, and his years as a diplomatic correspondent in Gorbachev’s Moscow and Clinton’s Washington.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Why Martin's wife Julia is his most important assetThe freedom of writing novelsHob nobbing with world leadersBruno's passion for good foodCharmed by cave dweller sensibilitiesPerigord food and wine ambassador

Where to find Martin Walker: 

Website: http://www.brunochiefofpolice.com/

Facebook: @BrunoChiefOfPolice

What

follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for

word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny: But now, here’s Martin.  Hello there Martin and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Martin:

Hello Jenny.  I don't think I've ever had

an interview from such a long distance before!

Author Martin Walker - Bruno Chief of Police mysteries and former diplomatic correspondent

Jenny: Yes. It's wonderful what modern technology can do. You're in Washington DC and I'm an Auckland New Zealand, and that's really fun.  You've had a distinguished career as a journalist with top newspapers, including as diplomatic correspondence for The Guardian in London. What made you switch to fiction?

Martin: When we were based in Brussels, my wife decided that we'd been

foreign correspondents for all of our lives and our children needed a place to

be rooted. She decided we should get a house in the Perigord, which we'd

visited from time to time because  we

have some friends who were there.

Remarkable prehistoric caves

Caves of Perigord - where it all began. Martin Walker's first novel

I became increasingly fascinated by the Perigord, particularly by the prehistory, the prehistoric caves, like Lascaux. I remember the shock when I first saw it and thought, my God, these people were in no sense primitive.  We've been quite wrong about this. I mean, the artistic sensibility, it was like our own.

And so I began researching, interviewing the archeologists and reading books and visiting all the caves. And I wrote my novel, The Caves of Perigord, which is still in print, I'm proud to say, which is really about what kind of human society that could have produced at Lascaux.

Before that, my books were pretty

conventionally journalistic -  a history

of the cold war, a  book about Gorbachev

in Peristroika. A book about modern America and the history of America and so

on and a book about the National Front in England. So the sense of liberation

in writing this novel about the Perigord, got me even more locked into the

fascination with this part of France.

Art work from the prehistoric Lascaux caves - setting for Martin Walker's first novel.

Moving into Bruno mysteries

Jenny: That's fantastic. So you moved on to the mystery genre and a French

police chief called Bruno. How did you make the choice of genre? You've

explained the setting, but why did you go to mysteries?

Martin: Well, because in our village in France,