Peter May was trying to find the place where he killed a journalist and a British government minister.
To be fair to the Scottish author, the murders in Brussels’ EU quarter took place some 40 years ago and were purely fictional.
“Square Ambiorix is where?” he asked, looking out of a window in the Scottish government’s Brussels office. “That’s it there, isn’t it? And then Rue de Pavie, where the murder took place, is just off it.”
The 67-year-old writer was back in the special lead EU capital for the first time since he researched the thriller that features those murders, “The Man With No Face.”
When the book was first published in 1981, May was a young newspaper reporter in Glasgow. He is now a France-based best-selling writer, thanks above all to a trilogy of crime novels set on the Isle of Lewis.
His publisher has just reissued “The Man With No Face,” lightly revised by May. And the author was back in Brussels to promote it. The book is something of a time capsule, and how little Brussels and the EU have changed. It portrays a grittier, noirish Brussels, and an EU that was then much smaller, more male-dominated and overwhelmingly Francophone.
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