Kathy Reichs’s Déja Dead: A Great Series Begins

This week has been a Faulknerian one for me: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I’ve experienced multiple forms of déja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. So it’s a perfect time to return to the 1997 first novel in Kathy Reichs’s celebrated series of crime novels featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

(Fun tidbit: at the event I attended last September, a conversation between Reichs and Sir Ian Rankin at Scotland’s Bloody Scotland crime fiction festival, she was asked about the irony of naming her heroine, who has struggled with alcoholism, “temperance”; and Reichs confessed that she didn’t spot this at the time, although it may have been an unconscious association.)

This is a wonderful début novel, an assured and confident beginning to a long-running series. I’ve recently complained about the more recent additions, but there is nothing to complain about here: it’s rich, and thoughtful, and engaging. The forensic depictions are grisly, true, but Reichs has given us a fully rounded protagonist from page 1, and that’s unusual.

Let me count the ways in which this book succeeds:

Setting and plot are both fully achieved here. Reichs sets her novel in Montreal, where southern U.S. transplant Tempe (as she’s typically called) is living alone for the first time in her life in a downtown condo, eating too much greasy takeout and communing, during non-work hours, mostly with her cat. She is recently separated from her lawyer husband, Pete; her daughter Katie is far away at university, but threatening to drop out. Or quit her job. Or follow a lover to a foreign country. Tempe worries.

Her one close friend in the city, who dates back to her grad school days, is worryingly erratic: calling Tempe up late at night for help, and then refusing to describe the precise nature of the danger she believes she is facing. The friend’s research project has her working closely with sex workers and other street-involved Montrealers in a grimy neighbourhood, and her ethnological research has attracted the unwelcome attention of one particularly creepy fellow. But is she in actual peril, or is she exaggerating? Tempe can’t quite figure it out.

At work, things are also disquieting. A new forensic discovery reminds Tempe of a previous young woman’s corpse, also dismembered in especially disturbing ways. Tempe becomes convinced that there is a serial killer at work, but the police scoff at her, which leads her to attempt her own and not particularly well-conceived investigation in the dark of night. She’s whacked on the head, not for the first time in this book; a cop jokes that she should invest in a helmet.

This is a fast-paced, engrossing read. The first-person narrator/protagonist is believable and complex. The city of Montreal, with its varied neighbourhoods and overlapping police forces, is vivid and realistic. And Tempe has just the right number of problems to contend with, while also being imbued by Reichs with some unusual attributes and strengths that enable her to cope with high levels of stress.

And, too, Tempe is profoundly compassionate about the dead who are in her care. I find Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta less satisfying, in this regard: it sometimes seem like her scientific or legal curiosity drives her more than her rage on behalf of the victims.

Bones is a long-running TV series oh-so-loosely based on Temperance Brennan’s character and profession; few other aspects of these terrific books have been translated to the scene. So I’m imagining a different kind of adaptation of this first novel, set and filmed in Montreal, with ample joual and multicultural restaurants.

A final note: asked why she began writing, Reichs cited two key factors. She had long and frequent plane trips between North Caroline and Montreal during her working career; like her character, she worked in both cities and travelled between them, living a bilingual and cross-border professional life. And her children all wanted to attend expensive private American universities, so she needed to earn more money.

I’m guessing this worked out.