We are delighted to welcome author Laurent Guillaume to Omnimystery News.
Laurent's new crime novel, the first of his books to be translated into English, is White Leopard (Le French Book; November 2015 hardcover, trade paperback and ebook formats) and we asked him to give us the backstory to it. He titles his guest post for us today, "Reality and Escape".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Laurent Guillaume
As long as I can remember, I've needed to tell stories and create worlds. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a screenwriter and to write graphic novels, but I realized quickly that I needed to get some experience in life first. Joining the police was a way to go behind the screen society puts up; it was an opportunity to see reality. Drawn to this, I chose to work the graveyard shift in the housing projects outside of Paris. I come from a relatively protected background, and nothing prepared me for that shady, miserable world. It fascinated me. It was full of the stuff of novels.
It took me a long time though to start writing. Writing is not easy. It requires more than having material for a story. You have to make sure you don't get submerged in the desire to recount the story. For me, writing is an act of passion that must be implemented outside of that passion, in a serene state of mind.
I now write full time, but I will always be a cop at heart. It's in my DNA. In my novels, I try to provide a realistic image of my former job. My plots all take place in a realistic environment, often inspired by real people and events.
From 2007 to 2011, I worked in for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an advisor to the Mali police. My job consisted of sharing my expertise in various areas, including public safety, investigation techniques, human resource management, etc. I taught in the country's police and gendarme schools. On the operational side, I helped the Mali authorities to fight international drug trafficking.
White Leopard is freely inspired by two true stories that occurred when I was working in Bamako. Young women from Parisian suburbs were being used as mules to smuggle cocaine into France. The second was a case called "Air Cocaine." At the end of 2011, a plane landed in northern Mali with a cargo of 7 to 11 tons of cocaine. The case had all the ingredients of a mystery: a Colombian cut up with chainsaw, a corrupt former cop from Spain, a shell company, and corruption at the highest levels of the government. It didn't take much to turn that into a good story.
Nothing that I describe in Solo's environment is fiction. I wanted the story to be as close to reality as possible. Corruption is an institution throughout West Africa. I'm no specialist, but I believe that the poorer a country is, the more visible corruption is in public institutions. Government workers supplement their income in this way. But corruption exists everywhere, in less obvious ways. My goal was not make any value judgment, but to recount daily life in Bamako, where people have to deal with these issues all the time.
That said, in all of my writing, I am attentive not to let veracity bog down the story. The most important part of the story is the escape.
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Laurent Guillaume is an award-winning French writer and former police officer. In law enforcement, he worked anti-gang, narcotics, financial crimes, and served in Mali as advisor to the local police. White Leopard is his first novel to be translated into English.
For more information about the author, please visit his author page on the Le French Book website and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook.
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White Leopard by Laurent Guillaume
A Crime Novel
Publisher: Le French Book
Everything is possible and nothing is certain.
A man torn between two continents finds himself in a dangerous confrontation between tradition and corruption. Solo is a former cop who ran away from a dark past in France to start his life over again in Bamako, Mali, as a PI.
An ordinary case turns out to be not so ordinary. The drug mule gets her throat slit. The French lawyer is too beautiful and too well-informed. The cocaine is too plentiful.
— White Leopard by Laurent Guillaume
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