THE light first drew artists to the north west of France. Most famously it was Gauguin and his portraits of girls in clogs and costumes, one of many.  Pont Aven, a sleepy one church town on a creek was where they would meet up. The town gave its name to a school of painting. They also named the nearby beach Tahiti in Gauguin’s honour.

This most westerly part of France was largely overlooked before the new railway brought the painters. It was a long way from anywhere, somewhere north of Bordeaux, west of Normandy. They drank cider, not wine. It was its own country until a few centuries back, known only in tales from sailors of the terrors of the bay of Biscay. This was Asterix and Obelix country.

But the vistas, especially the sunsets of open sky and sea, painted by artists from Robert Wylie (who died here) to Van Gogh to Monet brought tourists. And then readers of the first of what has become a series and TV starring Commissaire Georges Dupin. This first book sold seven million copies.

Dupin, newly arrived from Paris where he has been demoted to this unexplored, ragged landscape with huge forests, finger-like creeks, the blue city at Concarneau,  huge tidal swells, magic islands, prehistoric memorials of menhirs and dolmens, and legends. To the Romans Finistere was literally the end of the world, to locals in their own dialect “Penn ar Bed ” – the Beginning of Everything.

Just how impenetrable some of this culture might be is plain in the place names that smack of a language beyond even Gaelic – Quimper, Douarnenez, Kerfany.

Jean-Luc Bannalec is an adopted son of Brittany, a German publisher turned author writing under a pseudonym that he took from a village outside of Pont Aven. His real name is Jorg Bong. What sets him and his alter ego Dupin apart from other detectives-set-in-foreign-places is his understanding of the area. He has even written a guidebook, and a cookbook. And now nearly a dozen novels, each set in a different part of the region. Pont Aven was where it all started.

Inspector Dupin is still regarded as a foreigner by the locals. He is in search of the soul of the region. A naïf even.  His inspectoral team do their best to bring him up to speed because this not a region that is really very comfortable with the idea of being a part of France at all.

It is somewhere of  “enchanting landscape…traces of mysterious eras…untouched and unspoiled.”

At each turn there is another glance at the landscape – ”a stunning long dazzlingly white beach…”the entrance to the harbor with the little lighthouse and the buoys bobbing sleepily in the groundswell….””you could hear the sound of falling water all over Pont Aven.”

Dupin has an ally to initiate him in this new land, his secretary the formidable Nolwenn, a native Breton, still suspicious of anything French. She instructs him in all things Breton: We grow more artichokes than anywhere in the world, we have the second biggest tidal range of anywhere, we have the most varied traditional costumes of anywhere – 1266 in all – and we have 770 saints etc.

And we have a murder.

A reputed hotelier has been stabbed in his front room. Aged 91. And not just any hotel but the Central, the first stop for all the painters arriving by train…. The hotel was founded by the victim’s grandmother Marie Jeanne in 1879, much of which, if not all, is true.

Like all great detectives Dupin has his foibles. He needs his shot of coffee to think. He does not like going on boats. He writes his notes diligently in a red Clairefontaine notebook. He needs to go for long walks around the great coastal vistas, to think, to deduce. He likes his food. He likes his old blue Citroen DX.

The clues come slowly: the son, the wife, the brother. “The drama was still playing even if they could not see it”.  There is concern from the mayor worried about the tourist season (shades of Jaws), and higher up,

Bannalec weaves all this together with good humour like he might have been sitting on the dockside waiting for a ferry. There are unashamed nods you might conject to the interrogation techniques of Columbo, the pensive thinking of Morse, the inspiration of Sherlock Holmes, the whodunit sagas of Agatha Christie, even the pastures of Thomas Hardy, but Bannalec does the genre with elan. He is a good storyteller, his plotting is clever, his characters have bite, the vistas bristle, the changing weather mirrors the mood of the investigation.

And much of this is real enough. Even the Amiral café is a real cafe and has a menu now dedicated to Dupin (and one to Maigret who also had an investigation here the Yellow Dog). The painters and the caffe Central are also part of the local folklore. As is Flaubert who has a rock named after him around the bay where he liked to sit.

The wrongdoing is so much needlework pulling together patchworks of suspicion, of local politics, of rural intrigues. It is a proper novel. Crime in its proper setting. In the community. Georges to the rescue. Brittany to the fore.