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Superintendent Lannes #4
End Games in Bordeaux
In the early summer of 1944, France is in turmoil. The Allied invasion, bringing the promise of Liberation, is awaited, eagerly and nervously. The Vichy regime is in its death throes. Those who have served it and collaborated with the German Occupation fear the revenge of the Resistance. Atrocities are committed on both sides, and justice is blind. Superintendent Lannes, suspended from duty by order of the Boches, searches unofficially for a missing girl, and investigates cases of historic sex abuse. His marriage is experiencing difficulties and he worries about his sons, one with the Free French, the other in Vichy. The narrative of this tense economical novel switches between Lannes in Bordeaux and the young characters met in the first three books of this Vichy Quartet, now caught up in the terrible drama of these months - in France, London and on the Eastern Front - and brings Allan Massie's acclaimed series to its gripping climax.
244 pages, Paperback
First published October 11, 2015
8 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
Allan Massie
86 books83 followersAllan Massie is a Scottish journalist, sports writer and novelist. Massie is one of Scotland's most prolific and well-known journalists, writing regular columns for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times (Scotland) and the Scottish Daily Mail. He is also the author of nearly 30 books, including 20 novels. He is notable for writing about the distant past.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
November 7, 2015
I'm writing a very brief review of End Games in Bordeaux because it is the fourth and last book in a series which began with Death in Bordeaux. All four novels are set in Bordeaux just before and during the German occupation 1940-1944. One story follows the other and it would be impossible to read this novel without having read the first three.
The plotting is incredibly complex and deals with a whole raft of issues including politics, collaboration, treason, revenge and sexuality. At the heart of this book, and its three predecessors is the policeman Jean Lannes, a fascinating character who in another life would have been a tightrope walker, such is the skill and dexterity he needs to plot his way through the political and social minefields of occupied France.
I've enjoyed this series so much that I intend to re read all four in the New Year when I'm abroad for a month. Following that I shall review the whole series on Goodreads.
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen and Two Families at War, all published by Sacristy Press.
The plotting is incredibly complex and deals with a whole raft of issues including politics, collaboration, treason, revenge and sexuality. At the heart of this book, and its three predecessors is the policeman Jean Lannes, a fascinating character who in another life would have been a tightrope walker, such is the skill and dexterity he needs to plot his way through the political and social minefields of occupied France.
I've enjoyed this series so much that I intend to re read all four in the New Year when I'm abroad for a month. Following that I shall review the whole series on Goodreads.
David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen and Two Families at War, all published by Sacristy Press.
February 21, 2024
A good series highly recommend if you are into historical fictional crime judging by the writing it feels you are actually there back in time
July 24, 2025
You won't find another four star book reviewed by me that is also shelved as bad-disappointing so I'd better explain. 'End Games in Bordeaux is as well written as the other three novels in the series and it is also compulsively readable. But it fails to live up to what 'Death in Bordeaux' and 'Dark Summer in Bordeaux' promised - an examination of the complex choices faced by ordinary Frenchmen and women during WWII. Indeed I had premonitions when I reviewed volume III 'A Cold Winter in Bordeaux' that Massie would side-step the ugly side of collaboration and in 'end games in bordeaux' that is exactly what he does. Superintendent Lannes in this concluding volume is on suspension which ensures that he cannot be sullied with a taint of acquiescence or complicity with anything unworthy. He does investigate, not a murder because he is after all on suspension, but the disappearance of a relative of one of the characters we have met previously which, like the murders in the previous novels, provides of linking together an extraordinary number of the disparate major and minor characters from the previous novels. It is a cracking good read, but it is still a disappointment.
I was going to go into greater detail but either I would simply repeat what I have said about Massie's earlier novel 'A Question of Loyalties', refer you to the sites I listed in my review of 'A Cold Winter in Bordeaux' (maybe adding a few more), or indulge in plot spoilers which I don't believe in. So I conclude my review, perhaps unsatisfactorily, but then I think the novel ends unsatisfactorily (particularly with the conversion to heterosexuality of one of the gay characters). I would not want anyone not read the Bordeaux Quartet of novels but I do think it was an opportunity missed.
I was going to go into greater detail but either I would simply repeat what I have said about Massie's earlier novel 'A Question of Loyalties', refer you to the sites I listed in my review of 'A Cold Winter in Bordeaux' (maybe adding a few more), or indulge in plot spoilers which I don't believe in. So I conclude my review, perhaps unsatisfactorily, but then I think the novel ends unsatisfactorily (particularly with the conversion to heterosexuality of one of the gay characters). I would not want anyone not read the Bordeaux Quartet of novels but I do think it was an opportunity missed.
April 12, 2016
You really have to read the quartet of novels comprising the Superintendent Lannes series in order or I would think you would flounder, badly. As it is, even though I have read them all I struggled a bit with this one to keep track of all its threads and character POV switches. The pace is, if anything, a little too frenetic. However, as a series conclusion it packs a punch, and leaves you bruised and emotionally drained. A lot happens, but Massie ties it all together, even offers a brief What happens now the war is over? summation for characters we have followed over four novels, though some readers might feel a little disappointed by such a brief follow-up account. It seems Massie does not intend to revisit Lannes, and that is a shame. It is a sad book, really, tinged with melancholy and tragedy, which isn't exactly what I was expecting, given the novel brings us to the Allied invasion and German retreat. In some ways, to be perfectly honest, I wished more than once I had not read it, to see Lannes so reduced and left behind by events and circumstances. A decent man laid low by times that do not reward decency.
Snatches of brief lives, crossing each other's paths, all deeply and inescapably stained by memories of the dark years, 1940-44.
Certainly, if you want to know about the complexities of life in France under the German Occupation then you will learn a lot from Massie's series. Clearly a lot of research has gone into the writing, without bogging down the story in a surfeit of details. As a companion to the series I recommend 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié) by Marcel Ophüls about collaboration between the Vichy government and the Nazis during World War II, featuring interviews with German officers, French collaborators and Resistance fighters, mixed with archive footage.
Massie asks us to consider why people behave as they do, the consequences of their decisions, the moral compromises and ambiguities required under the extreme circumstances of the Occupation and Vichy government, the very human truth that we are good, bad, indifferent, mostly a bit of each, and the trick is how to live with what you have done, whether willingly or under duress. France struggles still to come to terms with what happened in the dark days 1940-44. Anyone who reads Patrick Modiano appreciates that. We Brits like to think we would have behaved differently but human nature gives the lie to that.
However we come out of this it will be like stepping into a different world, utterly different. It couldn't be otherwise. Too much has happened, too much that has been dreadful and divisive. It will be years before we can look each other in the eye without a question: so how did you behave, what did you do, in the years of the Occupation?
Snatches of brief lives, crossing each other's paths, all deeply and inescapably stained by memories of the dark years, 1940-44.
Certainly, if you want to know about the complexities of life in France under the German Occupation then you will learn a lot from Massie's series. Clearly a lot of research has gone into the writing, without bogging down the story in a surfeit of details. As a companion to the series I recommend 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié) by Marcel Ophüls about collaboration between the Vichy government and the Nazis during World War II, featuring interviews with German officers, French collaborators and Resistance fighters, mixed with archive footage.
Massie asks us to consider why people behave as they do, the consequences of their decisions, the moral compromises and ambiguities required under the extreme circumstances of the Occupation and Vichy government, the very human truth that we are good, bad, indifferent, mostly a bit of each, and the trick is how to live with what you have done, whether willingly or under duress. France struggles still to come to terms with what happened in the dark days 1940-44. Anyone who reads Patrick Modiano appreciates that. We Brits like to think we would have behaved differently but human nature gives the lie to that.
However we come out of this it will be like stepping into a different world, utterly different. It couldn't be otherwise. Too much has happened, too much that has been dreadful and divisive. It will be years before we can look each other in the eye without a question: so how did you behave, what did you do, in the years of the Occupation?
November 9, 2023
A fabiys series
I loved this quartet of books set in Bordeaux during World War II. What a cast of characters. I was sorry to leave their company. The Rnboi. Eith a paragraph on what each person became after the war, was masterful, full of surprises.
Think I must now re-read Massie's "Sins of the Father", about Nazis taking refuge in Argentina. It will lack the Simenon-like quality of the Bordeaux books but has its own appeal.
I loved this quartet of books set in Bordeaux during World War II. What a cast of characters. I was sorry to leave their company. The Rnboi. Eith a paragraph on what each person became after the war, was masterful, full of surprises.
Think I must now re-read Massie's "Sins of the Father", about Nazis taking refuge in Argentina. It will lack the Simenon-like quality of the Bordeaux books but has its own appeal.
April 1, 2016
This brings a memorable series to a close. The four books should be read in the correct order. By the fourth book we know and care about the characters whose struggles, moral and physical, have occupied the previous volumes. These books give an intelligent insight into life in occupied France. They are to be savoured.
June 25, 2017
Loved the series and this was one of the best as, though not a lot happens, there is significant character development and a very affecting epilogue which tells what happens to everyone in the future. The series is quite sedate but the pleasure is from absorbing the minutiae and the pace of life.
March 15, 2017
Thank hod there was a conclusion.... loved this series.
May 8, 2021
It is the duty of the detective story to set the world to rights, to remedy the transgression at its heart (usually a murder) by bringing its perpetrator to justice. The literary novel, however, affects to resemble the world in all its aspects - albeit mostly via a microcosm of that world - and therefore, unlike in the classic crime novel, good does not always prevail.
Massie’s series of books set in Bordeaux during wartime and occupation (of which the previous three were Death In Bordeaux, Dark Summer in Bordeaux and Cold Winter in Bordeaux,) seeks to square that circle, employing a literary sensibility but examining various crimes highlighting the more sordid aspects of human nature. In this final instalment things are again seen mainly from the point of view of Jean Lannes, Superintendent in the police judiciaire, who has been suspended from duty for being less than cooperative with the German occupiers, whose marriage has seen better days, whose sons are variously working for Vichy or acting as an agent for the Special Operations Executive and whose daughter’s boyfriend is on the Eastern Front with the Legion of French volunteers against Bolshevism. Wartime France in microcosm then.
Massie’s Bordeaux quartet is of course dealing, albeit obliquely, with an almighty transgression, the enormity of Nazi ideology. Inextricably bound up with that in these novels is the reality of French collaboration; willingly or not most French people were compromised by it, soiled by association. These are, however, matters that Lannes cannot remediate in any way. While the reader knows the outcome of the war, the prospect of the usual consolation of the detective novel is nevertheless withheld. It is to Massie’s credit that he illuminates the sheer grubbiness of life in such circumstances and intimates the deceptions with which the French people will reassure themselves after the war. Even the Allied landings in Normandy do not lift the gloom as the Germans still hang on in Bordeaux and their adherents, such as the Milice, continue to persecute those they deem traitors either to (Vichy) France or to what they would call decency.
The incident which starts proceedings here isn’t a crime, though. Lannes is asked privately to investigate the disappearance of Marie-Adelaide d’Herblay, a nineteen year-old who has gone off with one Aurélien Mabire, apparently of her own volition. This is something of a red herring as it serves only to draw Lannes once again into the sordid realm of the advocate Labiche whose various misdeeds have preoccupied Lannes for the whole Quartet, but it does relate back to earlier events where a music teacher was procuring very young girls for those who had a taste for them. Lannes is desperate to find someone to testify against Labiche, of whom he has a compromising photograph, but when Marie-Adelaide eventually turns up to see him her reaction is not what he expected.
Massie’s object is not to have justice done. It is to illustrate the complexities of human nature – especially under stress. No-one in the book is without fault of some sort – except perhaps the prostitute Yvette, for whom Lannes developed a soft spot and who of course, as a horizontal collaborator (even if out of necessity,) suffers the consequences of being labelled as such when the occupation ends.
In the end here, no-one is as they were at the beginning, the war has changed everything, except the influence of the powerful, or those who gravitate towards it. As is usual the literary novel unveils evolution ; hence that circle isn’t squared. I’m not sure crime aficionados will be satisfied with this. The literary reader may also find the quartet’s focus to be too narrow.
Massie’s series of books set in Bordeaux during wartime and occupation (of which the previous three were Death In Bordeaux, Dark Summer in Bordeaux and Cold Winter in Bordeaux,) seeks to square that circle, employing a literary sensibility but examining various crimes highlighting the more sordid aspects of human nature. In this final instalment things are again seen mainly from the point of view of Jean Lannes, Superintendent in the police judiciaire, who has been suspended from duty for being less than cooperative with the German occupiers, whose marriage has seen better days, whose sons are variously working for Vichy or acting as an agent for the Special Operations Executive and whose daughter’s boyfriend is on the Eastern Front with the Legion of French volunteers against Bolshevism. Wartime France in microcosm then.
Massie’s Bordeaux quartet is of course dealing, albeit obliquely, with an almighty transgression, the enormity of Nazi ideology. Inextricably bound up with that in these novels is the reality of French collaboration; willingly or not most French people were compromised by it, soiled by association. These are, however, matters that Lannes cannot remediate in any way. While the reader knows the outcome of the war, the prospect of the usual consolation of the detective novel is nevertheless withheld. It is to Massie’s credit that he illuminates the sheer grubbiness of life in such circumstances and intimates the deceptions with which the French people will reassure themselves after the war. Even the Allied landings in Normandy do not lift the gloom as the Germans still hang on in Bordeaux and their adherents, such as the Milice, continue to persecute those they deem traitors either to (Vichy) France or to what they would call decency.
The incident which starts proceedings here isn’t a crime, though. Lannes is asked privately to investigate the disappearance of Marie-Adelaide d’Herblay, a nineteen year-old who has gone off with one Aurélien Mabire, apparently of her own volition. This is something of a red herring as it serves only to draw Lannes once again into the sordid realm of the advocate Labiche whose various misdeeds have preoccupied Lannes for the whole Quartet, but it does relate back to earlier events where a music teacher was procuring very young girls for those who had a taste for them. Lannes is desperate to find someone to testify against Labiche, of whom he has a compromising photograph, but when Marie-Adelaide eventually turns up to see him her reaction is not what he expected.
Massie’s object is not to have justice done. It is to illustrate the complexities of human nature – especially under stress. No-one in the book is without fault of some sort – except perhaps the prostitute Yvette, for whom Lannes developed a soft spot and who of course, as a horizontal collaborator (even if out of necessity,) suffers the consequences of being labelled as such when the occupation ends.
In the end here, no-one is as they were at the beginning, the war has changed everything, except the influence of the powerful, or those who gravitate towards it. As is usual the literary novel unveils evolution ; hence that circle isn’t squared. I’m not sure crime aficionados will be satisfied with this. The literary reader may also find the quartet’s focus to be too narrow.
September 23, 2023
This book concludes a very good series of 4 which tell the story of the German Occupation as it might have been experienced by ordinary people -- a police officer, his wife and their teenaged children. Of the younger generation, one aligns himself with Vichy, one with de Gaulle, and one has a boyfriend who joins the Charlemagne madness. The characters are drawn very convincingly, and develop significantly, as you would expect over 4 years like those!
This volume deals with the end of the war, and has a clever envoi that tells a little of the post-war life of the people we have come to meet over 4 volumes and 4 years -- continuing their lives after the war, scarred, but nevertheless going on. Not necessarily the best volume of the series but a worthy conclusion with a move to history as it actually was.
The people who rallied to Vichy are painted very convincingly, as are the majority who tried to get on with their lives.
If I have one regret it is that an important thread of collaborators are depicted as sexual criminals, which feeds the view that ordinary people don't end up doing bad things. Of course they do -- in my view very often the real baddies are conservative, good neighbours, adhere to their code of ethics while they are complete scum viewed in any larger context. For instance, I believe Heinrich Himmler was honest with money and scrupulously correct, enjoyed being the paterfamilias and hanging pictures, all the while pitying himself for having to murder millions of people. It is not just the deviants we have to be scared of!
I can't imagine that you could read this book out of sequence -- you would lose a lot.
This volume deals with the end of the war, and has a clever envoi that tells a little of the post-war life of the people we have come to meet over 4 volumes and 4 years -- continuing their lives after the war, scarred, but nevertheless going on. Not necessarily the best volume of the series but a worthy conclusion with a move to history as it actually was.
The people who rallied to Vichy are painted very convincingly, as are the majority who tried to get on with their lives.
If I have one regret it is that an important thread of collaborators are depicted as sexual criminals, which feeds the view that ordinary people don't end up doing bad things. Of course they do -- in my view very often the real baddies are conservative, good neighbours, adhere to their code of ethics while they are complete scum viewed in any larger context. For instance, I believe Heinrich Himmler was honest with money and scrupulously correct, enjoyed being the paterfamilias and hanging pictures, all the while pitying himself for having to murder millions of people. It is not just the deviants we have to be scared of!
I can't imagine that you could read this book out of sequence -- you would lose a lot.
March 7, 2021
This book finishes the series. Very atmospheric and depressing. Appropriate for the setting. How do you respond to a situation where there is no way to live your life without constant compromise of your values? Lots of characters, accumulated from the previous three books of the series. Lots of switching between those characters, making for some confusion for the reader as to who was where. I kept comparing Lannes, the detective here, to Gemache of the Louise Penny books. Lots of similarities between the two characters.
May 18, 2019
Super. All the strings wrapped up, for good or for bad.
Excellent writing and evocation of the atmosphere of war-time Bordeaux.
The books in this series need to be read in sequence, maybe even as one book.
Excellent writing and evocation of the atmosphere of war-time Bordeaux.
The books in this series need to be read in sequence, maybe even as one book.
August 18, 2025
This is a must read series. Read all 4 books and follow the characters through the years. The first book (Death in Bordeaux) moves slowly as the foundation is set and then books 2-4 are so compelling that you will be hard pressed to put them down.
October 18, 2025
I enjoyed this one too! Was sorry to see the stories finish although the last bit did let you know what happened to everyone! Such a relief
June 20, 2016
I loved these 4 books I may have overrated them compared to others I have read but I am so sad I have reached the end of the series! Well written and captures the turmoil of France at this historical period.
April 5, 2016
A sad, tragic but real end to great characters who survived life under occupation. What price does one pay for surviving? Massie shows that one man's hero is another's terrorist and that everyone pays a price in war.
April 30, 2016
How splendid these books are. A postwar final farewell would be welcome.
December 19, 2016
fitting end to a great series
September 2, 2019
See my review here:
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2019...
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2019...
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April 25, 2017Loved all four books - it was not so much a quartet, more one long book in four parts. At the end, Massie writes a short "what happened next" about all the main characters, so you are not left wondering whether they got back to their ordinary lives or not. That makes me think that the characters had taken over the author's thoughts and feelings as much as they did me as a reader.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews