Of Castles, Caverns, and Conspiracies

​By Barbara Woshinsky, originally published in the April 2025 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

​I recently found myself simultaneously reading two books that shared unexpected affinities. The Devil’s Cave, by Martin Walker, and Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner, are both set in southwest France, a lovely region replete with medieval castles, prehistoric caverns, and intriguing conspiracies. The Devil’s Cave is the latest in Walker’s popular “Bruno, Chief of Police” mystery series.

​Walker spices his tales with descriptions of succulent meals, local wines, and his hero’s romantic liaisons. But Walker is not only a mystery writer. He has also enjoyed a successful career as a journalist for The Guardian and United Press International, reporting from Russia and France, where he now lives part of the year. Walker always links his mystery plots to historical events going back decades, even centuries. 

​In The Devil’s Cave, Chief Bruno discovers a woman’s body floating down the Dordogne River, surrounded by the elements of a devil-worshiper’s ritual. He then finds the traces of such a

ceremony in the underground chapel of an immense cavern that was sacred to prehistoric peoples. Without giving away the plot, the roots of the crime go back to a famous seventeenth century scandal involving the court of Louis XIV.

Rachel Kushner would appear to be a very different kind of writer: an MFA graduate from Columbia University, all four of her novels have been shortlisted for either the National Book Award or the Booker Prize. With Creation Lake, this author of literary fiction has moved in a new direction, melding a philosophical and psychological novel with a page-turner in the roman noir tradition. Unlike Walker’s good-natured and social Bruno, Kushner’s main character is an inscrutable, manipulative loner. Sadie, as she calls herself, works as a spy/ provocateur for whomever will pay her.

Her current assignment brings her to the Guyenne, an area south of Walker’s Dordogne. She is to infiltrate the Moulinards, a commune originating in the 1960s Back to the Land movement. Its members oppose government plans to drain aquifers to make giant irrigation basins for industrial farming. As part of her strategy, Sadie uses a soft approach to pick up Pascal, a young movie producer who patterns his life on an actual filmmaker and Marxist theorist who took part in the 1968 uprising in Paris. Believing their meeting was fated, Pascal allows Sadie to stay in his family’s old house near the Moulinards’ commune, easing her entrance to the group. Sadie proudly presents herself as an amoral nihilist who, for unknown reasons, has developed a hard, cynical shell.

As the novel progresses, her own vulnerabilities slowly reveal themselves to the reader. Sadie becomes fixated on a local guru (also named Bruno) who lives alone and writes speculative emails to his Moulinard followers. Sadie monitors Bruno’s exchanges with the commune, hoping to find incriminating sabotage plans. Instead, she discovers that he advocates pre-industrial—even pre-historic —modes of living. Even as she dismisses him as a lunatic, Sadie becomes intrigued by Bruno’s rejection of modern life and his decision to retreat underground and live in a network of caverns beneath his farm. Events come to a climax at a demonstration against the water project. Read the novel to discover its surprise ending; read both novels to discover the possibilities of fiction in the hands of talented writers.

While both Walker and Kushner exploit the conventions of the mystery, both dig deeper: Walker into the many-layered history of the Dordogne, Kushner into the ideologies of the twentieth century, as they impact the psyche of her troubled heroine.