Colette Morel

A Morel novel is not solved in the lab, nor in a car chase, nor through a confession under pressure. It is solved because, in a small region, no one goes unseen. Who is missing from the Friday market, who returns which greeting and which not, who suddenly switches to French where they usually speak German — that is the material from which Christine Duvet reads her cases. As a reporter for the Quotidien jurassien, she reaches, through journalistic and social proximity, what no badge could reach. And because she is herself part of this community, every truth costs her something.

Her method is the fair-play principle: every clue the detective discovers also lies before the reader. Hidden in dialogues, in what characters don't say, in a false label, a missing stamp, a name struck from an article. Red herrings abound — but every one is grounded in genuine character psychology, never in arbitrariness, and the motives grow out of local circumstances. The solution at the end must be two things simultaneously: surprising and inevitable. The reader turns the last page and thinks: Of course. I should have seen it.

The whole thing is warm, but never twee: no blood, no forensic proximity, no sugar-cosy. In the end, order remains habitable, but with visible human costs — and with Christine's closing article, in which she weighs what she writes, what she leaves out, and what truth is worth in a small public sphere. Warmer and more playful is this persona's second voice: Célestine Brochard, who in the Suisse romande solves cases at the table, where cheese, wine, and origin become evidence — bound by the same fair-play contract.

Colette Morel grew up in Neuchâtel, a city that sits on the lake like a polite lie: calm on the surface, dark and deep below. Her grandmother ran a small restaurant on the Rue du Seyon — eight tables, no menu, you ate what Mémé Lucienne cooked. There Colette learned early that food is a statement and that silence at the table speaks louder than any confession.

After her Matura, she studied law in Lausanne — not to become a lawyer, but to understand how guilt is assigned and why that's rarely just. In her third semester she discovered Simenon's Maigret, not a literary but a legal revelation: Simenon understood the difference between law and justice better than most of the professors she had. Then four years as a court reporter in Lausanne and Geneva, where she learned what she now applies: that a pause after a question reveals more than any answer, and that people give away the most when they least want to speak.

Today she lives in the Arc jurassien, in Moutier — the town that moved from Bern to the canton of Jura on 1 January 2026, after decades of conflict and a vote that nearly split it in two. This language border doesn't run on the map but through the middle of everyday life: through families and local clubs, through the question of who belongs and who has moved in, who speaks which language and when. For a crime novel there is hardly better ground. Moutier is no postcard but a lived working space: the Rue Centrale with its kiosk, bakery, and hairdresser, the Friday market that doesn't begin until four in the afternoon, the newsroom of the Quotidien jurassien a few steps away.

From there her world reaches deeper into the Jura: to Saint-Ursanne, the medieval town on the Doubs, where the river and the limestone slow time; onto the railway line through the Weissenstein tunnel to Solothurn, where timetables, commuter routes, and boundaries of jurisdiction become the logic of a case. On Saturdays Colette is at the market — usually not to shop but to observe: the farmer's wife who knows the price of her eggs and won't budge by a centime; the affineur who stays silent when asked about the best piece, because the best piece is never on display. In every one of those faces lurks a suspect, in every silence a clue.

A regional crime novel is a portrait of society in the form of a puzzle. A handful of people who have known each other for years, who need each other, who lie to each other — and one of them has killed. Not out of madness, not by chance, but out of a motive so human that the reader understands it. Understanding is not forgiveness. But without understanding, there is no good crime novel.

What drives me is not the question of who. It is the question of why. Why the reporter strikes a name from her article. Why a newcomer never quite belongs, even after twenty years. Why an entire town can tear itself apart over a cantonal border. My places carry the cases: the Arc jurassien, the language border, the small public spheres where people have known each other for generations and where precisely that closeness becomes the motive. I write about them with the precision of a woman who knows that a Chasselas from Dézaley tastes different from one from Epesses and that this difference can be more telling than a witness statement.

My contract with the reader is simple: all clues are on the table — beside the coffee, beside the newspaper, beside the silence that sounds like politeness. Whether Christine Duvet investigates in the Jura through social proximity or Célestine Brochard solves at the table in the Suisse romande: anyone who reads attentively will solve the case before the last page. Anyone who doesn't has still made a fine journey through francophone Switzerland. That is fair play. And it's the only thing that counts.