In A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved, a London nurse narrates the story of a drifter she latches onto in a public hospital. Henri is in permanent recovery, not only from his heroin addiction but from the 1960s, a decade that invited the unwary to the biggest party in history then discarded them. She is curious about his past life on the Côte d’Azur with a French countess, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in their exile.
Henri dismisses that story; it’s an old one. Instead, he tells her about a couple he knew in Nice, the man an Armenian with the convenient name Armen, and his wife, Luciana, originally from Bessarabia, a forgotten battleground of Europe, subsumed into the bigger countries around it. They are gamblers who continually made and lost small fortunes. They are also genocide survivors – a word Henri understands for the first time when he hears them utter it – Armen escaping the Smyrna conflagration in 1922, and Luciana surviving the totalitarian powers that scourged Europe in the Second World War. Both are from places that no longer exist. Henri’s affinity with them becomes friendship, even as their troubles multiply when Luciana falls prey to a wasting disease.
When a series of catastrophes robs Henri of his friends and his countess, his days on the Blue Coast are numbered, and soon he is back in his native England, in and out of London’s hospitals. There are signs that his luck has not been all bad: Henri may have salvaged some of the fortune his friends lost, and the narrator feels close to a solution to a final mystery from his time on the Blue Coast when she deduces that he is not as adrift as he seems.
Nick Sweeney is a freelance writer and musician living on the English coast. His fascination with East European history and culture will become apparent to readers of A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved. Nick’s other books include the Poland-set Laikonik Express and The Exploding Elephant.