Charles Exbrayat (5 May 1906 - 8 March 1989) was a French writer.
He was a prolific author of crime novels and espionage thrillers. Many of them had a comedic twist.
Tropes found in his works:
- The Alcoholic: Most male Irish characters are alcoholic wifebeaters by default, though with some sympathetic traits.
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: A common affliction of young female characters, leading to them unknowingly dating murderers or worse.
- Asshole Victim: A number of murder victims had given almost everyone they knew cause to hate them, leading to Who Murdered the Asshole in a number of cases.
- Banana Republic: "Et qu'ca saute!" is set in one where government officials getting killed off is treated more as Black Comedy than actual drama.
- Believing Their Own Lies: Mentioned as something of a cultural quirk of Italians: They don't actually believe the tall tales they tell, but they enjoy pretending to believe them a little too much.
- Beneath Suspicion: Several villains looked like harmless old ladies or wimpy men. "Looked like" being the keyword.
- Best Served Cold: "Le Dernier des Salauds" features a police officer almost openly becoming a mobster's henchman for years after the mobster has the cop's wife and daughter killed, waiting for the best moment to betray him.
- Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: A number of the fathers of Spirited Young Ladies are less than happy with their romantic choices. Usually the young man wins out in the end, though not without a fistfight or two.
- Brave Scot:
- Imogen Mac Carthery will not tolerate anyone insulting Scotland and will gladly fight them over it.
- Downplayed with Malcolm Macnamara, who isn't as combative as most other examples but is quite capable of knocking out anyone insulting him or his country... after a deafening blast of bagpipe music, of course.
- Children Raise You: "Les Blondes et Papa" features a widower whose preteen daughter is clearly more of an adult than he is.
- Culture Clash: A frequent source of comedy, especially in the Tarchinini stories where he gets sent to a different country. His stay in the U.S. to meet his in-laws features a murder investigation leading to the local commissioner having to be restrained from calling the President to demand that the U.S. invade Italy.
- Depraved Homosexual: One or two gay villains show up, usually presented as utter psychopaths who enjoy torturing women as they can't interact with them in any other way.
- Food Porn: Food and loving descriptions of the local cuisine feature in many of his books. The only exception is British food, consistently treated as Foreign Queasine that no self-respecting gourmet would touch. An English couple abandoning porridge and making the decision to move to Italy where their daughter now lives is treated as a victory over bad weather and worse cooking.
- Honor Before Reason: One old man in "Le Sage de Sauvenat" is ready to go to prison for murder rather than admit his eyesight is so bad he wouldn't have been able to see what he was shooting at, much less deliberately take aim. He still goes to prison for perjury for a few weeks.
- Love Freak: Commissionner Romeo Tarchinini encourages love whenever he meets it, even playing matchmaker to his misogynistic assistant, but not when it leads to murder. The fact that he's Veronese and married a young woman named Giulietta may have something to do with it...
- Loving a Shadow: One farmer in "Une vieille tendresse" was well-known to have a soft spot for the wife of the victim, despite her well-known affair with a farmhand. He himself was aware of it, and so framed her for the husband's murder so he could go back to loving the imaginary version without that pesky reality getting in the way.
- National Stereotypes: Many of his works feature walking, talking stereotypes such as drunken, violent Irishmen/Scotsmen, Rambuctious Italians, stuffy Brits, coquettish Frenchwomen, etc. Two of them are the stars of their own series, Imogen Mac Carthery (an older Scottish woman) and Romeo Tarchinini (a Love Freak Veronese commissioner).
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Malcolm Macnamara never goes anywhere without his bagpipe, allowing him to pass for a not-too-smart Scotsman rather than the highly-efficient Foreign Office operative he is.
- Patriotic Fervor: Most strongly seen in Imogen Mac Carthery, who gets depressed and furiously combative respectively on the anniversaries of Scottish defeats/victories over the English.
- Russian Guy Suffers Most: Or rather, German Guy Suffers Most, as the stories set in Germany tend to have the bleakest endings.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Almost guaranteed to happen between the main couple, especially if the story is set in Italy.
- Sustained Misunderstanding: A staple of his works, usually involving Not What It Looks Like or Mistaken for Cheating between the main romantic couple.
- Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: For all the comedy in his works, many villains are downright loathsome, such as a trio of young men raping and strangling a young woman and killing a black teenager to pin the crime on him in "La Route est Longue, Jessica" or faking friendship/romantic attraction to trick the protagonist into taking the blame for a murder in "Cet Imbecile de Ludovic".
