1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession

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There is in part real-world, real-time sleuthing, as I drag my project into the light of the day, a century later.

Bradley struck gold with his debut, The Cat and the City; stories of loneliness in Tokyo connected by a strange, recurring cat. Menmuir uses all the poetic storytelling techniques honed in his Booker-longlisted career to imbue the wonderful The Draw of the Sea with a keen sense of place and purpose. I was very concerned they would look in their archives and say it turns out we’ve got five copies of this film already so don’t worry, but not a bit of it, this is definitely the only copy,” says an obviously relieved Boulting. When cycling commentator Ned Boulting bought a length of Pathé news film featuring a stage of the Tour de France from 1923 he set about learning everything he could about it - taking him on an intriguing journey that encompasses travelogue, history and detective story. It wasn’t Pélissier but this “Beckmann” – actually the Belgian Théo Beeckman – who most captivates Boulting, however.The other photograph, that one actually was taken in the Parc des Princes, where the Petit Tour de France was being held, a post-Tour track-meet Desgrange organised annually and which forms an early step on the road to today’s post-Tour critérium circuit.

Then it cuts to just before La Roche Bernard, 250 or so kilometres into the stage and getting on for noon, as Beeckman launches a solo attack. It started to take on the elephantine proportions that it has done because the political and cultural landscape of June 30, 1923, was absolutely fascinating. Into this gloom came an unpromising curio – an old reel of unknown provenance up for auction, claiming to contain footage of a 1930s Tour de France.With access to vast digital archives, as well as fluency in French and German, the author goes into fascinating digressions about what else was happening on that day.