Trevanian's Pig Weather

Questions arrive here about  the meaning of "pig weather."

It denotes a land saturated with unpleasantness from the skies.  Mist, chill, sporadic rain accumulating as filthy slush. Low grey clouds portending not storms but a long siege of wet and boring discontent with the world outside your window, neither the balminess of a good spring and summer, nor the crispness of autumn, nor the challenge of winter's worst.  Neither one thing nor another, merely enervation.

The phrase comes to me from Trevanian's great and gentle novel, "The Main,"  set in Montreal and  following an adventure of aging detective Claude LaPointe.   Trevanian called it a roman policier. Most Americans would probably refer to is as a police procedural, but that shorthand connotes too much of the mindless whodunit.

It is certainly possible that some better novel has been written about culture clash and human frailty and the innate compassion of the best police officers seeking to temper human violence. I haven't found it, and that is not for a lack of looking.