FRENCH CRIME FICTION: FROM GENRE MINEUR TO PATRIMOINE CULTUREL

Abstract

One book in five sold in France today is a polar. In the face of repeated diagnoses of a crisis in French literature, sales of crime fiction of all varieties have remained buoyant and testify to a clear demand for new crime fiction, both home grown and from abroad. The vitality of this market is also evident in the explosion of specialist crime fiction collections in recent years. Most major publishers in France now edit a crime fiction series, whilst a number of smallto medium-sized publishing ventures have emerged in the last decade to contest the dominance of established imprints such as the Serie noire and Le Masque. Amongst these are presses created precisely to cater for a crime fiction readership, such as La Baleine (now subsumed into Editions du Seuil) and L’Ecailler du Sud, or publishers with more general listings, such as Editions Viviane Hamy, who have made their reputations through discovering talented new crime writers. Indeed, a number of these new voices in French crime fiction have become publishing sensations with translation rights and film and television adaptations of their novels making their work known to a global audience. The visibility in the media of such writers underscores a second important feature of the current state of crime fiction in France: its progressive infiltration of French cultural life. The changing status of French crime fiction can be attributed to both developments within the body of crime writing itself, for example, the rise of a younger generation of crime novelists formed by the debates surrounding the events of May 1968, as well as to broader trends within contemporary French fiction, such as the ‘retour au recit’ since the 1980s and the championing of more populist notions of the literary. In terms of institutional recognition, French crime fiction has also benefitted from the academy’s increasing receptiveness to forms of popular cultures: