French Crime Fiction Research Articles

Virginie Despentes’ queer crime fiction

Virginie Despentes has become one of France’s most commercially successful and celebrated novelists. However, while the French press has often labelled Despentes’ novels as crime fiction (‘polars’), there has been little in-depth scholarly discussion of how her work engages and transforms the conventions of the genre. Studies of Despentes’ queer/feminist themes and rhetoric would benefit from a more sustained attention to her ambivalent appropriations of the masculinist tropes of brutal crime fiction, and studies of French crime fiction would benefit from considering Despentes as key figure in the development of French queer/feminist crime fiction. Examining novels ranging from Baise-moi to Apocalypse bébé, this article argues for the interest in reading them as crime fiction, and notably as works that underline the risks that accompany efforts to rewire masculinist genres from within and orient them towards feminist and queer concerns.

Gatekeepers of Noir: The Paradoxical Internationalization of the French Crime Fiction Field

The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.

Fatale Revisited: Reflections on the “Radical” in Radical Crime Fiction

Fatale Revisited: Reflections on the “Radical” in Radical Crime Fiction Lucas Hollister (bio) Je me flatte de penser que mon travail (très imparfaitement mené à bien dans Fatale, d’ailleurs) contribue à la suppression du polar. —Jean-Patrick Manchette1 Anyone studying crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries eventually must confront a basic question of terminology and critical methodology: what allows us to qualify crime fiction as “radical”? This question, like many of its sort, has both simple and complex answers. The simplest answers rely on what Theodor W. Adorno (6) critiqued, helpfully if perhaps too categorically, when he wrote of aesthetic politics understood as “the insertion of objective elements.” The radical, in this sense, would name those moments where crime fiction comes into contact with and represents historical movements, ideas, or groups dubbed radical. From this perspective, Dashiell Hammett would be a radical crime writer because he was for a time a communist and because he transposed the “objective elements” of his experience working with the Pinkertons into the [End Page 888] adventures of his Continental Op (Knight 135–36). This conception of literary politics, characteristic of influential scholarship on French crime fiction (Gorrara, Lee, Platten) and of widely read contemporary crime writers (Didier Daeninckx, Dominique Manotti), has helped solidify the polar’s reputation as a politically engaged genre.2 As necessary as this work is in a cultural environment where representational content and authorial biography remain the most significant vectors for determining the political valence of a text, from the perspective of literary studies politicality must also be considered in relation to stickier questions of genre, form, and style. Adorno (6), again helpfully though again too categorically, wrote that the “relation of art to society” was defined not by political content (i.e. “objective elements”) but by “immanent problems of form” that reflect the “unresolved antagonisms of reality.” How might such a suggestion lead us to imagine a broader, less contextually narrow political history of crime fiction as a form or genre? What subversive strategies, meta-discursive tactics, thematic reorientations, and critical lenses would such a history highlight? Beyond disseminating and reinforcing politicized perspectives and worldviews, there are other important ways that popular genres regulate politicality. First, genres define who and what is recognizable in a positive or negative sense as a political subject. When marginalized subjects try to appropriate genres from which they have historically been excluded, they risk having their concerns dismissed as excessively political (“preachy,” “radical”) or, conversely, as insufficiently political (reformist, mere identity politics, “not truly radical”). Second, and relatedly, genres exclude some forms of radicality (Jean Genet, undeniably a crime writer and undeniably not a writer of crime fiction, is emblematic of the genre’s tacit exclusions) while celebrating others (straight white-male marginality and regenerative violence).3 Third, genres recuperate and tame the radical through commoditization. [End Page 889] Politicized market pressures channel cultural expressions toward different kinds of conformity, and the price of entry into a popular genre is that one’s work becomes symbolically industrialized and hence differently legible. We might add that the inscription of popular genres in transnational cultural economies means that these fictions, while certainly informed by contextual factors, work at scales that are often unacknowledged in histories of crime fiction focused on a single national or linguistic space and its imputed “politics.” As Theodore Martin (88) has suggested, contexts that are centuries and continents apart are in fact “bridged by something that measures historical time on a different scale—something like a style, a category, or a genre.” Such issues pertaining to genre remain underexamined by scholarship on French crime fiction. For this reason, much work remains to be done both to describe the formal innovations (or lack thereof) that have accompanied thematically radical crime fiction and to develop critical lenses that will allow us to read across from popular crime fiction to the politicized violent writing of authors who are generally considered above or to the side of the genre: Rachilde, François Mauriac, Genet, or Virginie Despentes to take but a few salient examples from French literature. The fact that the aforementioned writers might appear out of place in a discussion of...

Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet Zvezdana Ostojic (bio) Andrea Goulet. Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 304 pages. In her 2016 book Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France, Andrea Goulet explores shifting extradiegetic scientific and philosophical paradigms through an extensive corpus of French crime literature ranging from mid-nineteenth century romans-feuilletons to late twentieth-century postmodern fiction. Throughout the pages of this profoundly erudite scholarly work, Goulet demonstrates the ways in which the vast body of literature she analyzes conditions the tension between the rational, deductive processes of the crime novel detective and the ultimately ambiguous nature of the violent crime. She weaves an intricate, deeply researched web of connections that spans over 150 years of modern French crime fiction and pinpoints the inaugural text of this genre's primary tropes in Edgar Alan Poe's short crime story The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841). However, what is innovative in Goulet's usage of Poe's story as foundational is her refusal to situate it as a normative text. She considers it rather as one that is "as non-normative—that is, as counter-rational, gruesome and conflicted—as any of the sensational murder narratives that were excised from the most purified accounts of the roman policier" (7). According to Goulet, French crime fiction inherited from Poe's story "two irresolvable tensions: between abstract intellection and bodily violence, and between (inter-) national politics and domestic privacy" (11). And indeed, as Goulet successfully illustrates, these tensions will continue to haunt French detective novels up through the most modern text she incorporates in her study—Dantec's cyberpunk novel Babylon Babies (1999). As she walks her reader across centuries and territories, Goulet extends her network of connections in two directions. On a "vertical" axis, she takes her reader deep below street-level Paris in an exploration of subterranean crime novels. On a "horizontal" axis Goulet emerges from the depths of Parisian catacombs to portray the cartographic dimensions of crime fiction, underlining the topographical aspect of detective investigation. Goulet's book is divided into three sections: "Archaeologies," "Intersections" and "Cartographies." In "Archaeologies" Goulet delves below ground level and explores catacomb crime gangs who subvert the apparent political [End Page 841] structure existing in the above-ground city. She argues that Cuvier's geological discoveries caused a shift in the comprehension and representations of time and space in nineteenth-century crime fiction. With close readings of Berthet's Paris avant l'histoire (1876) and Les Catacombes de Paris (1854), Labourieu's Les Carrières d'Amérique (1868), Guéroult and Couder's Les Étrangleurs de Paris (1859), Zaccone's Les Drames des catacombes (1861) and Lermina's Les Loups de Paris (1876) she succeeds in pointing out the ways in which these underground crime stories are deeply marked by Cuvierian catastrophism and prehistorical violence that challenge and subvert the above-ground horizontality and linearity of the Second Empire's Hausmannian Paris. These stories demonstrate how temporal linearity as well is subverted and superseded by a va-et-vient in which the prehistoric violent past continuously haunts the nineteenth-century spaces of modernity. Moving then to the Belle Époque's crime novels such as Leroux's La Double Vie de Théophraste Longuet (1904) and Souvestre and Allain's Fantômas: le bouquet tragique (1912), Goulet uncovers the underground world of larvae and ghosts who come to replace catacomb gangs. As Goulet approaches the first decades of the twentieth century she shifts her focus to "the intersections between national historiography and paleontological discourse" that she finds particularly noticeable in Gaston Leroux's Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1908) and Maurice Leblanc's "La Comtesse de Cagliostro" (1924), works that were directly influenced by advances in the domain of paleontology (80). What Goulet finds particularly noteworthy about these novels is that they share an omnipresence of oceanic space, and more importantly of coastal caves. This shared thematic results in their distancing from the urban metropolis and in an exploration of the "proto...

Noir (Masculine Noun)

This article examines how the preeminent leftist crime writer of 1970s France, Jean-Patrick Manchette, engaged with the Delonian archetype of criminal masculinity. By drawing out hitherto overlooked ways Manchette’s last novel, The Prone Gunman (La position du tireur couche), was in dialogue with both Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime films (notably Le samourai [The Samurai]) and with a broader tradition of Anglophone crime film and fiction, the article argues for the importance of masculinity to understanding Manchette’s efforts to radicalize the roman noir (crime novel) and subvert from within the hypermasculine thriller. Indeed, the transnational filiations and appropriations that inform works like The Prone Gunman and Le samourai demonstrate the need to conceptualize both gender and genre in broader contexts than they have often been given in studies of French crime fiction. While this article is primarily a study of noir in the French context, it is concerned more broadly with the question how the reception of Manchette’s work might allow us to measure the progress that has (or has not) been made toward regendering or ungendering crime fiction.

Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. Andrea Goulet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 295.

<i>Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France</i>. Andrea Goulet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 295.

Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France. By Andrea Goulet

Edgar Allan Poe has arguably been a thorn in the side of crime fiction studies for some time. Stephen Knight has sought to dethrone Poe as the founder of the genre (Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics: Detecting the Delights of 21 Enduring Stories (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015)), putting forward American predecessors. Others (Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007); Lucy Sussex, Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Melbourne: Text, 2015)) have spoken out against the monogenetic or immaculate-conception theory that sees crime fiction burst out of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Sub-genres have been forged to contain Poe, including analytic, metaphysical, and philosophical detective fiction. French crime-fiction studies, as a national category, as opposed to sub-category, has struggled equally to work around him, to fit him in, or to justify his exclusion. Where Andrea Goulet excels in this new study is in cutting through any number of such knots. Putting it, as she herself notes, baldly, ‘Edgar Allan Poe invented French crime fiction’ (p. 3). On its own, Goulet’s short prologue makes a striking contribution to the field, provocatively hitting head-on the problem of what to do with Poe, who, she writes, ‘was speaking in 1841 what may now be called “Global French”, a language that paradoxically reaches transnational proportions through local particularity’ (p. 1). The ‘French’ of Goulet’s French crime fiction is a provocation: it refers both to a specific space and language, and to their interaction with the transnational, the translational. She places French at the heart of crime fiction while simultaneously mobilizing its referentiality in multiple directions (Balkanizing it, perhaps, to extend her own play on such shifting, ultimately auto-antonymic terms). Every chapter of Goulet’s book resists unidirectionality, seeking contradictions and counter-movements at every turn. Her principal interest (among oppositions including transnational versus local spaces, horizontal versus vertical mappings, and political versus domestic violence) are maps and mapping; and yet, what she refuses is any clear mapping of the evolution of French crime fiction. Despite this cartographic argument against mappability, Goulet’s study itself transitions clearly from a deliberately, and justifiably, complex prologue and introductory first chapter on mapping crime to a set of reader-friendly case studies. From Élie Berthet to Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc, from Sébastien Japrisot to Fred Vargas, from Léo Malet to Didier Daeninckx, from Émile Gaboriau to Michel Butor, and concluding with Maurice Dantec and Vladan Radoman, Goulet plays the same, but always evolving, double game: she deconstructs the generalizations of broad-brush criticism, refusing to simplify the complex, while providing clear insights into literary works of at times overpowering complexity. All Goulet’s chapters make connections and are interconnected (horizontally), but all also dig deep (vertically). And Poe, of course, haunts them, appearing (unannounced, palimpsestuously) in such quotes as the following from Japrisot’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles: ‘Victoria Anna Penoe’ (p. 134). Goulet’s book is a legacy, a cartography, a celebration of absence/presence, and as such it is a powerful and readable study of French crime fiction.

Something old, something new, something borrowed: imitation, limitation and inspiration in French crime fiction

Looking at a range of creative strategies, namely imitation, limitation and inspiration, employed within the flourishing sector of French crime fiction, this study highlights some obvious intertextual borrowings and influences. Beginning with parody and pastiche and the replication of series’ titles to launch new collections, it then moves on to explore the role of Jean-Bernard Pouy in founding some of these important series and encouraging new approaches to crime fiction writing. Although the Le Poulpe series he founded is widelyknown, another series (Pierre de Gondol), created in 2000 with more muted success, attempts to take its readers past the high-low culture divide and even beyond the realm of the metaphysical detective novel.

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation

The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation

Rewriting Wrongs: French Crime Fiction and the Palimpsest

Rewriting Wrongs: French Crime Fiction and the Palimpsest

Twenty-First-Century Irish Mothers in Tana French's Crime Fiction

Twenty-First-Century Irish Mothers in Tana French's Crime Fiction

Crime in popular fiction: Remembering the Algerian War of Independence in contemporary French crime fiction

Abstract Critics have evoked parallels between the French experience of Vichy during World War II and the Algerian War of Independence, in terms of their intensely divisive nature and the difficulty the French have had, and continue to have, in acknowledging repressed memories of both conflicts. France has come rather further in confronting its Vichy past than it has in facing up to repressed memories of the Algerian War. In addition to the memory work done by historians and film-makers, occluded memories of Vichy and occupation have been tackled by writers of crime fiction. While the investigatory framework of the crime novel has been identified as an ideal narrative tactic for unearthing forgotten or hidden memories of the past, little critical attention has yet been paid to its deployment in remembering the Algerian War of Independence. This article aims to examine the ways in which the conflict is remembered through selected crime novels by three French writers: Maurice Attia, Didier Daeninckx and Maurice Gouiran, and the part these texts play in ongoing memory work.

French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories

French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories

French Crime Fiction, 1945-2005: Investigating World War II

French Crime Fiction, 1945-2005: Investigating World War II

The Pleasures of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction

The Pleasures of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction

French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories

French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories

Platten, David, The Pleasures of Crime. Reading Modern French Crime Fiction

Platten, David, The Pleasures of Crime. Reading Modern French Crime Fiction

Tana French and Irish Crime Fiction

Tana French and Irish Crime Fiction

French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories

French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories