Reviewed by: Origins and Legacies of Marcel Duhamel's Série noire by Alistair Rolls, Clara Sitbon, and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan Mark Wolff Rolls, Alistair, Clara Sitbon, and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan. Origins and Legacies of Marcel Duhamel's Série noire. Brill, 2018. ISBN 978-90-04-35897-3. Pp. 198. Contrary to the idea that the Série noire, the immensely successful crime fiction collection launched by Gallimard immediately after the Second World War, was a vehicle for importing American popular culture in France, the authors offer alternative explanations of the editorial strategy for producing almost 3,000 titles from 1945 until the present. First, Marcel Duhamel's translations of the initial works in the collection, especially La môme vert-de-gris (Poison Ivy) by Peter Cheyney and Pas d'orchidées pour Miss Blandish (No Orchids for Miss Blandish) by James Hadley Chase, domesticate (or [End Page 210] "Frenchify") these texts and perform an allegorical function for a French readership who, after living through the violence of German occupation and the importation of American culture that followed Liberation, could recognize their recent past and appropriate American hardboiled fiction as distinctly French. Second, Duhamel's "unfaithful" translations stand apart from the originals and raise questions of influence and legacy: did Duhamel find inspiration in works by English authors pretending to be American, or did Anglophone writers anticipate what Duhamel would produce as translations (where "traduit de l'américain" signifies an expropriation of the translated text into French culture)? Baudelaire's translations of Poe set a precedent for Duhamel's translation practice. Just as Baudelaire recognized in Poe's work a potentiality for expressing both himself and an Other, Duhamel recognized the potential for Anglophone crime fiction to represent France's recent past and its uncertain future. The choice of the first novels in the Série noire was imporant. Cheyney's novel inaugurated the collection, and as an Englishman writing American crime fiction, he offered texts that were already caricatures of the United States and lent themselves to a revisionist history of the war for a French readership. In La môme vert-de-gris, the female protagonist plays a role similar to that of a Marianne who effects her own liberation. Chase's novel set the tone for the collection, and Duhamel's translation is more faithful than what he had done with Cheyney. But the success of Chase's novel in France may have led the English author to rewrite the text in response to its reception in France. The immediate success of the Série noire prompted Boris Vian to write under the pseudonym "Vernon Sullivan" and produce four texts, including J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), which for a while outsold other crime novels in France. Vian eventually translated works for the Série noire, including Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (Le grand sommeil, 1948). The success in France of the contemporary American writer Douglas Kennedy demonstrates that the Série noire can launch an author's career. Once gaining recognition as part of the series, however, Kennedy had his work retranslated in order to define a more distinct voice. The authors of this monograph combine textual studies with translation studies to show that the Série noire itself is a literary phenomenon that merits further scholarly attention. Mark Wolff Hartwick College (NY) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French