Introduction

Louise Hardwick

The notion of crime crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. In

an era of identity fraud, délinquance, eco-crime and global terrorism, can we
move towards a reconsideration of crime in the French literary and cultural
imagination? To what extent have ways of thinking about power, deviancy,
exclusion, legitimacy and punishment evolved and changed, and how are
these changes represented artistically? Approaching the notion of crime
invokes a shifting scale from individual actions to global deceptions; crime
may suggest cunning ingenuity, righteous indignation or base violence, as
well as lust, hatred, jealousy and other Biblical sins, all of which serve to
underscore the fragility of human existence. Modernity is characterised by
increased spending on innovations which ostensibly aim to offer advanced
protection from crime, be it in our homes, workplace, or in the expanding
online world. Yet privately, much personal time and energy is still spent
reading about or watching representations of crime, real or fictional, sug-
gesting its paradoxical, enduring appeal. Recent academic responses to
crime in French culture take a number of diverse approaches, exploring
questions of genre, theory and ethics through artistic representations and
real-life cases.1

1 See, for example: Colin Davis, Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction:
Killing the Other (London: Macmillan, 2000); Claire Gorrara, The Roman Noir in
Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and
(as editor) French Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); Simon
Kemp, Defective Inspectors: Crime Fiction Pastiche in Late-Twentieth-Century French
Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2006); Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen
(eds), Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Keith Reader and Rachel Edwards, The Papin Sisters
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Deborah Streifford Reisinger, Crime
2 Louise Hardwick

The genre of crime fiction in French has received renewed critical

comment in recent years, and deservedly so, for, at a time when the printed
page is experiencing increased pressure from telecommunications advances
and the Internet, crime fiction continues to thrive. Claire Gorrara points
out that ‘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.’2 The revised edition
of the Dictionnaire des littératures policières, edited by Claude Mesplède,
appeared in 2007 and testifies to the pronounced interest in crime writ-
ing in France (including information on literary prizes, bandes dessinées,
film and radio plays).3 Yet, this success notwithstanding, there is perhaps
no other genre which has led to such fundamental and repeated question-
ing of its very nature. The current volume proposes a series of innovative
approaches to crime, seeking to investigate crime as a genre, and also to go
beyond the confines of crime fiction in order to identify the multiple and
evolving ways in which crime is manifest in art and theory.
What defines a work as crime fiction? In French, the generic fecun-
dity – or anxiety – of crime fiction is evident in the variety of overlapping
sub-genres associated with it: polar, néo-polar, roman noir, roman poli-
cier, roman à énigme, several of which are famously discussed by Tzvetan
Todorov in ‘Typologie du roman policier’.4 Todorov knowingly enters into
the existing debate on crime fiction by prefacing his essay with a quota-
tion from Boileau-Narcejac on the question of classification(s): ‘Le genre
policier ne se subdivise pas en espèces. Il présente seulement des formes

and Media in Contemporary France (Purdue University Press, 2007). Two recent
journal numbers also explore crime fiction: French Cultural Studies (2001) xii, no.
36 and Yale French Studies 108, Crime Fictions (2005).
2 Claire Gorrara, ‘French Crime Fiction: From Genre mineur to Patrimoine culturel’
French Studies 61 (2007), 209–14.
3 Claude Mesplède, Dictionnaire des littératures policières (Nantes: Joseph K, 2007),
first edition 2003.
4 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Typologie du roman policier’ in Poétique de la prose (Paris: Seuil,
1971), pp. 9–19.
Introduction 3

historiquement différentes.’5 He then nonetheless goes on to identify

significant ‘espèces’ within the genre, drawing in particular on Michel
Butor’s presentation of a crime writer in the novel L’Emploi du temps
which develops the notions of the duality of the crime (proposing that
the actual murder under investigation leads to the metaphorical murder
of the assassin by the detective) and the duality of time (there is the time
of the investigation and the time of the crime).6 Moreover, Todorov engages
with the lists of ‘genre rules’ which accompanied the development of crime
fiction and emerged during its so-called Golden Age in the inter-war
years. Two such lists gained notoriety at the end of the 1920s, published
on either side of the Atlantic, by the English theologian and crime writer
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox and the American S. S. Van Dine. Todorov pays
particular attention to a detailed list of twenty prerequisites prepared in
1928 (and thus pre-dating those by Knox, published in 19297) by S. S. Van
Dine, the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright, an American art
critic and creator of the fictional detective Philo Vance. Van Dine’s list
appeared in an article entitled ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’
in The American Magazine in September 1928, and is summarised by
Todorov in eight sections:

1. Le roman doit avoir au plus un détective et un coupable, et au moins une victime

(un cadavre).
2. Le coupable ne doit pas être un criminel professionnel; ne doit pas être le détec-
tive; doit tuer pour des raisons personnelles.
3. L’amour n’a pas de place dans le roman policier.
4. Le coupable doit jouir d’une certaine importance:
a) dans la vie: ne pas être un valet ou une femme de chambre;
b) dans le livre: être un des personnages principaux.
5. Tout doit s’expliquer d’une façon rationnelle; le fantastique n’y est pas admis.

5 Boileau-Narcejac, Le Roman policier (Paris: Payot, 1964), p. 185. (Boileau-Narcejac

was the nom de plume of crime authors Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud; Ayraud
was also known as Thomas Narcejac.)
6 Michel Butor, L’Emploi du temps (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1956).
7 R. A. Knox and H. Harrington (eds), The Best Detective Stories of the Year (London:
Faber and Gwyer, 1929).
4 Louise Hardwick

6. Il n’y a pas de place pour des descriptions ni pour des analyses psychologiques.
7. Il faut se conformer à l’homologie suivante, quant aux renseignements sur l’histoire:
‘auteur: lecteur = coupable: détective’.
8. Il faut éviter les situations et les solutions banales (Van Dine en énumère dix).8

Todorov’s contribution to the study of crime fiction informs several

of the chapters in this volume, whilst also providing fertile ground for
contestation and further debate. His analysis remains helpful as a set of
remarks which serve to identify prevailing affinities with crime fiction in
other genres, or indeed highlight new developments in fiction dealing with
crime, as is the case in several of the chapters in this volume. The assump-
tion that a novel about crime must produce a dead victim (‘un cadavre’) is
challenged in Lorna Milne’s analysis of two novels by Marie Nimier; Véro-
nique Desnain explores complex, more abstract forms of modern political
crime in the work of Dominique Manotti; Claire Gorrara considers crime
fiction’s reconstructive potential in post-war France, and Simon Kemp
demonstrates that the novels of Sébastien Japrisot defy narrative conven-
tion to thwart the genre rules on several occasions. Moreover, Todorov’s
dismissal of the role of psychology is counterbalanced in chapters which
underscore the fundamental importance of the psychology of criminal
behaviour in literature, art and film. Nonetheless, Todorov’s analysis and
his methodology raise two further points which will now be considered
in greater detail: the interplay between the development of Francophone
and Anglophone crime fiction, and the evolution – and limitations – of
categorical (and generic) boundaries.

8 Todorov, pp. 16–17.
Introduction 5

Francophone – Anglophone Interplay in Crime Fiction

The development of Anglophone crime fiction has long had one eye firmly
fixed upon continental Europe, particularly its French-speaking regions. The
American author Edgar Allen Poe is considered to have created the classic
detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), a work which,
as its title suggests, is set in Paris. The tale features the first literary sleuth,
C. Auguste Dupin, a gentleman private investigator (the word detective
would not appear in the English language until 1843). Dupin is considered
a model for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s
Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. The name of Maurice Leblanc’s hero,
Arsène Lupin, pitched as a French foil to bumbling English ‘Herlock Shol-
mes’, also recalls Dupin (Lupin is further explored in this volume by Emma
Bielecki). Dupin reappears in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842) and The
Purloined Letter (1845); in the twentieth century, the latter tale would re-
emerge as a fundamental text in French thought, interpreted first by Lacan
and then re-read by Derrida (discussed further below). Whilst there are
examples of ‘home-grown’ detectives who are active in their native coun-
tries and/or languages (Sherlock Holmes, Georges Simenon’s Maigret and
Christie’s Miss Marple), the interplay between the two languages in the
development of crime fiction, and in the development of interdisciplinary
theoretical writings, cannot be ignored, leading Andrea Goulet and Susanna
Lee to suggest that ‘paradoxically, it is the country’s robust trade in tropes,
plots, figures, and devices across national boundaries that has allowed France
to attain its pivotal status in the realm of crime fiction.’9
This overlapping engagement between Anglophone and Francophone
approaches to crime, however, goes well beyond the parameters of crime
fiction to make a greater contribution to sociological conceptions of crime.
Foucault’s rediscovery of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panop-
ticon, an architectural design for a prison in which many inmates could

9 Andrea Goulet and Susanna Lee, ‘Editors’ Preface: Crime Fictions’ Yale French
Studies 108, Crime Fictions (Yale University, 2005), p. 1.
6 Louise Hardwick

be observed at once without knowing whether they were being observed,

informs his ground-breaking study Surveiller et Punir.10 The physical struc-
ture and metaphorical potential of the panopticon have inspired much
further criticism, and Foucault’s innovative methodological approaches
to the field of interpreting historical constructions of deviancy and crime
are discussed by Lisa Downing in this volume. Moreover, Poe’s novel The
Purloined Letter about a stolen compromising letter and the threat of
blackmail, a situation the detective must resolve, provides the most com-
pelling evidence of the cross-fertilisation of Anglophone and Francophone
thought, in its psychoanalytic and post-structuralist reinterpretations by
Lacan, and then Derrida. For Lacan, the tale becomes an allegory of psy-
choanalysis, whilst Derrida holds that the Lacanian interpretation reduces
the narrative to a migratory signifier (the letter) and instead deconstructs
Poe’s text to demonstrate the dominance of the signifier over the signified.
Yet this is not to suggest Poe as the only influence. French authors were
more than aware of their outre-Manche contemporaries, and in Le degré
zéro de l’écriture, Barthes admires Christie’s narrative innovation in The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd:

Cette fonction ambiguë du passé simple, on la retrouve dans un autre fait d’écriture: la
troisième personne du Roman. On se souvient peut-être d’un roman d’Agatha Christie
où toute l’invention consistait à dissimuler le meurtrier sous la première personne
du récit. Le lecteur cherchait l’assassin derrière tous les ‘il’ de l’intrigue: il était sous
le ‘je’. Agatha Christie savait parfaitement que dans le roman, d’ordinaire, le ‘je’ est
témoin, c’est le ‘il’ qui est acteur. Pourquoi? Le ‘il’ est une convention type du roman;
à l’égal du temps narratif, il signale et accomplit le fait romanesque; sans la troisième
personne, il y a impuissance à atteindre au roman, ou volonté de le détruire.11

Moreover, in his theory of the hermeneutic code, Barthes made a defini-

tive contribution to post-structuralist critical theory which lends itself
particularly well to crime fiction. Originating from his analysis of Balzac’s
‘Sarrasine’, the hermeneutic code is particularly sensitive to the devices

10 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard,

1975).
11 Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), pp. 27–28.
Introduction 7

which identify, define, and then slowly unravel or solve a mystery,12 fur-
ther explored by Simon Kemp in this volume. The depiction of crime in
art, then, is shown to be capable of destabilising narrative conventions
through repeated literary innovation, as well as producing new art works
of enduring epistemological interest and of significant value to other fields
of thought.
This theoretical cross-fertilisation extends to the field of criminology.
The French contribution to this discipline is considerable, as demonstrated
in a recent article by Jean-Paul Jean surveying the uptake of French ideas
by Anglophone critics.13 Jean directs his focus at The Oxford Handbook of
Criminology, observing that the handbook ‘has no equivalent in the French
language’. French thinkers such as Foucault, Durkheim, Lacan, Derrida
and Wacquant are cited; Foucault in particular draws eleven lengthy refer-
ences. Beauvoir and Cixous are referenced in the chapter ‘Feminism and
Criminology’, although Jean cautiously identifies this feminist approach
as something of an Anglo-Saxon specificity. What emerges from this dis-
cussion, however, is the continual traffic in Anglophone and Francophone
epistemological traditions with regard to notions of crime fiction, crime
and criminology.

The Notion of Crime

Having thus introduced several significant currents of Francophone and

Anglophone thought which demonstrate that approaching the notion of
crime reveals a sophisticated web of interdisciplinary influences, we can
proceed to a thorough consideration of the increasingly diverse ways in

12 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970).

13 Jean-Paul Jean, ‘Confrontations: French Criminology seen by British Criminologists’,
Champ pénal/Penal Field (2004). Online copy viewed at: http://champpenal.revues.
org/document29.html [accessed 01/11/07].
8 Louise Hardwick

which crime is manifest in art. Again, the problem of genre is raised. In a

guest editorial in The Times introducing the choices he made when compil-
ing a 2008 list of ‘The 50 Greatest Crime Writers’, Marcel Berlins identifies
what he terms ‘the Dostoevsky Dilemma’ in crime writing:

Crime and Punishment is arguably the greatest work of crime fiction yet. But its
author is not on my list. I’m in danger of suggesting that great novelists who happen
to have a crime at the centre of their narrative are too lofty to be regarded as mere
toilers in the field of crime fiction. I’m not saying that, but I know, instinctively,
that I don’t regard Dostoevsky, Graham Greene, or many other eminent novelists
as primarily crime writers.14

The distinction Berlins articulates poses a very real problem for approaches
to crime. Studies of crime in literature often focus uniquely on the field
of crime fiction, where, as we have seen, the friction between conven-
tion and innovation yields significant rewards. Yet the depiction of crime
far surpasses generic boundaries. This volume moves towards a greater
insight into the representation of crime and criminality, and the inherent
transgressions, at the centre of several works of French and Francoph-
one literature, film and art. Crime is conveyed through particular lexical
choices (with recourse to some of the specific vocabulary associated with
criminal activity: assassin, escroc, du toc, leurre), through narrative develop-
ments, ludic manipulation of perspective (which may be limited, or even
provide an ‘access all areas’, behind-the-scenes view of the corridors of
power), recurring motifs (such as the femme fatale), or through reference
to contemporary social urban unrest. As such, the volume engages with
evolutions within the genre of crime fiction as well as homing in on new
approaches suggesting the diverse manifestations of the theme of crime. It
encompasses works knowingly inscribing themselves into the tradition of
crime fiction as well as those exploring themes as diverse as necrophilia, art
forgery, the censorship authorities, eco-crime, slavery and its postcolonial
representation, and banlieue criminality. In so doing, we move towards a

14 Marcel Berlins, ‘First Word’ in ‘The 50 Greatest Crime Writers’, Books section, The
Times, Saturday 19 April 2008, p. 2.
Introduction 9

conceptualisation acknowledging that notions of what constitutes a crime

(criminal behaviour or activities) remain intrinsically linked to prevalent
sociological discourse.
The particular ties between crime fiction and fiction concerned with
uncovering subaltern histories have already been identified by Charles
Forsdick, who observes that ‘the mechanisms of a “duty to memory” are
similar to those of the roman policier itself, for both unearth the past and
both raise questions relating to the actual purposes of such unearthing.’15
Contributions by Aurélie L’Hostis, Jennifer Jahn and Deborah Streifford
Reisinger particularly underscore such observations, considering literature
which exposes silenced criminal aspects of the contemporary postcolonial
world. It is also shown, however, that the ‘duty to memory’ arises in works
concerned with metropolitan France, particularly in chapters by Lorna
Milne (considering the consequences of environmental destruction and
eco-crime), Véronique Desnain (exploring the corrupting nature of political
power and the socially-engaged objectives of the néo-polar, pioneered by
Jean-Patrick Manchette) and Claire Gorrara (demonstrating how roman
noir writers engaged with the conditions of the post-war era of reconstruc-
tion). Indeed, some contributions sit outside all generic definitions, and seek
instead to inscribe art itself as a form of crime, such as James Hanrahan’s
chapter on Voltaire and the Parlements de France. By challenging the way
in which a crime is recorded, crime also emerges as a locus of future inter-
pretative discourse in several chapters, as Desnain calls into question the
veracity of the historical archive available for subsequent re-examinations
of events, whilst Reisinger applies a similarly critical approach to strategies
of media coverage of criminal behaviour. Similarly, the visual presentation of
crime demands a process of reflection and self-interrogation, evident in the
art of Jacques Monory (explored by Fernando Stefanich), whose provoca-
tive images depict the artist alternatively as victim and assassin, both seen
as products of contemporary society and thus challenging the very basis
of postmodern capitalism.

15 Charles Forsdick, ‘“Direction les oubliettes de l’histoire”: Witnessing the Past in the
Contemporary French Polar’ in French Cultural Studies xii (2001), 333–50 (346).
10 Louise Hardwick

The notion of what constitutes a crime is perhaps equally depend-

ent upon the sociological norms of the period in which it emerges, and
upon subsequent historical (re)analysis of events. When France took the
unprecedented step of declaring slavery a crime against humanity in 2001
(through la loi Taubira), this arose from repeated demands, especially
from Antilleans, for an acknowledgment of the criminality of what was
once considered acceptable, or at least defensible, behaviour. Thus public
debate in France on notions of crime continues to influence and reshape
the political landscape. This was further demonstrated as debates about
insécurité and la délinquance des mineurs reached fever pitch in autumn
2005, when banlieues in Paris and the provinces blazed.16 A decade prior to
these events, films such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) depicted
the social conditions which are all too often marginalised in contemporary
French discourse, linked to issues of immigration and integration, and
invoking a painful colonial history (subjects explored in this volume by
Chong J. Wojtkowski). Jim House points to the historical development of
the banlieues in tandem with the regroupement familial of Algerians work-
ing in France and the resultant discourse of exclusion:

[I]n a highly gendered discourse, post-colonial stereotyping of young Algerian males

centered on criminalization, and alleged their refusal to ‘integrate’ […] The negative
targeting of young males had spatial dynamics since it now focused on the public
housing estates and run-down banlieues where many Algerians and their families
lived by the late 1970s, areas and their inhabitants presented as a source of problems.
Algerians and their descendants were always the main targets of such representations,
even if these were couched within the euphemism of ‘immigrant’, ‘immigration’ or
‘young people’.17

16 For a discussion of the events of 2005 see Joshua Cole, ‘Understanding the French
Riots of 2005: What Historical Context for the “Crise des Banlieues?”’, Francophone
Postcolonial Studies 5.2 (2007) 69–100.
17 ‘The Colonial and Post-colonial dimensions of Algerian migration to France’, History
in Focus, No.11, Autumn 2006, www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migrations/articles/
house.html [accessed 04/11/08].
Introduction 11

The tropes of spatial and metaphorical exclusion are now a permanent

feature of counter-culture expression in France, perhaps most urgently in
popular music, particularly rap. At the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury, two prominent legal cases brought against the rap groups La Rumeur
and Sniper demonstrate this trend. La Rumeur were accused of defaming
the police, notably in a fanzine article discussing the massacre of French
Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961. As of 2008, this court case has been
ongoing for six years. Sniper were brought to trial for the song La France
(2001) which contained lyrics such as ‘la France est une garce et on s’est fait
trahir/le système, voilà ce qui nous pousse à les haïr’. Sniper were acquit-
ted by the court of Rouen in 2005. Nonetheless, the music video for La
France juxtaposes a stream of violent images from gangster films such as
Scarface with lyrics full of anger and aggression, thus posing urgent ques-
tions about the turn to criminal activity in youth culture in the banlieues
and its depiction in a variety of media.

Introducing the Chapters

The four sections of this book put forward contrasting approaches to crime,
exploring configurations of criminality, textual crimes, crime as genre and
the interactions of crime, the media and visual media. In Section One,
‘Defining Criminality’, the opening chapters explore evolving conceptions
of crime according to the prevalent discourse of an era. Lisa Downing
investigates the overlapping methods of categorising two types of ‘abnor-
mal’ subject – the sexual pervert and the criminal – in nineteenth-century
medical and legal discourses, particularly in the work of Epaulard, a stu-
dent of French criminologist Lacassagne. Taking up Foucault’s challenge
of using understudied case material to reveal the workings of medical and
legal discourses of knowledge and power, Downing presents a detailed
discussion of how constructs of sexual normality and abnormality have
been mapped onto criminality.
12 Louise Hardwick

Exploring another manifestation of crime in nineteenth-century

discourse from the Second Empire to the Belle Epoque, Emma Bielecki
considers the faked work of art. Looking at representations of forgery
in physiological sketch-writing and fiction, Bielecki argues that the fake
encodes a set of prevailing social concerns which call into question the role
of art in society. In doing so, she draws on the work of authors as diverse
as Champfleury, Rochefort and Leblanc, the creator of Arsène Lupin, le
gentleman cambrioleur. Moreover, Bielecki demonstrates that the fake
challenges our understanding of crime by drawing attention to those values
of art which surpass monetary concerns, and goes on to argue that it also
serves as a vehicle for interrogating the assumptions underpinning specific
kinds of literary practice.
The modern reconsideration of the crimes of colonialism is analysed in
the next chapter, with particular focus on the work of Martinican authors
Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. Here, Aurélie L’Hostis explores
how contemporary debate in France around slavery resulted in its official
recognition as a crime against humanity. Glissant’s Le Discours antillais
offers an important theoretical framework for the articulation of these
past crimes, whilst Chamoiseau contextualises the events of slavery and
the impunity of colonial crimes. His first novel, Solibo magnifique is dem-
onstrated to owe some debt to crime fiction, and emerges as a metaphor
for the silencing of Martinican history.
Exploring the ways in which crime may be inscribed within the literary
text, Section Two, entitled ‘Textual Crimes’, develops and exemplifies both
the depiction of crime in literature, and the literary text itself as a form of
committing a crime. Lorna Milne demonstrates how Nimier’s texts set up
a certain narrative premise which invites reference to the genre of crime
fiction and its theorisation by Todorov. Yet textual ‘norms’ are undermined,
both thematically and structurally, by the deliberate obfuscation of what
initially appeared to be the narrative’s main line of investigation. Themati-
cally, Nimier also casts suspicion upon the bourgeois as possible perpetrators
of crime in order to retain social respectability, and draws attention to the
consequences of modern nuclear pollution, read by Milne as eco-crime.
In the next chapter, James Hanrahan charts the literary text as a crime
and a form of innovation against punishment. Voltaire’s relationship to the
Introduction 13

parlements de France, whose authority stretched to both punishing crimes

and censoring literature, is demonstrated to go beyond one of antago-
nism and artistic suppression. Hanrahan shows that in the first half of the
eighteenth century, the criminalised nature of a certain literature fuelled
literary creativity, while also calling into question the issue of its own crimi-
nality through the knowing manipulation of the competing censorship
authorities.
Closing this section is Jennifer Jahn’s study of gendered colonial crimes
and the textual crime of silencing of women’s voices in Francophone Car-
ibbean literature and theory. By considering issues that are specifically
concerned with women’s status in society such as contemporary and his-
torical sexual exploitation, rape and prostitution, Jahn demonstrates that
three contemporary Martinican women writers have elected prose fiction
as a tool for analysing and criticising their community, whilst simultane-
ously calling attention to the ongoing injustice of their sidelined position
in discourses of Caribbean identity.
Section Three, ‘Crime as Genre’, provides a new perspective on the
evolution of crime fiction in France, from roman policier, polar and roman
noir (and Todorov’s theoretical discussion), to the depiction of political
crimes in 1990s France. Claire Gorrara examines French crime fictions of
the early post-war decades, focusing on some of the dissonant voices who,
through the popular medium of crime fiction, expressed profound unease
over the costs and conditions of reconstruction. Gorrara traces how an
American-identified literary aesthetic, the hard-boiled crime novel, came
to offer a formative cultural narrative for French writers sharply critical of
the political and economic imperatives driving reconstruction.
Surveying the ways in which Sébastien Japrisot manipulates narrative
perspective in his fiction and films, Simon Kemp sees in Japrisot’s work a
refutation of Todorov’s claims regarding the need to conform to the rules
of the genre. Following Todorov, literary ‘embellishment’ of the crime
formula is incompatible with the expectations of crime fiction. Kemp
challenges Todorov’s assertion, arguing that Japrisot successfully takes
psychological themes such as identity as the basis of his plot, and that a
sophisticated play of perspectives serves to construct and sustain a narra-
14 Louise Hardwick

tive which, whilst indebted to the genre of crime fiction, revisits it through
innovative, postmodern techniques.
Complementing the discussion of innovations within French crime
fiction is Véronique Desnain’s analysis of the crime novels of Dominique
Manotti. A historian by training, Manotti uses fiction as a means of reveal-
ing dysfunctions in contemporary French society, probing the influence
of high finance on the political landscape of the country. Desnain assesses
the suitability of using fiction as a means to present complex (and often
concealed) transactions to an unspecialised readership, and the implica-
tions of using crime writing to do so, read with reference to the néo-polar.
The chapter concludes with original interview material with Manotti, in
which her relationship to history and the transmission of historical sources
is figured as particularly appropriate to the genre of crime, utilising the
tension between revealed and concealed information.
The final section considers the modern form in which crime is brought
to the public consciousness with increased urgency. ‘Crime, the Media and
Visual Media’ presents crime through the lens of literary reappropriations
of media discourse, painting and film. Deborah Reisinger’s chapter takes
Kalouaz’ Point kilométrique 190 as its focus, and is particularly concerned
with the use of media reports in the literary fictionalisation of the true
account of the murder of a young Algerian man on a train journey to Mar-
seille in 1984. Reisinger demonstrates how the narrative enacts a textual
examination which focuses on the journalistic reporting of the event, to
pass bleak comment on the deliberate sidelining of the victim whilst also
paradoxically electing a fictitious journalist as the channel for the victim’s
memory.
The obsessively repetitive return to the motifs of crime and film noir
in the work of the artist Jacques Monory form the substance of Fernando
Stefanich’s investigation. Monory, a member of the Figuration narrative
movement, depicts moments of personal turmoil in his own life in his 1968
paintings series Meurtres, going as far as to incorporate himself into his
paintings as murderer or victim. He disrupts the very fabric of his canvases
by firing bullets into them or painting onto mirrors, implicating the specta-
tor, representative of modernity, in his art and the criminality it depicts,
producing work which hovers ambiguously between condemnation and
Introduction 15

glorification. Such themes are also explored by Monory through literature,

particularly in the novel Diamondback.
In the final chapter, Chong J. Wojtkowski examines Didier Bivel’s
Fais-moi des vacances (2002), a film depicting the criminalising modes of
violence and ostracism at play in the French banlieues. With reference to
Durkheim’s theories of collective behaviour, Wojtkowski concentrates on
the socialisation of the film’s protagonists, two young boys, one of whom
is in thrall to his older brother. The latter’s involvement in criminal activity
– and the implications of this for his younger brother – are foregrounded.
Bivel’s film thus raises questions of the perpetuation of cycles of urban
violence, and the uncertain, explosive limits between youthful ‘trickery’
and adult ‘crime’. Delinquent behaviour is, nonetheless, shown to forge an
unmistakable Durkheimian bond between its perpetrators, in a film which
represents an important contribution to contemporary debates on youth
culture and criminalisation in the banlieues.
These contributions engage with the notion of crime in a number of
innovative and diverse artistic manifestations. Through their contrasting
perspectives and methodologies, the authors seek to challenge the param-
eters of traditional approaches to crime and crime fiction by proposing
new interpretative discourses. Indeed, it is the infinite capacity for evolu-
tions within our very understanding of the notion of crime to provoke
and intrigue, to challenge and to condemn, which renders it such a potent
artistic channel. Uniting all contributions and the artworks they examine
is a palpable desire to address the reader or viewer and to implicate them in
an interpretative process in which they are challenged to become actively
involved, underscoring the potential of such art to stimulate debates beyond
its own direct parameters. Moreover, by framing the representation of crime
as a function of the age in which it emerges, and of the age in which it is
reinterpreted, we are led to wonder what future generations will identify as
the crimes of our own age, and how today’s moral compass will be judged
by tomorrow’s critics.