Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction by Richard Bradford

Author:Richard Bradford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199658787
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

Boileau-Narcejac (the nom de plume of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac) pioneered fictional investigations of disturbed, sometimes criminally inclined psychological states and are better known from their film adaptations than from translations. They produced the prototype stories for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Clouzet’s Les Diaboliques.

Far more than in Britain and the US, the rural provinces of France, along with the country’s provincial cities, provide not only the setting but inform the texture of much post-1950s crime writing. Provence and the Côte d’Azur are particular favourites (see Pierre Magnan, Michel Grisolia, Jean-Claude Izzo, and Maurice Périsset), and Maurice Bastide uncovers convincing layers of criminality beneath the elegance of Bordeaux and the bordering vineyards. René Belletto introduces us to the gangsters of Lyon and Philippe Huet (Normandy) and Hervé Jaouen (Brittany) disclosed uncomfortable activities in the seemingly idyllic north-western areas of the French countryside.

Finally, I must give some attention to France’s most famous, internationally-bestselling contemporary crimewriter, Fred Vargas (real name, Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau), for no better reason than she is virtually impossible to categorize. She said in an interview with the Guardian (18 January 2004) that she feels more of an affiliation to British crime fiction than with US writing or with her French peers or predecessors. Her statement flatters the work of her northern neighbours: there are parallels, certainly, but they are outweighed by contrasts. Her main characters—such as the medieval historian Marc Vandoosler and Police Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg—are magnificently eccentric and her plots often turn upon events that carry an air of the surreal (a tree planted anonymously in someone’s garden or a severed toe discovered in dog-mess on a Paris pavement, for example) but, throughout, an undertow of menace pulls us back towards a world in which murders are indeed committed. Imagine, if you can, a Gallic hybrid of Borges, P. D. James, and Julian Barnes and you will come close to appreciating her uniqueness.

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