French stories of betrayal, paranoia and manipulation

The 1981 French movie Le Professional stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a French agent dispatched to Africa to kill a president, then left in the lurch to be captured and tortured when the political winds shift, and assassination is no longer called for.

Didier Daeninckx's 1984 French crime novel Murder in Memoriam (available in English translation from Melville House) has a son looking for his missing father in a novel that "exposed the hidden crimes of a nation."

In the 1970 and '80s, Jean-Patrick Manchette wrote novels whose protagonists are casually used and discarded by the French government. More recently, Dominique Manotti takes up a similar theme in her novels and stories. (Read James Sallis' appreciation of Manchette.)

Paranoia and manipulation were in the air in the 1970s, but did the French have a special affinity for this sort of story? If so, why? What are you favorite stories of a man or woman used, manipulated, and discarded government, corporate, or military power?
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Amara Lakhous on conflict Islamic style

Thursday's "Wide world of hate" post took up the diversity of ethnic resentment, conflict, and suspicion as revealed in crime fiction.

Amara Lakhous' Divorce Islamic Style, a social comedy in the guise of a spy story, offers this:

"I have to constantly remind myself that I’m Tunisian, and this neighborhood is full of Egyptians. Many people don’t know that there are rivalries among the Arabs. For example, it’s not smooth sailing between Syrians and Lebanese, between Iraqis and Kuwaitis, between Saudis and Yemenis, and so on and so on. It’s why they can’t seem to come up with a plan for unity, in spite of a common history, geography, Arabic, Islam, and oil. The model of the European Union will have to wait!"

That the Tunisian is really an Italian impersonating a Tunisian – albeit an Italian whose grandfather had been born in Tunisia of Italian parents before returning to Italy, where he longed to return to the land of his birth – suggests the fun Lakhous gets up to.

Here's what happens in the dormitory where the undercover Tunisian finds a place to stay:

“The non-Egyptian tenants are divided into two categories. Mohammed, the Moroccan, and I are in second place; we’re Arabs and we can communicate linguistically with the majority, limiting insult and injury where possible. But for the Senegalese and the Bangladeshi there’s no escape: they’re at the bottom. They have to submit or leave. To be Muslim isn’t enough. It’s better to be an Arab Muslim, but it would be fantastic to be an Egyptian Arab Muslim!”

Lakhous, Italian and born in Algiers, is only my latest reading encounter with Algeria. Didier Daeninckx built his novel Murder in Memoriam around the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters. Yasmina Khadra challenges easy notions that the Islamic world is either fundamentalist suicide bombers or Western sellouts.

Coincidence, or did the bloody end of Algeria's colonial ties to France make the country a moral crucible for relations between the West and the Islamic world?

While you ponder the question, here's a song by the Algerian-based-in-France singer Rachid Taha that you've likely heard before, though perhaps not in this version.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Didier Daeninckx Day at Detectives Beyond Borders

Didier Daeninckx may have the only last name in crime fiction harder to spell than Duane Swierczynski's. I'd long wanted to read him, but little, if any of his cutting, politically charged crime writing was available in English, and I was not confident enough to try reading a novel in French.

This week, in the space of two days, I found his story "Les Négatifs de la Canebière," which I'm reading with the help of a dictionary, and the good folks at Melville House sent along Murder in Memoriam, a translation of Daeninckx's 1984 novel Meurtres pour memoire.

The book is a fictionalized examination of the Paris massacre of Oct. 17, 1961 that takes in the history of Drancy, the French town from where Jews were transported to Auschwitz. According to a publisher's blurb,  the novel "confronts two of the darkest chapters in French history — its(sic) colonial racism and its complicity in genocide."

And that, in turn, leads me to suspect affinities with the work of Dominque Manotti, Jean-Patrick Manchette. and perhaps Leonardo Sciascia as well.

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"Les Négatifs de la Canebière" is available as part of a series called Les petits polars du Monde ("Little crime stories of the world"). Among the titles in the series is one by Sylvie Granotier, one of whose novels is now available in English as The Paris Lawyer from Le French Book, a new English-language imprint dedicated to making French writing available in English.

I wish they'd chosen a different name for their imprint, but it's hell of an idea. Like Hersilia Press, the imprint is a welcome source for English-language readers. Godspeed to these two exciting publishing ventures.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012