A Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015: Pierre Lemaitre's The Great Swindle

A jacket blurb on Pierre Lemaitre's novel The Great Swindle says something like "just as he does in his crime fiction, Lemaitre ... "  The Great Swindle tells of two epic-scale swindles in post-World War I France sparked by two especially odious murders, so why is it something other than crime fiction?

Perhaps because is at least as much a social novel about post-World War I France, about class fissures and political and business corruption, as it is about crime.  Perhaps because the build-up to the central swindles is so leisurely (and so beautifully done and so thoroughly explores the lives of its two central characters and a host of minor ones).  Perhaps because of its ending, which is atypical of crime fiction. Or perhaps because Lemaitre, a two-time winner of the International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction from the Crime Writers Association in the UK, won France's Prix Goncourt for The Great Swindle (Au revoir là-haut in its original French).

Nonetheless, The Great Swindle may remind crime readers of Dominique Manotti in its examination of corruption in France or of Daniel Pennac or Fred Vargas in its portrayal of eccentric households. And it generally avoids the twin dangers of sentimentality and whimsy when it does the latter.The villain of the piece is a weaker character than he could be, too villainous at times, a bit too thoroughly black when a bit of gray might have been called for.  The rest of the characters, even when engaged in outlandish actions, nonetheless--or perhaps because of those actions--combine to present convincing and moving picture of the messiness and the social gaps and broken promises of postwar life.

The translation's English prose is elegant and unobtrusive, a credit to translator Frank Wynne, who is not, a proclamation on his Web site notwithstanding, a terrible man.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The French are coming! The French are coming!

Amid fascinating new theories I've been reading about the origins of English (Stephen Oppenheimer's Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain could easily include chapters called "No Saxons, Please; We're English," "All Angles," or "Some of My Best Friends are Jutes"), comes crime fiction news about the French:

Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, translated by Sian Reynolds, and Pierre Lemaitre's Alex, translated by Frank Wynne, were named joint winners this week of the International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction by the Crime Writers' Association in the UK. The news release announcing the award says the CWA plans to establish a French chapter "in the near future."

Wynne, Lemaitre, and fellow French authors Antonin Varenne and Xavier-Marie Bonnot attended Bristol's Crimefest 2013 along with your humble blogkeeper, so perhaps French crime writing is about to start enjoying a higher profile in the UK and then, perhaps, in America (Alex is to be released in the U.S. in September.)

Whatever its profile in the UK at large, French crime writing has enjoyed an outsize profile at the Daggers. This year marked the fifth time in the International Dagger's eight-year history that the award had gone to a French novel or novels. The award was the fourth for Vargas/Reynolds, following on The Three Evangelists in 2006, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007, and The Chalk Circle Man in 2009. Dominique Manotti's  Lorraine Connection, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz, was the other French winner, in 2008.

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Your humble blogkeeper interviewed Fred Vargas last month and Sian Reynolds in 2008. It was Reynolds' solution to a bit of untranslatable wordplay in The Three Evangelists that spurred me to start interviewing authors and translators in the first place. I also reviewed The Ghost Riders of Ordebec in the Philadelphia Inquirer in June.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013