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