French Mystery Fiction

Introduction

The foundations of modern mystery fiction were laid in France in an eccentric fashion. The most popular French writer of the 1820s, Étienne-Léon Lamothe-Langon, was a fiction writer, but many of his works were disguised as nonfiction, adopting the form of fake autobiographies. An example was L’Espion de Police (1826; the police spy), which claimed to offer insights into the hidden world of police informers. That book was not one of his best sellers but did prompt the production of a rival, which became one of the most influential texts of the era: François-Eugène Vidocq’s Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sûreté jusqu’en 1827 (1828; tr. as Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police Until 1827).

Vidocq’s book offered a colorful account of his alleged career as a Parisian thief, culminating in a change of sides when he offered his expertise to the police in 1809. He claimed that his offer was gratefully accepted and that he rose to command a force of twenty-four men—the original French Sûreté—before resigning in 1827. When serial fiction took off in the Parisian newspapers in 1843, however, one of the first works that demonstrated its potential as a circulation builder was Eugène Sue'sLes Mystères de Paris (1842-1843; The Mysteries of Paris, 1843), whose hero—a prince in disguise—engages in a long contest of wits with various criminal adversaries.

Vidocq was quick to cash in on the success of Sue’s book’s success by rapidly publishing a second volume of his “memoirs” as Les Vrais mystères de Paris (1844; true mysteries of Paris), in which he claimed to have returned to police work after the July Revolution of 1830, when retirement had proved too boring. It is probable that Vidocq’s memoirs were pure fiction. If they were not, they certainly embellished the truth considerably. However, at the time, they seemed to offer useful insights into the workings of a complex secret organization, and they became a key reference handbook for later writers of serial fiction. The first volume had some influence outside France. For example, The American writer acknowledged Vidocq’s influence on his “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). However, Vidocq’s second book nursed the development of crime fiction in domestic popular fiction.

Vidocq’s Offspring

Vidocq was used as a model by several writers, including Honoré de Balzac, who used a sinister master-criminal named Vautrin in several novels in his La Comédie Humaine series (1829-1848), and Alexandre Dumas, père, whose Les Mohicans de Paris (1854-1855; the Mohicans of Paris) featured a Sûreté chief named Monsieur Jackal. Vidocq’s most significant clone was Monsieur Lecoq, a character in a series of novels by Paul Féval featuring a crime syndicate called the Habits Noirs (Blackcoats). The Habits Noirs are virtually immune to detection, partly because of their masterful ingenuity in framing innocent parties for all their crimes, and partly because M. Lecoq is an influential figure in the Prefecture of Police—where, it seems, he sometimes uses a pseudonym beginning with the letter V.

Féval had pioneered detective fiction in Jean Diable (1862; tr. as John Devil), in which the eponymous master criminal is opposed—anachronistically—by a Scotland Yard detective named Gregory Temple, who is the first police detective to play a significant role in a work of fiction. Temple is the author of The Art of Detecting the Guilty, and his investigative technique involves mapping evidence on a blackboard in a manner that has since become a common feature of police “incident rooms.” After Jean Diable finished its serialization, Féval founded a periodical with the same title that published thirty-seven issues in 1862-1863. In parallel with that enterprise, Féval published Les Habits Noirs in 1863. After providing Les Habits Noirs with two sequels, Coeur d’acier (1865; heart of steel) and L’avaleur des sabres (1867; the sword-swallower), he wrote two prequels explaining the evolution of the criminal organization: La rue de Jérusalem (1868; Salem Street) and L’arme invisible (1869; the invisible weapon). This retrospective account coopted Jean Diable and three earlier novels into a vast “secret history” of organized crime. Féval later added three more novels to the Habits Noirs series.

Féval did not follow up on his invention of Gregory Temple. At that time, the French police were held in such low esteem—especially after the savage portrayal of Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862)—that Féval made only one token attempt to establish a heroic French policeman in his depiction of Inspector Badoît in La rue de Jérusalem. Badoît’s show is, however, eventually stolen by his sidekick, a teenage gamin nicknamed Pistolet. The same strategy was followed by Féval’s great rival, a Second Empire serial writer, Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail, who developed a series of his own that was parallel to Féval's. Ponson’s series mainly emphasized the thwarting of criminal enterprises, but it regarded the police with manifest contempt.

Ponson followed the same strategy as Féval, establishing Rocambole, a character he had earlier introduced as a spirited teenager, in the serial Les drames de Paris (1857-1862; the dramas of Paris), as a flamboyantly unorthodox crime-fighting hero. Rocambole’s adventures continued through the 1860s and survived Ponson’s premature death in 1871 to be taken over by other writers. The adventures of Rocambole were so distinctive that rocambolesque entered the French language as an adjective describing flagrantly implausible but stirring endeavors.

Invention of the Roman Policier

Paul Féval’s secretary and coeditor of the magazine Jean Diable, Émile Gaboriau, also got in on the act. He took up Ponson’s crucial realization that the ideal way to construct a crime fiction series was to establish a hero who might confront a potentially infinite series of challenging cases; however, he dispensed with the rocambolesque approach in favor of the naturalistic. His L’Affaire Lerouge introduced a sedentary amateur detective named Père Tabaret, but he was displaced in several sequels by his more active acolyte, a Sûreté agent named—surely not by coincidence—Monsieur Lecoq. Gaboriau’s Lecoq continued his career in Le crime d’Orcival (1867; The Mystery of Orcival, 1871), Le dossier no. 113 (1867; File No. 113, 1875), Les esclaves de Paris (1867; The Slaves of Paris, 1879), and Monsieur Lecoq (1869; English translation, 1879).

Gaboriau would probably have made further use of his Lecoq had he not died in 1873. However, his detective’s posthumous career was limited to one further book by one of his most faithful imitators, Fortuné du Boisgobey (1821-1891), who wrote La vieillesse de Monsieur Lecoq (1878; The Old Age of Monsieur Lecoq, 1888). Boisgobey wrote some thirty other novels in a similar vein, including Le coup de pouce (1875; the thumb stroke), La main coupée (1880; The Severed Hand, 1888) and Le crime de l’Opéra (1880; The Crime of the Opera House, 1881). Boisgobey was one of several writers who produced a series of nouveaux mystères de Paris in honor of Sue.

Among other writers of serial fiction who attempted to fill the gap left by Ponson and Gaboriau was Eugène Vachette (1827-1902), who wrote as Eugène Chavette. He was the author of Le Procès Pietompin(1865; the Pietompin cases) and the first locked-room mystery, La Chambre du crime (1875; the crime scene). Another was Xavier de Montépin, the author of La Porteuse du pain (1884; the bread carrier) and a pioneering fictional study of criminal psychopathology, L’Homme aux figures de cire (the wax model man), first developed as a play in 1865 and novelized in 1884. The most significant precedent for modern detective fiction, however, was set by Henry Cauvain’s Maximilien Heller (1871), which introduced a neurotic master of deduction who can be seen retrospectively as a kindred spirit of ’s Sherlock Holmes.

Such endeavors helped distinguish detective fiction as a genre in its own right in France and England, where Gaboriau and Boisgobey were very successful in translation during the early 1880s. Their works provided a flood of exemplars, which laid the groundwork for the boom in British detective fiction, whose early products included Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). It was, however, the English amateur detective—as spectacularly exemplified by Sherlock Holmes—who took over leadership of the field, swiftly overtaking the popularity of his French predecessors, even within France.

The threat posed by Holmes to the dominance of French mystery fiction was reflected in striking fashion by Maurice Leblanc, who had continued the Févalesque tradition of criminal-centered fiction in the adventures of the gentleman-cambrioleur (gentleman burglar) Arsène Lupin. His earliest exploits were collected in book form in 1907. The second collection in the series, Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmes (1908; Arsène Lupin Versus Herlock Sholmes, 1910), was the first of several volumes in which Sherlock Holmes, or his alter ego Herlock Sholmes—a change prompted by an understandable copyright dispute—unsuccessfully matched wits with Lupin. Lupin’s domestic adversary, Inspecteur Ganimard, fared even worse as Lupin elucidated one tricky mystery after another while casually avoiding capture. Arnould Galopin (1865-1934) followed suit with an unflattering portrait of Herlokolmes in La ténébreuse affaire de Green Park (1910). However, the detective that outshines the Holmes figure in this story, Allan Dickson, is an Australian.

Aftermath of the English Invasion

Leblanc’s efforts to denigrate Holmes failed. The English detective continued to out-do and out-sell French masters of deduction. In an ironic twist of fate, the most prolific French detective of the twentieth century, Harry Dickson, began life as a transmogrification of the central character of a numbered series of French translations of Sherlock Holmes pastiches written in German, and he might well owe his name to Galopin’s influence. The Belgian writer Jean Ray, who became the series’ translator in 1930, took over as Dickson’s creator in 1932, with issue number 63, and continued until number 178 in 1938, establishing the character as a significant archetype.

French mystery fiction did, however, continue to break important new ground of its own for some years. In Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1908; The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1908)—a book widely, but incorrectly, celebrated as the first locked-room mystery—Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) introduced an eccentric journalist-detective named Joseph Rouletabille whose further adventures were chronicled in Le Parfum de la femme en noir (1908; The Perfume of the Woman in Black, 1909) and several further adventures. Leroux also introduced the endearing Cheri-Bibi (1913) in a second series of mysteries, and Todd Marvel in a third, while carrying forward the Févalesque tradition of criminal-centered mysteries in such works as Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910; The Phantom of the Opera, 1911)—which gave birth to a significant modern legend by virtue of its cinematic adaptations and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s successful musical.

As English detectives became the cutting edge of crime fiction, French writers grew more inclined to fall back on a subgenre about appealing criminals in which they still held the lead. Leon Sazie’s masked bandit Zigomar (1909-1910) was soon superseded by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s even-more-rocambolesque character, Fantômas, in thirty-two volumes written with remarkable rapidity (considering that they were writing two other series alongside it) before Souvestre’s death in 1914. Allain was persuaded to resurrect Fantômas some years later—casually announcing that the thief and his chief adversary, Inspecteur Juve, had been frozen in suspended animation in an iceberg in the interim—thus adding another name to the lengthening list of indestructible legendary figures. Fantômas became a favorite with the Surrealists, who thought Allain and Souvestre’s writing method akin to “automatic writing” because they spent three days planning a plot, three days dictating the text, and four days correcting their typescript. The Surrealists also approved of the criminally inclined mad scientist in Gustave Lerouge’s eighteen-part Le mystérieux Dr. Cornelius (1912-1913).

Gaston Leroux had a rocambolesque fondness for seemingly impossible crimes, some of which, like the mystery of the vanishing train in La Double vie de Theophraste Longuet (1904; The Double Life, 1909), have extremely implausible solutions. Nevertheless, they also inspired imitators. The subgenre of mystery fiction providing ingenious naturalistic explanations of seemingly supernatural events became something of a French specialty, its first classic being Maurice Renard’s Les Mains d’Orlac (1920; The Hands of Orlac, 1929). Arthur Bernède’s “king of detectives,” Chantecoq, whose career began in 1912, often faced brazenly rocambolesque challenges of this sort, especially when he became involved with the femme fatale Belphégor, initially in Le Mystère du Louvre (1927). Bernède, Leroux, and an actor famous for playing Fantômas, René Navarre, formed a Societé des Cinéromans with the purpose of producing films and books in concert, with a heavy emphasis on crime and mystery. Gaboriau’s Lecoq and Leroux’s Rouletabille had been adapted for the screen in 1914, although their popularity was outstripped by Fantômas and by Bernède’s tale of elaborate vengeance, Judex (1917), in collaboration with Louis Feuillade. Bernède’s involvement with the pioneering of cinema novelizations prompted the translation of several of his books in the cinema-related Readers Library series, including the Chantecoq novel La Maison hantée (1916; the haunted house).

Evolution of the Roman Policier

The gentrification of mystery fiction took a significant step forward in France in 1927, with the foundation of two long-running series of books, Albert Pigasse’s Le Masque and Alexandre Railli’s L’Empreinte, which played a major part in popularizing translations of books by such influential writers as . French detective fiction began to cleave much more closely to such models, as exemplified by such pastiches as Pierre Véry’s Le Testament de Sir Basil Crookes (1931).

Véry produced more distinctive works in L’Assassinat de Père Noël (1934; the murder of Father Christmas) and Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1935; the disappeared of Saint-Agil) and made other increasingly idiosyncratic contributions to the Masque line. The author who became its domestic mainstay was the Belgian Stanislas André Steeman, the author of Six hommes morts (1931; six dead men), La Nuit de 12 au 13 (1931; the night of the 12th/13th), Le Mannequin assassiné (1932; the murdered mannequin), and many others.

Other notable writers to participate in this burst of creativity were Noël Vindry, the author of La Maison qui tue (1932; the house that kills), La Fuite des morts (1932; the flight of the dead), and numerous others, and Jacques Decrest, whose works included Hasard (1933; chance) and Les Trois jeune filles de Vienne (1934; three girls from Vienna). Spy fiction, abundantly exemplified in the Masque line by the works of and , was also relocated to the French political context by such writers as Jean Bommart, in Le Poisson Chinois (1934; the Chinese fish) and André Brouillard, who wrote as Pierre Nord, in Double crime sur la ligne Maginot (1936; double murder on the Maginot Line).

The most innovative French-born mystery writer to emerge during the 1930s was Eugène Avtsine, who wrote under the name Claude Aveline. His works included Le Double mort de Frédéric Belot (1932; the double death of Frederic Belot), the first of a loosely knit series that included Voiture 7, place 15 (1937; car 17, seat 15) and extended to Le Jet d’eau (1947; jet of water).

Aveline’s efforts were far outnumbered, if not outshone, by those of the equally versatile and amazingly prolific Belgian writer Georges Simenon, who signed over two hundred books with his own name and published an even greater number under various pseudonyms. Simenon’s Pietr-le-Letton (1931; The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, 1933; Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett, 1963) introduced the character of Inspector Jules Maigret of the French Sûreté, who became the most famous of all French detectives and the central figure of the twentieth-century roman policier. Simenon retired him in Maigret (1934) but quickly brought him back, by popular demand, in Maigret revient (1934; Maigret Returns, 1941) and continued his career until 1972. Maigret seemed distinctly French by virtue of his methods, which emphasized intuitive empathy over logical deduction. Maigret was, in a sense, the first great psychological profiler in crime fiction—and he also functioned as a kind of confessor to those he apprehended—a more useful confessor, Simenon claimed, than a priest could ever be because his judgments were not bound by dogma. Simenon’s pseudonymously written fiction included numerous narrations from the criminal point of view many significant studies in criminal psychopathology.

American Influences

The amazing productivity of writers such as Ponson, Allain and Souvestre, and Simenon remained a key feature of French mystery fiction. It was carried forward by Frédéric Dard, who wrote nearly three hundred novels, beginning with orthodox policiers written under mock Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms. About half his output was, however, representative of a new kind of mystery fiction that became fashionable during the 1940s, and to which he contributed a long series of adventures signed with the name of their hero, San-Antonio—a French police commissaire. However, his work is nevertheless redolent with an American ambiance.

The cynical attitude and frank violence of the “hard-boiled” detective fiction nurtured in American pulp magazines was introduced to France when translations of novels by appeared during the early 1930s. French pastiches of such fiction began to appear in Georges Ventillard’s Minuit series in 1941, typically using pseudonyms such as “Frank Harding” and “Leo Latimer.” From the very beginning, French pastiches of American thrillers attracted contributors with highbrow interests and credentials; Harding and Latimer were both pseudonyms of Léo Malet, a celebrated anarchist and Surrealist poet, who moved on from such pseudonymous endeavors as Johnny Metal (1941) and La Mort de Jim Licking (1942; the death of Jim Licking) to breezy policiers signed with his own name. In 120, rue de la Gare (1943), Malet introduced the highly unorthodox and influential detective Nestor Burns.

The influence of American fiction of this sort was greatly increased by its cinematic spin-offs, which made a bigger initial impact in France than at home and whose genre became known as the film noir. French novels of a similar sort were sometimes called romans noirs, but the label was always problematic because of its prior use to refer to the French equivalents of German schauer-romans and English gothic novels, and its usage was never universalized. In 1945, the large Parisian publishing firm Éditions Gallimard launched the highly influential Série Noire (noir series), which published translations of , Hammett, , and other icons of American hard-boiled fiction. Significantly, however, its first titles were books written by British authors imitating American originals: and , the pen name of René Raymond. Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), published in France as Pas orchidées pour Miss Blandish, had already achieved a succès de scandale in England, kick-starting a genre of pseudonymous pastiche fiction that further exaggerated the naked cynicism and brutal violence of its American models and greatly encouraged a new style of titling.

French contributors to the Série Noire initially followed the Minuit precedent very closely. The first French writer the series published, Serge Arcouët, signed his book La Mort et l’ange (1948; death and the angel), Terry Stewart. The series proved similarly capable of attracting highbrow writers. The avant-garde existentialist novelist Boris Vian, who had translated Chandler’s books, attached the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan to J’irai cracher sur vos tombes! (1946; I’ll spit on your graves!), Et on tuera tous les affreux (1946; and the ugly will all be killed), and Les Morts ont tous la même peau (1949; all dead men have similar skin). The first of these books matched James Hadley Chase’s success in being prosecuted for obscenity and banned. (Even so, Chase settled in France after finding it politic to leave England, as many exiles had done before him.)

As time went by, however, French writers abandoned such pseudonyms. Once Léo Malet had come out of hiding, Nestor Burma became the mainstay of his writing career. Burma started yet another series of nouveaux mystères de Paris as the proprietor of the detective agency Fiat Lux. Burma was one of the few late twentieth-century French detectives whose novels were translated into English, albeit belatedly, during the 1990s. Malet’s translated titles include Le Soleil nait derrière le Louvre (1954; Sunrise Behind the Louvre, 1991) and Les Rats de Montsouris (1955; The Rats of Montsouris, 1991).

Another significant recruit to the new subgenre who scorned using a pseudonym was Albert Simonin, the author of Touchez pas au grisbi! (1953; hands off the dough!) and Le Cave se rebiffe (1954; the sucker digs his heels in). However, the use of supposedly appropriate bylines persisted long after that. For example, André Duquesne contributed some three hundred titles to the imitative Fleuve Noir series during the 1960s and 1970s, using the pen name Peter Randa.

Alternative Influences

The most prominent dissenters from the new vogue for hard-boiled fiction, who preferred to carry forward the mystery-centered tradition, signed themselves Boileau-Narcejac. had made his debut before World War II, with Repos du Bacchus (1938), but it was in collaboration with Thomas Narcejac (the pen name of Pierre Ayraud)—who also published several notable solo works—that he brought his distinctive form of mystery fiction to its peak of perfection. In addition to calculatedly traditional work—they resurrected Arsène Lupin—Boileau-Narcejac produced a fine sequence of novels featuring characters caught up in seemingly supernatural events that turn out to be the results of ingenious criminal conspiracies, a regular feature of rationalized gothic novels. These included Celle qui ne’était plus (1952; the one who is no more), filmed as Le Diaboliques (1954), and D’entre les morts (1954; The Living and the Dead, 1956), which provided the basis of the famous Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo (1958). They, too, had an American model, though, in William Irish (a pen name of ), who wrote several thrillers centered on the dire anxiety of protagonists under stress.

Roman noir was not the only new generic description tested out in this period by way of contrast to roman policier. The term polar, which began life as a slang contraction of policier, gradually took on a life of its own, being applied to novels that were not straightforward pastiches of American hard-boiled fiction but, nevertheless, seemed slicker, more cynical, and above all more naturalistic than their stylized forerunners. Exponents of this kind of fiction included André Héléna, who wrote Les Flics ont toujours raison (1949; the cops are always right) shortly after a spell in jail and went on to write two hundred books under various pseudonyms; Alain Page, who made his debut with Liberté conditionnel (1958; conditional liberty); and Exbrayat, who excluded his Christian name, Charles, from his byline and developed a more humorous species of polar in the course of a one-hundred-book career, launched with Vous souvenez-vous de Paco? (1958; remember Paco?).

Like Boileau-Narcejac, Hubert Monteilhet embarked on a crusade to increase the sophistication of traditional French mystery fiction in such novels as Les Mantes religieuses (1960; the praying mantises), Le Retour des cendres (1961; returning the ashes), and Les Pavés du diable (1963; the devil’s pavement). Following a precedent set by Pierre Siniac’s Les Morfalous (1968), Jean-Patrick Manchette launched an influential series of political crime thrillers with L’Affaire N’Gustro (1971; the N’Gustro affair) that included Morgue pleine (1973; full morgue). The latter’s reprinting under the punning title of Polar attempted to set it up as an archetype of the new subgenre.

Late Twentieth-century Developments

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the gap that had opened up between traditional romans policiers and American-influenced fiction disappeared, not only because it was bridged by polars but because the social environment of the fiction changed considerably. The cynicism and violence that had seemed shocking in the noir fiction of the 1940s and 1950s became so commonplace by the mid-1970s that they were virtually taken for granted as aspects of modernity. Meanwhile, an increasing public appreciation of the actual methods and conduct of police investigators set far higher standards of realism for fiction in which they featured. Edgy subject matter became expected in all such works.

The avant-gardist filmmaker Jean Herman adopted the pseudonym Jean Vautrin—borrowed from Balzac’s Vidoquesque master-criminal—to become one of the leading writers of this period. His novels include À bulletins rouges (1973; of red reports) and Bloody Mary (1979). Pierre Siniac also went on to become one of the leading writers of the period, after chronicling the exploits of the significantly named Luj Inferman in a series begun with Les 401 coups de Luj Inferman (1972; Luj Inferman’s 401 strikes) and Les Cinq milliards de Luj Inferman (1973; Luj Inferman’s five millions). Siniac continued the long-standing hybrid tradition in French mystery fiction in what he called “fanpols,” injecting an element of le fantastique (horror) into the polar, in such novels as Charenton non stop (1983) and Carton blême (1985; white cardboard).

One of the most significant figures to emerge during this period was Didier Daeninckx, who introduced Inspector Cadin in Mort au premier tour (1982; death on the first turn) and chronicled the character’s further adventures in Le Géant inachevé (1984; the unfinished giant) and several sequels. He also wrote such nonseries novels as Meurtres pour mémoire (1984; murders to remember). Another emerging author was Thierry Jonquet, whose career went from strength to strength between Mygale (1984; Tarantula, 2005) and Ils sont votre épouvante et vous êtes leur crainte (2006; they are your fear and you are their dread).

While existing traditions maintained their appeal—Frédéric Dard’s son, Patrice, continued the adventures of Commissaire San-Antonio into the twenty-first century—other social trends inevitably had their effect on the development of French mystery fiction. Women detectives made their appearance, often in a distinctive vein reminiscent of the femmes fatales who were once popular adversaries of the likes of Rocambole and Chantecoq, as in Jean-Daniel Giraud’s Parfum sauvage (2001; wild perfume), which stars Inspector Lea de Sera, alias “Le Tigresse.” An avant garde was conscientiously maintained by such writers as Philippe Jaenada, who won a significant literary prize before turning to mystery fiction in La grande à bouche molle (2001; the VIP with the soft lips) and La Vie et mort de la jeune fille blonde (2004; the life and death of the young blonde).

English-Language Translations

French mystery fiction is only patchily represented in English, although its most influential phase—from Gaboriau to Leblanc—is easy enough to research. Many of the key adventures of Rouletabille and Arsène Lupin were still in print during the early years of the twenty-first century, and Fantômas had been in print quite recently. Émile Gaboriau’s books were still relatively easy to find in English translation. The mature roman policier of the 1930s is very poorly represented, except for Simenon’s novels about Maigret, some of whose exploits remained in print into the twenty-first century. Only a few later examples were translated, including the Fred Kassak novel, which was translated in 1976 as Come Kill with Me.

Although the series of 1990s translations of Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma adventures remains a notable exception, few quasi-American romans noirs have ever been translated. Boris Vian’s international reputation never prompted translation of his Vernon Sullivan books. However, the title of the first of those books was used in the “video nasty” version of Meir Zarchi’s unrelated Day of the Woman (1978). There were some signs of impending change before and after the end of the century. Ten thrillers by Sébastien Japrisot were translated, including Piége pour Cendrillon (1963; A Trap for Cinderella, 1964) and La Dame dans l’auto avec des lunettes et un fusil (1966; The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and a Gun, 1967). Daniel Pennac became the most prolifically translated modern French mystery writer with the English edition of his humorous Belleville series launched in 1997. These books include Au bonheur des ogres (1985; The Scapegoat, 1999) and La Fée carabine (1987; Fairy Gunmother, 1997). Jean Vautrin’s historical crime series begun with Le Cri du peuple in 1999, began to be published in translated editions in 2001 with The Voice of the People. The novelization of Claude Klotz’s film script for L’Homme du train promoted some further translations of his mystery fiction. Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale was translated in 2005, as Tarantula, in anticipation of a film version.

A useful contemporary resource for researching the earliest history of French mystery fiction is Southern California’s Black Coat Press—named after Paul Féval’s Habits Noirs series—which began publishing translations of numerous relevant items in 2003. These publications have included works by Ponson and Leblanc, as well as items from the Habits Noirs series and an elaborately annotated edition of Féval’s John Devil (1816). The publisher’s anthology series Tales of the Shadowmen by Jason Scott Aiken features new adventures, in English, of many of the classic figures of French mystery fiction, with an altogether apt emphasis on the rocambolesque. Novels in this series include Tales of the Shadowmen 12 (2015), Doc Ardan: The Abominable Snowman (2016), Tales of the Shadowmen 13 (2016), and The Last Tales of the Shadowmen 20 (2023). Other early-twenty-first-century French authors of mystery fiction include Pierre Lemaitre and Antonin Varenne. Many of Lemaitre's works gained global popularity and were translated into English, including All Human Wisdom (2018; Couleurs de l'incendie), Mirror of our Sorrows (2020; Miroir de nos peines), and The Great Serpent (2021; Le Serpent majuscule).

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