Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

• Born: April 28, 1906
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: January 16, 1989
• Place of death: Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France

• Born: July 3, 1908
• Birthplace: Roche-sur-Mer, France
• Died: June 9, 1998
• Place of death: Nice, France

Types of Plot: Psychological; inverted

Contribution

It is no exaggeration to state that through the efforts of crime writer Pierre Boileau and his collaborator, Thomas Narcejac, a new type of thriller was created. Together, under the pseudonym Boileau-Narcejac, they wrote studies in abnormal psychology rooted in the philosophical outlook of existentialism current in the Paris of the immediate pre-and post-World War II period. Film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock brought Boileau’s and Narcejac’s treatments of human duplicity and gullibility to a wider audience than that previously enjoyed by most thrillers.

Their tales are puzzles of intricate design that require the reader’s close attention. Each novel contains at least one startling development; some contain several. Many of the stories deal with people worn out by their mundane existence and who grasp at perceived opportunities to find some meaning in their lives. Their gullibility is matched by the amorality and artfulness of more vital characters, who trick them into doing things they had never considered doing.

Biography

Born on April 28, 1906, in the Monmartre section of Paris to a shipping-firm manager and a housewife, Pierre Boileau was an accounting student for a time, studying at a Parisian school of commerce, although he became increasingly unhappy with his father’s choice of careers for him. Before he became a writer, he first learned a considerable amount about other people from his work as an architect, a writer of advertising copy, a textile worker, and a restaurant waiter. Writing when he could find time, Boileau eventually wrote several early novels, the third of which, Le Repos de Bacchus, won the 1938 Prix du Roman d’Aventures.

Because he was thought to be an opponent of Nazism, Boileau was made a political prisoner in 1939, just after the German invasion of France. Fortunately for him and for literature, Boileau was not executed or jailed but rather was forced to serve in the French Welfare Department, visiting various penal institutions to talk to inmates. In these institutions, he learned much about crime and the criminal’s way of looking at life; this information would aid him immensely in his creation of crime fiction. After 1942, the year he was freed from his internment, Boileau began to turn to active mystery writing, publishing several well-regarded works.

Thomas Narcejac was born as Pierre Ayraud in 1908 to “a family with a well-established sea-going tradition.” He attended school in Poitiers and later received a degree in philosophy from the Faculté des Lettres in Paris. As a result of a childhood accident that had half-blinded him, he could not follow his family’s seafaring tradition; instead, he decided to teach. Becoming interested in the techniques of detective fiction, he began to write, often throwing the results, he states, “into the waste-paper basket as fast as I produced them.” Some survived, however, and in 1948 he too received the Prix du Roman d’Aventures. All of his literary ventures were written under the pen name Thomas Narcejac because he wished to keep his professional life distinct from his literary one.

The two writers’ destinies joined when Boileau noticed in a bookstore window a work written by Narcejac, a book that offered both a striking critique of modern detective novels and solutions to their problems. Thus inspired, Boileau wrote frequently to Narcejac about transforming the mystery genre; this correspondence led eventually to their forming a partnership in June of 1948. They pledged to put their theories to work in a collaborative novel. Written in 1952, Celle qui n’était plus (The Woman Who Was No More, 1954) was published by the house of Demoël, then had the good fortune to be adapted by director Henri-Georges Clouzot into Les Diaboliques (1955; Diabolique, 1955). Another collaboration resulted in D’entre les morts (1954; The Living and the Dead, 1956), which, when filmed by Hitchcock, became the widely acclaimed thriller Vertigo (1958). Boileau died in 1989 and Narcejac in 1998.

Analysis

The novels of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac deal with the subject of appearances. Their main characters discover the validity of the old saying, “Things are not as they appear.” Frequently, their tales of suspense and intrigue proceed in a murky, unreal atmosphere characterized by heavy fog or creeping darkness at twilight. Characters deceived in one way or another by people whom they have trusted stumble alone through the half-lit scene symbolizing moral ambiguity and their lack of vision. Here, in this foggy place, people listen only to inner, selfish directives, abandoning both reason and decency in the process.

Generally these characters are weak individuals who lead aimless, unhappy lives, starved of meaning and romantic fulfillment. Their lives bear a notable resemblance to the empty, absurd lives led in the existentialist novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Puppets of fate, these characters lack inner direction, and lacking direction, they frantically grasp at straws, looking for some form of secular salvation. Love often is the most appealing form of salvation they seek: they believe that it will carry them to a place far from their boring lives.

Boileau and Narcejac offer painful portraits of normal individuals who become studies in abnormal psychology. Obsessed with an idea or a particular person, these characters gradually create a realm all their own. These private worlds would not be destructive, were it not that they lead to danger and difficulties as well as, on occasion, death.

The Woman Who Was No More

Their fantasies become the stuff of murder mysteries because their obsessions are not self-generated but rather have been created for them by others who can profit from them. In The Woman Who Was No More, for example, a character named Fernand Ravinel is monstrously tricked by his mistress, Lucienne, and his wife, Mireille, into killing himself and leaving Mireille a large amount of insurance money. Typically, the tale begins in a literal fog, this one having drifted into a French city from the sea. Accompanied by the ominous sound of a ship’s foghorn, Ravinel begins the most fateful day of his miserable life. The ship carries Mireille, whom he has promised to help murder.

The fog without is emblematic both of confusion within Ravinel’s mind and of the creeping evil enveloping his soul. Given a sampler of his thoughts, the reader immediately realizes that Ravinel is a weak, selfish egotist with no redeeming qualities. Only an ordinary traveling salesman, he somehow manages to see himself as a man wronged by a wife who cannot comprehend his greatness.

Tension builds as Ravinel talks to Lucienne about the coming murder; they will commit it together to receive money from the insurance policy Mireille recently took out when Ravinel bought his policy. Lucienne, being the stronger and more intelligent of the two, takes the lead and forces Ravinel to stick with his assigned role. Nevertheless, he cannot stop thinking about the woman whom he is about to kill and about some of the things she has done for him.

The two killers administer a sedative to the unsuspecting Mireille and then drown her in a bathtub. Initially, Ravinel denies to himself that he has done anything wrong; he numbly helps Lucienne get rid of the corpse, but he cannot stop his memories of his wife.

Brilliantly, Boileau and Narcejac allow scenes from Ravinel’s past life to rise ghostlike from deep inside Ravinel’s unconscious mind; her image begins to haunt him, giving him no peace. Almost as quickly as Ravinel finds a way to justify the crime, another vision of Mireille floods his imagination, driving him toward a nervous breakdown. The existentialist Ravinel is not troubled by fears of having offended God; rather, he has to admit to himself that life seems unrewarding and unpleasant. Nevertheless, he cannot place the blame on himself, where it really belongs. There is no self-recognition in his disordered mind, only self-pity and fear. The more he thinks, the more frightened he becomes of being discovered and seen as a common murderer.

He creates elaborate rationalizations. He blames Mireille and Lucienne, not himself, for any lack of ardor in their relations. The murder, he postulates, happened only because of his wife’s inability to appreciate her husband. The boredom that weighs heavily on him is the fault of the dull people around him and of the dull place where he lives. In short, there is no chance of his accepting any measure of responsibility for his actions. Little by little, the reader comes to realize the unlikeliness of a bright woman such as Mireille ever being attracted to Ravinel.

Later, a complication arises: Ravinel cannot locate the body, which he had dumped in a millpond. His concern turns to panic when Mireille fails to float to the surface. It is as if she has come back to life, he speculates, although he quickly dismisses the thought. Yet, despite Ravinel’s best efforts, the notion that his wife is alive keeps resurfacing. Finally, it becomes not only possible but also likely that she lives. What is left of his composure is destroyed by an actual sighting of the supposedly dead Mireille. Though he could not see her clearly, he knows that it was her.

The reader wonders about what is happening: Is Ravinel hallucinating, is the fog creating a specter out of nothing, or is Mireille risen from the dead and walking the earth? At this point, the novel seems to be nothing more than a routine “haunting” with a ghost taking vengeance on the living. Yet Boileau and Narcejac have created something far more complex.

When a mentally retarded girl, Henrietta, informs Ravinel that she just saw someone who looks like Mireille, his mental anguish becomes acute. The last turn of the screw happens when he receives a letter having Mireille’s signature at the bottom that states, in her characteristically breezy way, that she loves him.

In a spectacular finale, Ravinel, delirious from terror and guilt, receives another note from his “dead” wife indicating that she will see him that night at their home. At this point, neither Ravinel nor the reader knows what will happen. As the light fades with the dusk, so does Ravinel’s courage. Waiting breathlessly inside the house, Ravinel at last hears footsteps approaching his room—the familiar footsteps of his wife. Mad with horror and in need of release from his crippling guilt, Ravinel does the only thing possible: He kills himself.

Boileau and Narcejac do not end the book there, though it would be a conventionally satisfying way to end a horror or mystery novel. The last scene is reserved for the arisen Mireille, who only pretended to be murdered, and Lucienne, her friend and (it is implied) lover. Mireille congratulates Lucienne on a job well done. They believe that they have performed a service to society, ridding it of a boring, unpleasant man.

The Living and the Dead

The startling turnabout displayed in The Woman Who Was No More is also used to good effect elsewhere in the Boileau-Narcejac canon. Fog, depravity, duplicity, and amoral drift are once again present in their masterpiece, The Living and the Dead. The main character is an ordinary man, Flavières, who is recruited by his supposed friend Gévigne to follow Gévigne’s wife to see why she acts so strangely. By agreeing to shadow the beautiful Madeleine, Flavières unwittingly becomes a victim of a terrible plot to murder the real Madeleine. Flattered by the attentions of his old friend, he decides to follow her throughout Paris if necessary to determine the cause of the alleged madness.

On the surface, Madeleine appears to be exactly what Gévigne says she has been: an erratic, unpredictable woman of strange moods. Flavières becomes fully convinced of her mental instability when he sees her jump into the Seine River in an apparent suicide attempt. She is saved by him from drowning and yet is not happy about being rescued.

As in their other novels, Boileau and Narcejac demonstrate the deceptiveness of appearances, especially when they are orchestrated by cynical and amoral people. As in The Woman Who Was No More, Madeleine reappears, after falling from a church tower onto a stone pavement. Flavières, witness to the final act of Madeleine’s madness, tries to forget her and get on with his life. Yet he is constantly reminded of her, and finds that he cannot forget her. Years after her fatal plunge, Flavières sees her again in a crowded theater, then in other places, until he becomes certain that it is she. Madeleine—or rather the woman who once pretended to be her—has forgotten all about him; she fails to recognize him at first when he introduces himself. Caught and unhappy about being recognized, Madeleine first tries to lie her way out of her predicament, claiming that he is imagining things. When the lies fail to work, she confesses that she is Madeleine but will tell him nothing else.

Finally, she blurts out that she is not really Madeleine but instead is Renée Sourange. She had been recruited by Gévigne to impersonate his wife, a woman without mental problems of any kind, to convince a third party that Madeleine had committed suicide. Actually, she had been pushed from the belfry by her husband. Flavières’s report of the “suicide” added authenticity to the story given to the police by Gévigne.

In a second twist, when Renée tells the enraged and disappointed Flavières the rest of the story, he strangles her. His rage is kindled not only by the fact that he was taken for a fool but also by the fact that the truth has destroyed his vision of a woman too good for this world.

In a third twist at the end of the novel, Flavières, being escorted in handcuffs, asks the officers if he can kiss Renée’s dead body. With tears in his eyes, he does so, leaving an ambiguous message: Did he love Renée just as he had loved Madeleine, or did he still see her as Madeleine? Perhaps that gesture of farewell was also a gesture of forgiveness.

Two of the best collaborators in the mystery and detective genre, Boileau and Narcejac, with their highly ambiguous endings, twists and turns of plot, and extraordinary insights into the psyches of both victim and villain, established themselves as craftsmen of the highest order.

Bibliography

Indick, William. Psycho Thrillers: Cinematic Explorations of the Mysteries of the Mind. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Detailed analysis of the psychological thriller in film, which was directly influenced by Boileau and Narcejac’s literary inventions. Bibliography, filmography, and index.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Les Origines du Roman Policier: A Wartime Wireless Talk to the French. Translated by Suzanne Bray. Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, England: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2003. Address to the French by the famous English mystery author, discussing the history of French detective fiction and its relation to the English version of the genre. Sheds light on Boileau and Narcejac’s work.

Schwartz, Ronald. Noir, Now and Then: Film Noir Originals and Remakes, 1944-1999. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. This study of film noir and later remakes includes analysis of two adaptations of The Living and the Dead and four adaptation of The Woman Who Was No More.

Wakeman, John, ed. “Pierre Boileau” and “Thomas Narcejac.” In World Authors, 1950-1970. New York: Wilson, 1975. Each author receives an entry in this massive list of the writers of the world and their accomplishments.