Pierre Magnan
Pierre Magnan was a French author known primarily for his detective fiction, particularly the Commissaire Laviolette series, which he wrote from 1977 until 2010. Born in Manosque, France, in 1922, Magnan's literary career began with regionalist novels, but financial necessity led him to pivot towards crime fiction. His work is characterized by a blend of historical context and police procedural elements, often reflecting the Provençal landscape and its cultural nuances, similar to the styles of regional writers like Jean Giono, who was both a mentor and friend.
Magnan's stories typically feature intricate plots linked to family histories and social issues, showcasing the darker, earthier side of his characters, particularly Laviolette, who embodies a more complex figure than the classic detective archetypes. His novels are noted for their rich descriptions and psychological depth, although some critics have found their plots convoluted. Magnan's first significant success came with "La maison assassinée," which propelled his fame and sales, leading to adaptations of several works for film and television. His unique approach to integrating themes of heredity, social justice, and the human condition makes his contributions to the genre particularly noteworthy in the landscape of French literature.
Pierre Magnan
- Born: September 19, 1922
- Place of Birth: Manosque, France
- Died: April 28, 2012
- Place of Death: Voiron, France
- Place of birth: Manosque, France
- TYPES OF PLOT: Master sleuth; police procedural; historical
- PRINCIPAL SERIES: Commissaire Laviolette, 1977–2010
Contribution
Pierre Magnan’s reputation as a writer of detective fiction was based predominantly on the literary qualities of his crime novels rather than the ingenuity of his plots or the attributes of his protagonists. He was above all a Provençal author, in the tradition of Henri Bosco, Marcel Pagnol, and particularly his friend and mentor Jean Giono. Magnan turned to detective fiction only to support himself at a time when he was unemployed and unable to sell his more traditional regionalist novels. He set out to create a synthesis between his historical-regional fiction and the more lucrative detective novel.
Because Magnan’s Commissaire Laviolette novels incorporate features of all the subgenres of crime fiction, it makes it difficult to assign his work to any single subgenre. The law-enforcement positions of Laviolette and his friend Judge Chabrand and the use of scientific police apparatuses (though often maligned) make the novels police procedurals, but the superior acumen and the eccentricity of both Laviolette and Chabrand suggest the orthodox detective novel. In addition, the abundant descriptions of sex and violence, combined with Oedipal motifs; the frequent empathy with the perpetrators of the crimes; and the subliminal leftist political messages evoke the French roman noir and film noir of the post–World War II years. Laviolette thus is a earthier, darker, and less domesticated figure than Georges Simenon's Commissaire Maigret.
Magnan’s novels have been translated into several languages, including English, and several novels in the Laviolette series have been adapted for film and television. His sales skyrocketed after the publication of La maison assassinée (1984; The Murdered House, 1999), and his work began receiving critical acclaim.
Many critics have complained that his plots are either too convoluted or too obvious and that his lengthy novels require considerable effort to read because they often deviate from the mystery to dwell on matters of mood, physical descriptions, and landscape. Magnan, however, considers such criticism high praise. More so than Commissaire Laviolette, the Provençal landscape is his main protagonist, shaping and forming his characters. Most of the crimes Laviolette faces can be solved only by an intricate remembering of things past, as they are motivated by century-old family feuds and atavistic urges. Magnan’s Laviolette series is great detective fiction and superb Provençal regional fiction that would have made Jean Giono proud of his protégé.
Biography
Pierre Magnan was born in the small Provençal town of Manosque, France, on September 19, 1922. He went to school there until the age of twelve, when he concluded his formal education. He subsequently worked as an apprentice typesetter and then joined the voluntary youth labor service, which substituted for the draft in occupied France. In 1937, at the age of fifteen, he became a member of the famous Contadour group around Jean Giono, who became Magnan’s friend and teacher, loaning him books from his library and encouraging him to write. Magnan writes about this period in his autobiographical novels Apprenti: Mémoires (Apprentice: Memories, 2003) and Un monstre sacré (A sacred monster, 2004). He wrote his first novel, Périple d’un cachalot (Voyage of a sperm whale), in 1938, on lined notebooks given to him by Giono, though it was not published until 1993. In 1942, to avoid the compulsory National Labor Service that would have made him perform forced labor in Germany, he joined the Maquis, a group of rural French Resistance fighters, in the Isère region.
Magnan’s first published novel, L’aube insolite (The strange dawn, 1945), draws on his experiences in the Maquis and was published to critical acclaim. It and his two subsequent novels did not sell enough copies to allow him to live as a writer, however, so he worked for a refrigerated trucking company for the next twenty-seven years, until he was laid off because of an economic downturn. Suddenly unemployed and without prospects, as he describes in his novel L’homme rejeté (The rejected man, 1979), he was told by several editors that his novels were too old-fashioned in the era of the nouveau roman (new novel). Magnan decided to write a detective novel because that popular genre still required stories to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and at the age of fifty-five he embarked on a new career.
Magnan’s first attempt at detective fiction, Le sang des Atrides (The blood of the Atrides, 1977), sold one hundred thousand copies and won the prestigious Prix du Quai des Orfèvres in 1978. However, the next three Laviolette novels did not sell nearly as well, and when he submitted La maison assassinée to his publisher, Fayard, it was refused because of his previous poor sales. When the novel was finally picked up by Denoël, it became an instant bestseller and has since sold more than five hundred thousand copies.
Magnan’s new fame led to bigger sales for his subsequent Laviolette novels and allowed him to turn his attention to autobiographical and regional novels. In 2000, he published what was believed to be the last novel in the series, Le parme convient à Laviolette (The purple suits Laviolette), in which the famous detective is killed off. After a decade of vociferous protests from his readership, Magnan resurrected Laviolette for what was, in fact, the series' last installment, Elégie pour Laviolette (Elegy for Laviolette, 2010). Not long after, on April 28, 2012, Magnan himself died in Voiron, France. He was eighty-nine years old.
Analysis
Pierre Magnan turned to detective fiction, not because he was a fan of the genre, but out of financial necessity. However, as an admirer of the great Provençal writers of the previous generation and a strong opponent of the postmodernist French nouveau roman, Magnan found that the detective novel, particularly the more conservative mystery novel, as published in France by the Éditions du Masque publishing house, permitted him to write highly structured novels whose investigative plots necessitate the unraveling of past events, often connected to family feuds. Magnan’s preoccupation with blood, in the sense of family and heredity, informs most of his plots, and the solution for most of the crimes in his novels can be found in the past, sometimes as far back as one hundred years.
Le sang des Atrides
Magnan’s basic approach is fully developed in the first novel of the Laviolette series, Le sang des Atrides. There is a series of murders, all which have been committed with a pebble propelled by a slingshot. The early victims are young men, but the case complicates itself when an old woman is found dead. An unfinished letter left at the murder scene begins, “My dear little assassin . . . ,” and Laviolette deduces that a child must be the murderer and that the old woman was killed because she discovered the identity of the perpetrator. Readers should be able to guess the identity of the killer and the motive from the hint given in the title of the novel; the reference is to the House of Atreus in Greek mythology, specifically to Orestes and Elektra, who plot to kill both their mother and her lover for having been unfaithful to their father and having murdered him. However, Magnan professes to have been fairly sure that most contemporary readers of detective fiction would not be familiar enough with the House of Atreus to easily solve the puzzle.
Death in the Truffle Wood
It is not surprising that Le commissaire dans la truffière (1978; Death in the Truffle Wood, 2005), the second Laviolette novel, is one of the few books of the series that has been translated into English, as it is his most original and most tightly constructed novel. One of the main characters is Roseline, a truffle sow who has made the fortune of Alyre Morelon, her owner, and thus is the apple of his eye. Laviolette is called to the small town of Banon to investigate the disappearance of several members of a small hippie community camped just outside the town. Not long after Laviolette’s arrival, the body of the first missing hippie shows up in the freezer of a local eatery, drained of all his blood. Roseline’s erratic behavior leads Laviolette to an old abandoned chapel, where he finds the rest of the bodies, all having been bled like pigs. One of the bodies, that of a young factory-owner-turned-hippie, appears to be out of place among the rest of the corpses.
The investigation soon begins to focus on a book of ancient magical spells and recipes by “the seventeenth-century alchemist” Albertus Magnus, or Albert the Great (who actually lived during the thirteenth century), which has been stolen from the library of an old friend of Laviolette’s. The friend is soon found dead with his throat cut. When the inspector finds a copy of the book, he discovers that one of the magical recipes indicates that human blood poured on the trees near truffle beds will stimulate the growth of the expensive plant.
The climactic ending unites all the main characters on a snowy country road and ends with the death of the serial killer. Desperate for money to buy the sexual favors of Alyre’s promiscuous wife, the murderer tried to increase his income from his truffle harvest by applying the ancient alchemist’s gruesome method. The murderer himself is killed by the sister of the former factory owner, who unsuccessfully tries to cover up her murder of her brother over a business dispute. Laviolette clearly has more sympathy for the poor man driven to kill by his sexual obsession than for the wealthy and greedy female factory owner.
The Messengers of Death
Written after the upsurge in Magnan’s popularity due to the publication of La maison assassinée, Les courriers de la mort (1986; The Messengers of Death, 2006) is the author’s masterpiece of detective fiction. Lured out of retirement by Judge Chabrand, Laviolette investigates a series of murders that have their origin and motive in a family dispute dating back to 1860. The novel describes the meager living Provençal farmers have had to scratch from their small, rocky properties for hundreds of years and the resulting custom, not supported by law, that forces all but the eldest son to leave home at the death of the father, often reinforced by the shotgun of the inheritor.
As always, Laviolette’s sympathies lie with the wretched criminals rather than with the affluent victims. The sparse house of the ascetic killer, who tries to right a wrong committed against his great-grandfather and will stop at nothing to find the treasure one of the villains cleverly hid, is contrasted favorably with the sumptuous and sexually depraved lifestyle of his victims, which finds its climax during a bacchanalian orgy in a derelict castle in the mountains. Once more, Magnan interweaves motifs of heredity, social justice, atavistic urges, folklore, and Freudian themes into a rich canvas of rural Provençal life.
Bibliography
Blaha, Franz G. “Detective/Mystery/Spy Fiction.” Handbook of French Popular Culture, edited by Pierre L. Horn, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 39–57.
"Magnan, Pierre." Dictionary of Canadian Biography, www.biographi.ca/en/bio/magnan‗pierre‗1E.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.
Montgomery, Isobel. Review of Death in the Truffle Wood, by Pierre Magnan. The Guardian, 2 Sept. 2005, www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview19. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
“Pierre Magnan.” The Telegraph, 25 May 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9290893/Pierre-Magnan.html. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Schütt, Sita A. “French Crime Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 59–76.
Review of The Murdered House, by Pierre Magnan, translated by Patricia Clancy. Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2000, www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-86046-649-6. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Verdaguer, Pierre. “Fictionalizing Proust.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, pp. 165–73. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=16266704&site=ehost-live. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Verdaguer, Pierre. La séduction policière: Signes de croissance d’un genre réputé mineur; Pierre Magnan, Daniel Pennac et quelques autres. Summa Publications, 1999.