Abstract
As a genre, crime fiction has proved to be literary form well suited to fictionalising the debates, dilemmas and afterlives of the Second World War for a number of European cultures. British authors, such as Ian Rankin in The Hanging Garden (1998), have investigated the legacies of the concentration camps and the hidden post-war lives of war criminals. Scandinavian authors, such as Jo Nesbø and Stieg Larsson, have challenged official accounts of Norwegian and Swedish wartime neutrality and highlighted the persistence of neo-Nazi circles in contemporary society in The Redbreast (2000) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005). And in German fiction, Bernhard Schlink’s series of novels centred on the private eye, Gerhard Self, bring to the surface stories of wartime anti-Semitism and legacies of the war in the present, such as Self’s Murder (2009). The preponderance of the Second World War as a cultural marker of individual, familial and national disorder and moral uncertainty is no less evident in the case of French crime fiction. For France, in common with other German-occupied territories, continues to live with divided memories of occupation – on the one hand, memories of resistance incarnated in the figure of General Charles de Gaulle and the triumphalism of the liberation of France in the summer of 1944, and, on the other, memories of collaboration, the rule of the Vichy regime and a history of indigenous anti-Semitism and collusion in the Holocaust. There is much material here therefore that feeds into the politics and poetics of crime fiction as a genre acutely sensitive to questions of crime and punishment, guilt and responsibility, justice and resolution.
Margaret-Anne Hutton’s French Crime Fiction 1945–2005: Investigating World War II offers a broad-ranging analysis of representations of World War II in French crime fiction, drawing on a corpus of over 150 novels and covering the immediate post-war decades until the mid-2000s. The study explores the relationship between literary form and historical events and legacies, examining how crime fiction illuminates our understanding of World War II in France and how World War II enhances our understandings of the aesthetics and ethics of French crime fiction. Central to this analysis is the notion of what it means to represent World War II at a specific historical juncture and how those representations are inflected by genre conventions as well as by shifts in historical understanding and cultural memory, above all as the wartime generation begins to die out. To this end, the study is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the work of Georges Simenon, whose voluminous and varied corpus allows for a critical assessment of the classificatory terminology of crime fiction that has often condemned such fiction as insubstantial and populist. In examining four Simenon novels from the late 1940s and early 1960s, Hutton reflects upon the ways in which the historical specificity of World War II is ‘held in tension with an ahistorical narrative which explores the mysteries of the human condition’ (p. 44). Such an existential or metaphysical interpretation of Simenon’s hybrid crime fiction/war fiction contests any clear differentiation between ‘crime fiction’ and ‘fiction’ tout court and calls into question the notion that crime fiction as a genre would be unable to engage with the complex legacies of war. In Chapter 2, Hutton explores representations of war in a range of very different crime fiction sub-genres – from the whodunit (Raymond Troye’s 1946 murder intrigue set in a prisoner-of-war camp) to Maurice Dantec’s 1995 roman noir/sci-fi hybrid in which the Holocaust enters the text via the psychotic actions of a serial killer and broader meditations on the human species and the nature of evil. The variety of crime fiction sub-categories in this chapter allows for discussion of genre inscriptions that reveal ‘how analyses of the war must both factor in the strictures and specificities of genre and be sensitive to the inevitable differences in the reception of texts with the passing of time’ (p. 79). In Chapter 3, Hutton investigates constructions of crime and criminality with close attention paid to the impact of changing legal and socio-political understandings of what constitutes wartime transgression and sanction. The use of a broad corpus drawn from across the post-war decades allows for intriguing comparative insights into fictional judgements made in relation to common law crime but also shifts in values and beliefs about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ criminals. In more recent decades, Hutton highlights the debates surrounding the criminal role of state representatives of law and order and their relationship to anti-Semitism and right-wing ideologies. In Chapter 4, the focus moves from crime and criminals to investigators and investigation via examination of three recurrent investigative figures in French crime fiction centred on the war years: the journalist, the historian and the second-generation investigator, predominantly father and son pairings. In the latter case, Hutton detects an oedipal pattern – war as tragedy – in the fictionalisation of such familial investigations. In the last chapter, Hutton evokes the temporality of remembering and the ways in which subjective and historical time are often asynchronous in a range of French crime fictions that explore the trauma and legacies of war for fictional protagonists. This chapter is particularly insightful for its exploration of crime fiction as a means of ‘humanis[ing] the issue of the past’s incursions into the present’ (p. 158). The final section of this chapter on the ethics and aesthetics of representing Holocaust denial in French crime novels from the late 1990s and early 2000s offers excellent and well-documented analysis of how, in a French frame, crime fiction novelists have engaged with the epistemological and ethical complexities of representing those criminals (in a French socio-legal frame where Holocaust denial is a crime) ‘who seek to unwrite the past’ (p. 196).
Overall, this study provides the reader with an erudite and extremely informative exploration of French crime fiction as a body of work and its imaginative investment in representations of World War II. The focus on literary form and genre offers valuable insights into how constructions of war are both read through and constructed upon narrative templates of our time, such as crime fiction. Indeed, Hutton emphasises throughout the imbrication of war stories and crime stories and the need to refute artificial aesthetic distinctions for, as she states, her intention ‘has been to show how works of crime fiction may be read with a critical eye which sees beyond the genre label’ (p. 195). Given that the study engages with such an impressive span and variety of crime fiction over so many decades, a final conclusion would have been helpful to the reader in order to draw together the many strands of debate and analysis. That said, what emerges most strongly is the persistence of World War II as a profoundly troubling period in French history – an ‘ever-present past’ that continues to fascinate new generations of crime authors.