NOIR/POLAR - THE MYTHIC GENRE:
THE CASE OF THE MISSING FRENCH DETECTIVE
INTRODUCTION
My starting point in this paper comes from being intrigued by an absence. It was while I was pursuing
research into what might be called the postcolonial novel in French and not surprisingly therefore I was
interested in Robinson Crusoe and what had been done with this literary myth by the contemporary
French author Michel Tournier, whose first published novel was entitled Vendredi ou les limbes du
Pacifique. I was also, as anyone venturing into this domain must, considering what Ian Watt had to say
both more than 40 years ago on the rise of the novel and more recently on Myths of Modern
Individualism. The four great figures evoked by Watt in this latter work are Faust, Don Quixote, Don
Juan and Robinson Crusoe and while he sees the birth of the first three as occurring during the CounterReformation, with the fourth immediately following, tellingly he emphasises the importance of the
nineteenth century in their evolution:
"With the increasing dominance of the new individualism, the punitive elements in the CounterReformation plots were removed; and a more symbolic, indeed transcendental, view of the myths
changed the way all four characters were understood. In the nineteenth century all four spread
across the Western world and thus attained a universal and international status." (Op. Cit. Xv)
He then goes on to offer his working definition of myth which is appropriate both to the way in which I
use it in the present article and also to the definition proposed by Tournier:
"a traditonal story that is exceptionally widely known throughout the culture, that is credited with
a historical or quasi-historical belief, and that embodies or symbolizes some of the most basic
values of a society." (Ibid. xvi)
Tournier also evokes various similar figures when, in his intellectual autobiography Le Vent Paraclet, he
speaks about myth and its fundamental importance to his own writing and obviously given his subject,
he also cites the case of Robinson Crusoe as just such a literary myth alongside such others as Don Juan.
Having long had an intimate acquaintance with Tournier’s work, I was familiar with what I considered
to be a notable absence from his list of mythical figures, who have a precise birth in a literary work but
have long since gone beyond it to exist in us and the general sphere, such that even those who have not
read the original work in some sense know what, with Watt, we may call "the story" of Robinson
Crusoe. And when I found the same absence in Watt’s list, particularly given his preoccupation with
individualism and his stress on the role of the nineteenth century, I set off in pursuit of the missing
figure.
For the absent figure I speak of is none other than the great detective Sherlock Holmes and, of course,
all his literary avatars male and female alike. Surely there is no clearer modern example of the individual
in his struggle with the universe. It seems beyond doubt that the detective must have his place in the
Pantheon of modern myths and among those literary creations moreover who transcend their work of
origin and traverse many forms of cultural expression, but can the quintessentially English Holmes do
duty for the French? And what particular values of society might attach to his mythical status?
POLAR
Of course, my subject is French "detective fiction" and I do want to place inverted commas round
"detective fiction" as I am especially intrigued by the fact that, le commissaire Maigret notwithstanding,
there is a particular absence of the great detective figure in the French genre. Of course it is true that
there are many detectives and many policemen to be found in French writing of this sort and any trawl
through the many histories of the genre, which are frequent as well as numerous publications in France,
could be used to produce a list of names. But possibly only two of those names would automatically
evoke that of their creator, for to the couple Simenon - Maigret we must add Mallet - Burma "Le
premier privé français". Why is it then that the genre in English, at least, should lead instantly to a list of
authors whose names are immediately linked to specific characters who are Holmes, Wimsey, Poirot,
Marple, Rebus and Zen and so on almost ad infinitum and yet the detective should occupy so little space
in the French equivalent? Although honesty compels me to add that their place is taken up as far as the
readers are concerned by voluminous and rapid translation of the English works. French best-seller lists
are often topped by Patricia Highsmith.
So now is the time to turn to what the genre is actually called in French and to the "Noir/Polar" of my
title. Let me take the "polar" first since it is very common currency, although forged only in 1968 - there
is a review devoted to this kind of fiction in France which bears the title Polar. It might appear at first to
attack what I am attempting to develop as the central argument, because a "polar" is a crime novel, a
detective novel, a whodunit, a thriller, a police procedural and so on; it is a contraction of "roman
policier" to "pol" plus the augmentative/pejorative suffix "ard" which looses its "d" so leaving the
neologism homophone of things polar, with the result that Internet inquiries on the topic mingle essential
information with statistics covering the penguin population of South Georgia! So if the phenomenon is
labelled "polar" in France, does this not mean that the genre insists on the presence of the police and the
primacy of detection as the defining characteristic? To which the answer is no - partly because by the
time the term has emerged, the genre is dominated by works in which the police have little or no part
and partly because the deformation of the word itself is indicative not only of a deeply rooted French
scorn for all things to do with the police but also of the fact that over its very long history, and this goes
back much, much further than many histories of the genre allow, there is a much more important
emphasis on both the criminal himself and the criminal milieu in France, to such an extent that the
passage of vocabulary from criminal slang into common currency has been accelerated massively by the
characteristic expression of the "polar". What greater "frisson" or thrill in France than to be in
possession of the lexis of the milieu and thus to rub shoulders, while being of course in complete safety,
with the lowlife, the criminals who in perhaps their meanest manifestation - that of the pimp characterise themselves linguistically as do any isolated human group: they are not quite "the people"
(like the Lakota etc.) but they are "les hommes" whereas you and I are "les caves" (the mugs, the
punters). And this is true however far back we look and whether or not we include memoirs and
"authentic" documentation alongside actual fiction. In his absolutely central (to the entire question, that
is) Mémoires of 1828 Vidocq, a former criminal turned Chief of Police (and the inspiration for Balzac’s
Vautrin) offers the observation, "Flics et truands, c’est tout comme." What is still current French slang
(although with many more recent competitors) for the police? - Les flics; and crooks? - truands! - but in
1828 these were the argot of the milieu (look what has happened to both of those words, even in
English!) So the "polar" in France, even before it was called by that name has always insisted on the
authentic evocation of the criminal milieu (or at least the semblance of such) and as for the detective,
well, who can name another French detective apart from Maigret who has successfully crossed the
frontiers of the French-speaking world. So the emphasis of the polar is most definitely not on the police
and perhaps crime fiction would be a better label.
NOIR
This brings us to the "noir", which, unlike the French detective, has more than escaped the confines of
the French language and established itself as a territory of debate within both literary and film studies.
Here is what the dictionaries give: "Roman noir: genre emprunté aux Anglais, récit d’aventures
macabres, de brigands, de fantômes; (....) cf. Série noire" [Petit Robert]
And for film, merely a list: "Film policier. Film de gangsters. Film noir." Although one notes the
hierarchy suggesting that the American import "gangsters" may precede the birth of the "noir" which
would be quite untrue, even purely in terms of film style - but although it may be occasionally useful to
refer to cinema, it is not my main subject here.
The "noir" element is in fact much older and having been used initially to designate the equivalent of the
English Gothic novel it became in mid-twentieth century the label given to the universe described in
American "hard-boiled" detective fiction such as produced by Dashiell Hammett. From there and the
creation of the "Série noire" in 1945, which was initially so dominated by translations from the
American that the first French contributors took American-sounding pseudonyms, comes the kind of
view found in the Robert entry: namely that it designates an essentially foreign phenomenon only slowly
domesticated in France. This is to overlook several important strands of continuity in French cultural
production and in French life in general which run through the 30s, the Occupation and Vichy, and
which, although momentarily masked by the wave of Americana that dominates Europe in the 50s, reemerge again today among the writers whose work I shall go on to discuss. It is also to overlook the fact
the birth of the "noir" in French form is usually dated from the publication, in 1943, of the first work by
Léo Mallet: 120 rue de la gare. (R. Deleuse, Introduction aux romans policier et noir français in Le Polar
français, Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 1995).
Not that the "Série noire" was the first collection to advertise itself to its readership as a homogenous
series (the crime equivalent of Gallimard’s "Série blanche" - the highbrow novel) it was preceded in this
most notably by Le Masque, which, while French histories of the genre describe it as "placé sous le
signe de la déduction" and thus firmly in the puzzle-solving category of appeal to the reader, spawned
no really memorable detectives and particularly none who run from one novel to the next. One of its
most successful authors, for example, Pierre Véry, whose best known works (perhaps because filmed as
well) are probably Les Disparus de Saint-Agil, a mystery involving boys disappearing from a boarding
school, and Goupi Mains-Rouges, can be said to be typical insofar as those who solve the crimes in his
works are never part of the Police or even really of officialdom. Goupi Mains-Rouges, moreover,
provides us with a very good example of how the genre slides seamlessly from the 30s into Vichy and
beyond, since its resolution of a crime within a peasant family also includes the re-absorption into that
family and its traditional rural ways of the one member of the younger generation who had made the
break and gone off to city life in Paris. At the end he stays to marry his cousin and thus fulfil the Vichy
prescription for the atonement of the sins of the previous Republican decades - "Ainsi il gratterait la
terre, comme l’avaient fait les Goupi depuis toujours." The genre really is very accommodating of
ideology! In 1942 the definition of crime was to have deserted the ways of la France profonde - at least
in the eyes of some.
It is also worth noting that the first Maigrets are being published and translated to the screen (Renoir - La
Nuit du carrefour 1932) at the time of the successive financial scandals which culminate in the affaire
Stavisky and in the riots of the 6th February 1934, the assault on the French Parliament, instigated
because the Right is able to persuade enough people that the Republic itself is corrupt and guilty - a
theme to be taken up by Vichy. Not the least fascinating footnote to this complex conjunction is the fact
that Stavisky’s widow, in the wake of the notoriety caused by her husband’s suicide/murder was offered
a screen test as an instance of that tendency in film production to see existing fame/notoriety as
translatable to the screen and hence to the box-office. Her screen test took place on the set of Arsène
Lupin, gentleman cambrioleur! (For details see Revie, Ian: Stavisky: The Politics of Dreams or Le
Rouge et le Blanc, Modern and Contemporary France 41). In its faits divers as well as in its mainstream,
for this genre it is the whiff of scandal and the criminal that take on the glamour and become the centre
of interest more than the patient work of detection.
So even at the very time when a great French detective is establishing his place in the public imagination
(and even if his creator was Belgian) the disinclination of the French to believe in the forces of order as
truly on their side dominates the final years of the Third Republic. Despite the popularity of this form of
fiction, whether in French original or in translation, the context is profoundly hostile to the production of
a stream of figures who might parallel the "anglo-saxons" - those figures whose names might eclipse
that of the creator. Moreover, in the years following the end of the Occupation and, of course, the
Epuration, two of the genre's most celebrated French exponents as well as theorists Pierre Boileau and
Thomas Narcejac would elaborate on their proposition that the one element needed to guarantee the
success of the suspense was the absence of any police figure at all - where then can resolution (justice)
come from and how? Hence their celebrated Celle qui n' était plus (1952), which two years later became
an internationally successful film Les Diaboliques, with its unexpected interchanging of victim and
perpetrator, is also an attempt to find a specifically French form for the genre which leaves behind the
English puzzle-solving but is also distanced from the almost casual violence perpetrated both by the
criminals and the private-eyes of many of the American works so central to the establishment of the
Série noire at this time.
In his fascinating essay on the genre Le Roman Policier, which was published in the Pléiade's Histoire
des Littératures (vol. 3), Narcejac also sees its roots in the popular forms of the eighteenth century, but
above all, he sees the essential lineage created in the nineteenth as being the opposition of reason to
mystery and the central ambition of the "roman policier" to explain everything as positivism and science
set out to do.
"Considéré sociologiquement, le roman policier, à ses origines, est le symbole d'une croisade
contre toutes les forces d'illusion. Une certitude le porte: celle que le raisonnement , toujours et
partout, aura le dernier mot. Voilà pourquoi, sans doute, l'enquête est la partie essentielle du jeune
roman policier." (Op. Cit. 1699)
Yet Narcejac also developed the paradox inherent in such a concept for the novel form, since to invest
so heavily in the mystery and its solution was to reject all the qualities of the literary form of the novel as
it had developed from Balzac to the early postwar period in which Narcejac was writing. All the
subtleties of character development and room for doubt surrounding psychology and motive needed to
be pruned from the detective novel and he noted the tendency of those considered to be the leading
French exponents - Simenon included - of the day to turn away from the kernel of mystery in search of
other qualities.
HYPOTHESIS
When we come to consider the moments at which the genre begins in France, by which I mean its
earliest origins, and those moments when it is most in vogue, particularly given the tendency of the
cinema to accelerate the popularity of the genre as a whole and to accentuate certain aspects of it, we
find a strong correlation with moments in the history of France when paranoia dominates and the true
desire is not to be found out. In other words, we find that the absence of the French detective signifies
the suppression of still unresolved guilt. We see this most clearly perhaps in the postwar period in which
we have both the integration of the "roman policier" into the "Nouveau Roman" under the sign of the
Oedipal - whether this is rejected as is the case with Robbe-Grillet in Les Gommes or sublimated as is
the case with Butor in L'Emploi du temps. Nor is this a moment that can be confined to the birth of the
"Nouveau Roman", as later on the writings of a Modiano or a Rinaldi (who both begin publishing
around the cusp of May 68) constantly flag us back to the sins of the fathers and the period of the
Occupation. We see it particularly clearly and at a highly significant moment in Queneau’s brilliant
creation in Pierrot mon ami (1943) of the "roman-détective idéal [.......] celui où non seulement on ne
connaîtrait pas le criminel, mais encore où l’on ignorerait même s’il y a eu crime, et quel est le
détective." For with the obvious metaphorical references from the fire which destroys L’Uni Park to the
collapse of France, Queneau’s further explanation of his ideal detective novel that "Il y a un certain
plaisir à ignorer, parce que l’imagination travaille.", is as clear an invitation as one can get to understand
the succeeding years of French history as being predicted by the attitude of Queneau’s eponymous hero,
who sees only myopically and understands nothing. The analogies to be read between all aspects of the
novel and the circumstances of the average French citizen during the Occupation are such as to invite a
near allegorical reading of the work and its conclusions concerning crime and punishment (or nonpunishment) are highly revealing in regard to the France of the Fourth and Fifth Republics.
But even more tempting than this rapprochement in the last fifty years, useful corrective though it is to
the supposition that the essence of this genre is American, is the longer term association of the rise of the
genre, in parallel with the rise of the bourgeoisie as defining readership, and the unresolved guilts of the
bloody revolutions spawned by the triumph of reason over despotism. The rise of the "noir" going back
to Restif de la Bretonne and similar 18th century attempts to throttle "le style noble" of official French
culture will eventually set loose upon the world the "polar" just as Mary Shelley lured Frankenstein and
his monster from the id of the Enlightenment. Those French commentators, tracing the French ancestral
line, who point to the solitary presence of the Une Ténébreuse Affaire in Balzac's immense corpus as
evidence of the general absence of this kind of writing in France are missing the point. It is the
underlying presence of Vautrin and his world through so much of the Comédie Humaine which proves
the constant element of crime and conspiracy in the bourgeois novel. Much is revealed in Mallet's
decision to construct a grand fresco which he chose to call Nouveaux Mystères de Paris the project of
which - to have his hero solve a crime in each of the twenty "arrondissements" of the city - remained
unfinished. But where Britain’s Victorian Empire proposed the outsider, but nonetheless champion of
order, Sherlock Holmes, a France that saw two Emperors, three Republics and three Kings - in two
different forms of monarchy - all end in violence spawned the darker genre that is with it still as the
Algerian war and its aftermath (up to the present massacres in Algeria) and all that has marked the world
stage - terrorism etc. - since find their place in the contemporary polar. And here the example of
Yasmina Khadra, who, to denounce the culture of corruption and violence of her country, in which the
authorities are complicit, condemns to death her own invented detective, l'inspecteur Llob, the figure she
carries from one novel to the next, beginning with Morituri (1997). His status as first person narrator is
particularly significant, given the mystery surrounding the real identity of the author, since the
announcement on the covers of these novels foregrounds the author's need for anonymity because of the
danger to life involved in writing works such as these in present day Algeria has led to much speculation
that the author is male rather than female. But whichever may be the case the need not to be found out is
of paramount importance. Llob's knowledge of the guilty parties solves nothing at all since their guilt is
flagrant and he dies for his refusal to acquiesce in the conspiracy of silence.
Furthermore, what the missing figure of the detective signifies is that it is not the absent Gallic Sherlock
Holmes who needs to be invented to take his or her place within the Pantheon, but that the absence is
not real at all. In the apparent gap sits the figure of the reader (or perhaps the genre itself - hence that
second element of my title). For what this particular myth of modern individualism, or of modernity,
points to is the failure of the reading to remove the fault of origin; it is the faulty hermeneutics that
underpins the restoration of order in the classic detective fiction and in the fireside comfort of its
readership allowing itself the "frisson" of apparent contact with the underworld while concealing its
own fault of origin - not to say original sin - in its assumption that a literature of convention can solve
the problem, can find the answer to absolutely everything.
What it signifies ultimately is the dumping of that reader into the discomfort or playfulness of the post
modern world as evidenced in the parallel methods and conclusions of Rinaldi and Rio.
For the former: "le remords, n’est-il pas le seul moyen, sur terre, de maintenir le passé au présent?"
- and for the latter, as his detective is threatened with the incompatibility between systems and individual
desires or integrities: "Un anarchiste comme vous n’a rien à faire dans une structure hiérarchisée."
Angelo Rinaldi's Les Jours ne s'en vont pas longtemps (1993) annonces in its title the continuation of
past guilts and their association with new crimes. Its opening words:
"Donc, il était mort."
Spoken by the narrator over the body of an old friend lead on through a complex exploration of several
past lives as they are interwoven, but while a certain aristocratic ancestry, with its implications of honour
and duty, is evoked, the main nexus is found in the years of Resistance and Collaboration and their
continuing re-emergence into the life of contemporary France. Perhaps most significant of all is the fact
the work, while hailed in the press as the "polar vénéneux d'Angelo Rinaldi" - and proof that the grand
French novel was alive and well - describes itself thus on its jacket:
"…on ne trouvera ni commissaire ni juge d'instruction .. (……) on trouve Mme de La Prazière, la
tante du mort, collectionneuse d'armes, mémoire de la Résistance (……..) Elle doit sans doubte
connaître le secret du crime; elle ne tient pas à le livrer: à chacun sa dose de mystè pour hier autant
que pour demain."
However, allowing for the absence of the detective, all the classic features of the detective novel are
present. The conclusion belongs in the realm of the metaphysical novel as much as in that of the
investigation drawn successfully to a conclusion, but as the final words cited above show, guilt is not so
much expiated as clung to out of existential necessity.
The work of Michel Rio would seem to be entirely at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of
Rinaldi. It is pared to the level of the moral tale and La Statue de la Liberté (roman noir according to its
cover) at 175 pages in length is as longer than any of his highly varied output. It is a work which flirts
with the origins of the genre, locating much of the action in New York, but reminding us through its title
that the eponymous statue not only marks the entry point to the new world but also represents France's
claim to be at the origin of the conception of the Republic dedicated to Liberty and addicted to murder.
Rio's "polar" revels in every cliché of the genre pushed to the furthest point of irony. His detective is a
Franco-Irishman whose actions will reverse the assumptions of The French Connection, and his creator
presents him thus:
"Né d'un poète irlandais et d'une historienne bretonne suprêmement belle et cultivée, il est
parfaitement bilingue, a même une double culture (……) Il est dévoué au service public hérité
d'une Révolution française qu'il admire pour avoir créé trois choses: la République, la Déclaration
des droits de l'homme et, ajoute-t-il, la guillotine pour garantir les deux premières."
Here then is a detective who, whatever the degree of irony embodied in his presentation, does pierce the
veil. Yet his insight brings no justice, only a demonstration of the inheritance of the name Malone.
It may be objected that to concentrate on the authors I have selected here does not give a true picture of
the state of the contemporary genre in France, since, whatever their relationship to the "polar", they are
not true exponents of the popular form, merely highbrow authors borrowing a convenient frame. To
visit any survey, however, of the literature, is to come swiftly to the conclusion that few of its many
branches exhibit any evidence to the contrary. To take one possible counter example - the prominence
of Didier Daeninckx - which includes novels devoted to such regions of discomfort as, in the case of
Meurtres pour mémoire (1984), both the Occupation and its links to the Algerian war, which bring
centre stage a Maurice Papon clearly discernible behind the pseudonym Veillut, or the still older crime
of the execution of Russian soldiers during the Great War while serving under French command: Le
Der des ders (1984) - may offer the thought that in the post Barbie era a significant shift is occurring.
Daeninckx, however, offers little such comfort as the fate of his narrators testifies. In the judgement of
André Vanoncini ( in Le Polar Français, 117):
" Didier Daeninckx maîtrise complètement les procédés narratifs du roman noir. Mais, si les
enquêtes qu'il construit conduisent bien à démasquer les auteurs de sordides méfaits, l'intérêt
qu'elles suscitent ne réside ni dans leur intensité événementielle, ni surtout dans leur vertu
réparatrice."
Again, among the most prominent of contemporary exponents is Maurice G. Dantec, former punkrocker, but an author whose recent Journal has been published in Gallimard's white covers and one
who, in disgust at the old world has removed himself to Quebec, what nemesis is to be found for crime
is to be found in the person of Hugo Cornélius Toorop, soldier of fortune and self-appointed angel of
vengeance in La Sirène rouge (1994) develops even further an expression of anarchic alienation in the
highly successful hybrid of thriller and science-fiction that is Babylon Babies (1999) both of which
afford no innocence in their scream of injustice, accusation of complicity through complacency in the
crimes of the contemporary world. But this is not the place for a long enumeration of summarised plots.
CONCLUSION
Just as for Watt it is in the context of the Counter-Reformation that those great figures who represent the
myths of individualism are to be located, it seems to me appropriate to place the absence of the detective
as dominant in the French versions of this genre in the context of an extensive period of modern history
during which the French reading public has voraciously consumed crime and detective fiction but has
preferred its policemen to speak with a foreign accent. From the earliest origins, including the guilt and
disgust of the bourgeoisie - so crucial to any definition of the changing nature of readership - to the early
years of the twentieth century where a turbulent avant-gardism was ready to espouse the anarchistic and
deify Fantomas, to the mass readerships of the thirties and the pessimism of the crumbling Third
Republic, to the full flowering of the Série noire and the later "polar" and even "néo-polar", the absence
of the authority figure who represents the state is flagrant and leads to the conclusion that it is the genre
itself which takes on mythic status in relation to the expression of individual identity, while remaining a
myth of concealment and of mystery rather than truly embodying the values of positivist optimism and
the restoration of order.
My intentions here have been to sketch out the frame of a much more developed inquiry while
designating features that must be integrated into any account of the genre as specifically French and I am
well aware that on the basis of the small sample chosen many objections and alternative interpretations
may be raised. For the moment my case must rest on pointing to the significance of the clues in this
dossier, however circumstantial some may take them to be.
Ian Revie
The University of Edinburgh