Book Review: A Very Profitable War (1984) by Didier Daeninckx

If, like me, you relish crime fiction that has a political component, then you're resigned to the fact that your choices will be restricted to authors writing in languages other than English, which means the supply of such fiction is limited by what editors and publishers think is worth translating. UK and US crime writers seem gun shy when it comes to politics. They'll sometimes take notice of the symptoms of bad or corrupt political decisions (poverty, urban decay, racism, etc.), but they generally avoid tackling politics head-on. The late Elmore Leornard, for example, set at least a dozen novels in Detroit, a city that has come to symbolize all that is wrong and dysfunctional in American society and politics. But Leonard doesn't have anything to say about the whys and wherefores that turned Detroit into an urban wasteland. He records the symptoms of Detroit's decline but has no apparent opinions on why this has come to pass. The same neutral attitude towards societal ills is a commonplace one with a great many of his English language contemporaries.

Non-Anglo writers such as Massimo Carlotto, Yasmina Khadra, Dominique Manotti and Didier Daeninckx wholeheartedly embrace the political. For them, crime is inextricably linked with political decisions and the political zeitgeist. Their novels reflect the fact that politics and society can have as great a role in fictional murder and mayhem as traditional motives like greed, jealousy and rage. A Very Profitable War is set in Paris in 1920, and our hero is Rene Griffon, a veteran who was recently in the trenches and is now a private eye. He's hired by a retired general who's being blackmailed over his wife's serial indiscretions. What begins as a simple case of marital infidelity turns into a story about war crimes, radical post-WW I politics in Paris, and corporate greed.

The political themes don't make the novel dry or preachy; quite the contrary. Daeninckx's prose style is positively ebullient, full of jokes and energy, and the same can be said about Rene Griffon. As in his Murder in Memoriam (review here), Daeninckx wants to lay bare some of the dirty secrets from France's past. In this case he's concerned with the repression of anarchist and communist movements during and just after the war. These issues add some depth and resonance to the novel, making it more than just an exercise in style and mood. And style and mood is what too many contemporary crime fiction is all about. A great deal of noir or hard-boiled crime fiction works hard to create a gritty, sour, dystopian worldview, but the authors have little interest in explaining why these conditions exist; instead we get a lot of characters (including the sleuths) with deep and dark psychological problems that must be talked about at great length. There's certainly room for both kinds of crime fiction, but it would be nice to see more agitprop writing on the English language side of the ledger. After all, it was Eric Ambler, an English writer, who invented the politically-informed thriller. One American crime writer with a taste for politics is K.C. Constantine (read my piece on him here), although I think he's currently retired from writing. He offers an interesting comparison with Elmore Leonard. Constantine set all his crime novels in a small area of rural Pennsylvania, and he isn't shy about describing the political errors and crimes that have ruined the lives of people in that part of America. Leonard's resolutely apolitical stories stand in stark contrast to Constantine's, although in many ways they are literary blood brothers.

Book Review: Murder in Memoriam (1984) by Didier Daeninckx

France's conflict in Algeria from 1954-62 is to French culture and history what the American Civil War and Vietnam are to America. It's a conflict that was exceedingly cruel and bloody, and almost led to a coup d'etat in France. Needless to say, writing or talking about this war within France can still raise hackles across the political spectrum, and it's only in the last twenty or so years that France has really begun to have some honest conversations about its involvement in Algeria.

Murder in Memoriam is an agitprop murder mystery. The plot is about the apparently senseless murder of a university student, which, as it turns out, relates directly to the murder of his father twenty years previously. The father was killed on the night of October, 17, 1961, in Paris during the protests by Algerians for Algerian independence. But the goal of the novel is to throw some light on the brutal crimes perpetrated by the Paris police and the government against the protestors. It's estimated that perhaps 300 of these people were shot down in cold blood, beaten to death, or handcuffed and thrown into the Seine to drown. It's a massacre that wasn't spoken about for years in France, and, according to the introduction, this book eventually led to the man who was Prefect of Paris at the time being put under investigation. He was found to be a war criminal who had enthusiastically helped the Nazis round up Jews in France. He went to trial, was found guilty, and sent to prison.

Daeninckx's book works quite well as a mystery, and his Inspector Cadin is an enthusiastic and engaging detective, but the author's real purpose is to rip off the scab that's formed over France's memories of October 17/61 and the role of French citizens in the Holocaust. It's a tall order, but he pulls it off neatly, never sounding preachy or didactic. Algeria is still a hot button topic in France. A film made about the October 17 massacre a few years ago (the title escapes me) shied away from showing just how bloody it was. And a film called Days of Glory (2006) gives France's Algerian colonial troops, called Goumiers, the full Saving Private Ryan treatment for their role in the Second World War. This turns out to be a whitewash job as revealed in Jame's Holland's book on the Italian campaign. It's clear that the French, like any ex-colonial power, have an extreme reluctance to confront the crimes of the past. And for my dual review of two excellent Franco-Algerian themed films, The Battle of Algiers and The Day of the Jackal, click here.