What can crime stories tell us about the imaginary of political commitment? In France as in other European countries, the connections between writers and radical left activists were a strong feature of 1980s and 1990s crime fiction, in the wake of French néo-polar. In contrast, twenty-first-century thrillers seem to be inhabited by disillusioned and disoriented cops, and undecided or fatal commitments. Rather than exploring political issues emerging from crime fiction, this chapter focuses on the representation of political attitudes themselves in contemporary French Noir, to better understand the role played by uncertainty and disarray in European political sensibilities. The analysis is based on a large corpus of French crime fiction, from the early 1970s néo-polar by Jean-Patrick Manchette, to the novels of Caryl Férey, Dominique Manotti, Frédéric Paulin and Olivier Norek.
The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.
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