Le Roman policier en Amérique française
(The Crime Novel in French-speaking America)
Norbert Spehner
(Foreword, p. 9-15, followed by the Table of Contents)
An Investigation on a "Non Existent" Genre
"The Quebec crime novel doesn't exist!" I have often heard this peremptory statement, even from supposedly knowledgeable people, even from specialists in Quebec literature. I'll come back to this later. This peculiar affirmation is a problem in itself: how can you possibly study, catalogue, classify and analyze works that do not exist? There is no denying it, of all the bibliographies I have published, this one has been the most difficult to produce because, from the very beginning, I encountered major obstacles specific to this paraliterary genre as it is practised in Quebec. This made the challenge was all the more stimulating.
Cataloguing crime novels published in France, in Germany, in the UK or in the USA is not too much of a problem, despite an imposing corpus of hundreds and thousands of titles. To help the bibliographer, there are specialized magazines that list all the new publications, and clearly identified collections (Série Noire, Le Masque, Crime Club, etc.) in which all (or almost all) books have distinctive markings, or are presented in the similar way: it makes them easier to spot in bookstores. There are specialized libraries and bookstores (for instance, the Bilipo, a Parisian branch of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where all the crime novels published in France are archived), where you can find everything from the latest publications to out-of-print books. There are collectors' clubs and specialized associations (Sherlock Holmes, Simenon, Agatha Christie, etc.). Not surprisingly then, numerous and relevant reference works are available to inventory the entire production, such as L'Année de la fiction (Éditions Encrage, Amiens), Les Crimes de l'année (Bilipo, an annual inventory), or to make detailed studies of the great collections such as the Série Noire or others. The aficionado, the student and the specialist are faced with an embarrassment of riches.
Nothing of the kind in Quebec! We have excellent reference tools for science fiction and fantasy, but for crime fiction, there is still absolutely nothing, or almost nothing. Collections are rare, ephemeral, poorly defined and generally not well known. The label "crime novel" and the French term "polar" are rarely used. I challenge anyone to guess that Une Fleur entre les dents (Daniel Saint-Germain) is a crime novel. The majority of authors are not even "specialists," known for writing in this genre. Many titles are vaguely general, revealing nothing about the book's "criminal" contents.
So how does one go about compiling such a bibliography? This kind of research seems more like detective work than anything else. The bibliographer becomes a sleuth and must make good use of his bookworm's instincts, so to speak. You have to collect the relevant clues in the right places and deduce from them, as much as possible, a maximum amount of relevant information.
As a good collector, I began by buying a few available books, new or used, as they were published or when I happened to find them. I also acquired many books (when I suspected them of being of a criminal nature) through the inter-library loan system. Routine investigations, in short. But even before I launched myself into systematic, sustained research, newspaper and literary magazines were my primary sources of information. I got into the habit of religiously poring through the book sections of newspapers such as La Presse and Le Devoir, where I noticed, among other things, the absence of specialized columns or reviews on local production, up to the nineties. For instance, Gilbert Grand and Serge Truffaut, a.k.a. Trufo Misto, are excellent crime fiction reviewers, but they almost never talk about Quebec publications, confining themselves to imported books. This is to be expected after all: if there are no (or hardly any) crime novels written in Quebec, there is no need for specialists. It was therefore up to the critics of the "literary establishment" (that nebulous entity that Stanley Péan christened "Bouquinville" - Booktown - an ironic and unofficial name for the literary community, which I will occasionally use, thanks, Stanley!) to discuss a genre they knew very little and had very little appreciation for.
Cultural magazines, literary or others, were an invaluable source of information: Lettres québécoises, Nuit blanche, Québec français, Canadian Literature (which devotes a lot of space to francophone authors), L'Actualité, and other publications that give some place to books. These magazines suffer from a handicap - a minor one, from the bibliographer's point of view - because of their publishing schedules, it is difficult for them to keep up to date with current publications. These magazines often publish reviews of books that are no longer on bookstore shelves. You must therefore fall back on libraries, praying that the books are available! For children and YA literature, a magazine like Lurelu is an essential, irreplaceable source. There are others, but few of them are as complete and easy to use.
All these publications make it possible to do the preliminary spadework and define a basic corpus based on recent production. But to go deeper, to refine and complete it, and, above all, to go back in time, it was necessary to also go through reference works such as Le Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires du Québec, an indispensable reference tool. Unfortunately, this series ends (for now) in 1980. Moreover, this high quality dictionary does not list all works (especially not in the genre we are interested in). It does not include, obviously, such tributes to culture, such pearls of our heritage as Carignan et les cinéastes du sexe (Jean-Marc Bergeron) or the novels of Lydia Mitchells and sundry works by Pascal Elbé! It was therefore necessary to look elsewhere.
Through thorough examination of the Dictionnaire des auteurs canadiens de langue française (Réginald Hamel, John Hare & Paul Wyczynski eds.) I was able to find other works, but there again many authors of crime novels were absent for all kinds of good or bad reasons we will not discuss here. For instance, the ineffable Jean Côté, a great producer of trashy crime novels, is conspicuously absent, though he has written a few biographies and many non-fiction works, including one on the art of tanning!
Through frequent visits to used bookstores, I was able to get my hands on certain volumes that had been completely ignored by the media (often because they suffer from terminal mediocrity!) and were impossible to find because they were out of print or published by small regional presses whose books are poorly distributed, if at all. Who (besides a few privileged and cultured citizens of Abitibi) has had the opportunity to see and buy in a bookstore On appelle Moustache, by Gaby Desgroseillers? Or the first mini-novels in pocket format of the Carbo collection, penned by Jean-Marc Martel and published in Sainte-Foy?
Of course, you also have to haunt the big bookstores, but you must be ever watchful and apply all your investigative talents to find crime novels. Some books don't stay on the shelves for long. If reviewers don't talk about them, they are in danger of being overlooked, ending up in that book limbo where thousands of titles are drifting, forever forgotten.
Since crime collections are ephemeral and the books' cover only rarely indicate their criminal content, is not always easy to spot the relevant titles. A good example: how could an aficionado, even an enlightened one, guess that C.Q.F.D., by Bernard Gilbert, published by VLB, is a crime novel? The author is not a known specialist in the genre (as Chrystine Brouillet or Jean-Jacques Pelletier could be considered to be). It is his first novel. On the cover, under the title, we are told that it is a "novel," nothing more. The cover illustration: a traditional French-Canadian style house, with a neon sign showing the title of the novel. Only the words "Cahier Noir," and the brief description on the back cover give some small indication that this is a detective novel. You have to admit that this is less than thrilling! What is more, I would bet my life that bookstore employees placed the book on the Quebec literature section, where the crime novel enthusiasts would not think to look, unless they're very astute and used to such practices. This considerably reduces the chances a book will be found by its readership, all the more so given that dedicated connoisseurs of "high lit" are also not likely to buy it when they realize what the publisher is sneakily trying to sell them a crime story they do not want to read. One must therefore be constantly on the lookout. Nothing can be taken for granted.
My second example is even more telling. By pure chance, wandering through the shelves of Longueuil's public library, I stumble on a crime novel whose existence I was totally unaware of. The fourth book in a historical saga titled Chroniques de l'Acadie (the reason I hadn't paid attention), this book, with its not very encouraging title S'en vont chassant (by Jacques Gauthier), is an authentic investigative novel with a rather original touch of the esoteric. If it were not for the cover illustration (depicting a hunt, and the suggestion of an ambush), I would never have become aware of the true nature of this work.
One last example of a fortuitous find: it is while chatting idly with the poet Jean-Marc Desgent that I found out that O comme Agression, published by Les Herbes Rouges (a house specializing for a long time in poetry, before also starting to publish novels), was a crime novel! I had assumed that this small book was another of the numerous poetry collections published by this press.
All this goes to show that, in this kind of research dealing with a genre that is undervalued or ignored, chance can sometimes prove an essential tool, though, of course, one must not depend solely on it. But what criminal investigator hasn't benefited, at least once in his or her career, from a little help from luck? The same applies to bibliographers.
I have also surveyed other territories, partially opened up by other inquisitive minds. I would be remiss if I did not mention here the works of some of the pioneers in the genre, explorers who, long before me, had embarked on this adventure and whose research has been very useful. In 1978, Jean Belleau submitted a M.A. thesis titled Bibliographie analytique du roman policier québécois 1837-1978 at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières; this document helped me find many of the older titles. Unfortunately, this bibliography, obsolete today, has many failings, not the least of which was a rather naive enthusiasm and the great zeal for the "national heritage" shown by the author, giving high praise to works that were often insignificant, if not to say downright pathetic. Moreover, he places books for adults on the same footing with books for children or YA, evaluating them using the same criteria - an absurd approach. He blithely mixes fiction with true crime stories and sometimes makes no clear distinctions between literary genres. A case in point: this comment on Les Mémoires du chef Jargaille (which I did not include here for the obvious reason that it is not a crime novel): "Detective Jargaille narrates assorted events in his career as a policeman." They are not fiction, then, but actual events. Belleau adds: "These are nine short stories containing various crimes." More and more confusion... Is this a memoir or short stories? Reality of fiction? But the worst is yet to come: "A novel inferior to the previous one because the author spreads himself too thin by dealing with several subjects. Each story has been written hastily." Now I'm completely lost. Novel? Personal account? Memoir? A cat could not find her own kittens in all this! In short, while this dissertation has its merits, but is lacking in rigor. It must be used very carefully and with a lot of critical distance. Moreover, Belleau's unbelievable declaration, "We see that crime fiction written here has no reason to be take a backseat to that of other countries" (sic) would be enough to justify having his degree (provisionally) taken away from him, it is so wrong, so disconnected from all reality. This is not yet the case today, and it certainly was not in 1978. I might add that it would not have hurt if Belleau's thesis committee had been a bit more alert... But were very literary academics really able to evaluate the merit and relevance of a research subject as poorly known as this one, since Belleau was in a way the first explorer? That's another story, as Kipling would say!
Richard Saint-Germain is another scholar whose remarkable work must be mentioned and whose compilations I found very useful. A specialist in pulp fiction and popular publications, he is a great collector whose catalogues, although incomplete, (we'll see why in the chapter on this kind of publication), are very practical and unique. Lastly, I will mention that there are several research groups in Quebec universities working on popular literature and publishing, in Quebec City, Sherbrooke and Montreal. Denis Saint-Jacques, Jacques Michon, Guy Bouchard, Paul Bleton and other enlightened minds deserve credit for daring to challenge the absurd prejudices of their colleagues to strike forth into the uncharted and reviled territory of so-called popular fiction. To spend one's entire career counting (I am being polite: I was thinking of something more erotically crude) commas in the works of Proust is certainly a thrilling experience when you do not know what else to do with your drab life, but to study IXE-13, or the works of Simenon, Raymond Chandler, Michael Connelly, Conan Doyle, Chrystine Brouillet or Benoit Dutrizac, it's not bad either! Nothing criminal in that. A bit of variety in one's readings and the subjects ones studies does no harm to one's mental balance; moreover (I have been told), it can heal all forms of constipation, including the intellectual kind. It's absolutely legitimate not to be interested in crime novels, in "popular literature." A question of taste. There's no accounting for it. Marguerite Duras and her intolerable mannerisms bore me to death, and Nathalie Sarraute is my sleeping pill. Nevertheless, I respect those who read or study their works. But tolerance is a two-way street. So if crime novels and mysteries are not your cup of tea (with a pinch of arsenic!), don't get in such a state about it and leave those who enjoy them in peace without looking down your noses at them!
And since (before getting carried away), I was talking about pioneers and enlightened minds, in short, about eminently respectable people who nonetheless work in genre literature, I must mention the research, courses and articles of Réginald Hamel (Université de Montréal), another of these mavericks who are often criticized by the establishment. His works shed a lot of light on the subject for me, especially for a little explored period of our literature, from 1837 to the first pulp serials (in the forties and fifties).
Last but not least among my resources, the Internet allowed me to consult a few websites devoted to Quebec literature (still too rare) and to make some discoveries there, find certain titles, follow certain leads. It is a source of reading notes, reviews, publishers' catalogues and other useful information. The World Wide Web in particular gave me access to the computerized catalogues of the Biblitohèque nationale du Québec and the National Library of Canada. That saved so much time when I was completing dozens of references! Page numbers, authors' years of birth, lists of pulp serial issues and other annoying details that sometimes have a way of making our lives difficult and taking up hours of unproductive research.
A major caveat: beyond official websites in which the value of the data is (almost) guaranteed, you have to be wary of personal pages, fan sites and other hot spots for aficionados, where erroneous or incomplete information unfortunately congregates like mosquitoes in July! For research, the Internet is the best and worst of tools.
In conclusion, I would say that, in order to be sure of not missing anything in the Quebec production of crime novels, thrillers and mysteries, you would have in fact to read, or at least skim through, all novels published in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada between 1837 and 2000. A task all the more impossible given that legal deposit has only existed since 1953 at the National Library of Canada. As usual in the "distinct society" (unless this happens to be another brilliant manifestation of the "Quebec model") it has only been mandatory in Quebec since 1968. And in spite of this, many works are not listed anywhere. Even now when legal deposit is mandatory, it apparently is not for everybody. I've found books published quite enough whose titles do not appear in any official catalogue. A real puzzler.
After this brief overview of the main hazards of this research, which was so often fascinating, I would now like to give details on the content and objectives of this quest for the "lost crime novel"...
Table of Contents
1. Imperfect Crimes or, the case of the crime novel in francophone America p. 9
An investigation into a "non-existent" popular genre, p. 9
- Autopsy of the main corpus, p. 16
A bit of criminal history, p. 16Pioneering texts, p. 16
- The detective novel, p. 17
Noir, or "hard-boiled" novel, p. 18
Suspense fiction, p. 19
The police procedural, p. 19
The French "neo-polar," p. 20
The contemporary crime novel, p. 20Reading parameters , p. 23
- A critical essay? p. 24
For a few more references, p. 25A few historical reflections, p. 27
- The archaic, or Gothic period (1837-1920), p. 27
The beginning of the 20th century and Édouard Garant, p. 29
In the jungle of pulp fiction and serials (1940-1960), p. 31
About negative effects of the Quiet Revolution, p. 35
The last twenty years, p. 36About some problems specific to the Quebec crime novel, p. 41
- Serial criminals from elsewhere, p. 44
Crime novel authors, or the offence of being popular, p. 45
Crime novel publishers, the offence of being incompetent, p. 49
Crime novel reviews, a few sins of indulgence, p. 51
Bookstores: Victims or accessories to the system? p. 54A provisional conclusion, or: Crimes of the year 2000, p. 56
Acknowledgements 612. An annotated bibliography of crime novels for adults, p. 63
3. Crime stories and spy stories: the pulp serials (1940-1960), p. 323
4. Crime novels for YA (including mysteries, spy novels and suspense), p. 333
5. Studies on the crime novel in francophone America (books, theses and articles), p. 361
6. Blood on the maple leaf or looking for the Canadian crime novel, p. 373
7. The Canadian crime novel (in translation), p. 387
- Index of authors of fiction, p. 407
Index of studies (by author), p. 413
© 2000 Éditions Alire & Norbert Spehner
To find out what happens next...
