The Pleasures of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction (review)

This is a highly nuanced study. While David Platten dispels a number of myths that have become attached to crime fiction (that it is a commercial entity, that it is a minor literary genre yet to come of age, that readers engage with it in order to pit their wits against a clue puzzle), he is also careful to assess these myths and to weigh and present the scholarship behind them. Clearly, Platten is neither tipping his hat to the doyens of French crime fiction nor embarking on a project of one-upmanship; instead, his work is balanced both in scope and scholarship. While the ‘pleasures’ of the title are not entirely of the post-structuralist kind (although Barthes does get a mention, notably in the Conclusion), which may prove a disappointment for some readers, there are gains in terms of the reading pleasure to be had by a broad audience, with Platten’s material pitched (alternately, but to the same degree across all chapters) at undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers, and a more generalist reading public. The pleasure is clearly Platten’s, too, which is seductive. The reader is led from the emergence of crime fiction in France (Poe, Gaboriau, Leroux, Leblanc), through Simenon towards the noir (Malet, Héléna) and the néo-polar (Manchette, Amila, Daeninckx), into the contemporary (Pennac, Izzo, Benacquista, and Vargas, the last, justifiably, meriting a chapter to herself). In each case Platten introduces the dominant critical paradigm(s), makes an assessment, and carefully and deliberately proposes his own lens; he then engages in detail with a selection of what he deems the most representative works of the authors under review. The generalist reader is afforded a strong sense of the development of the genre in France and the pleasures on offer from its various exponents, while the researcher is given an invaluable presentation of key secondary sources. It is undoubtedly in this mix of thoroughness of scholarship and targeted delivery that the success of The Pleasures of Crime lies. For this particular reader, however, Platten is at his best in his asides. Each chapter makes room for digression but is generally content to point the reader towards it; however, in Chapter 5 Platten joins the reader in what is a miniature manifesto of digression. This neat mise en abyme study of crime scenes argues against the book’s very diachronic approach, suggesting points of intersection with other genres to take crime fiction studies into new dimensions (urban architecture is Platten’s special focus here). This is the ironic side of Platten’s work, which is all the more powerful for being kept in reserve: there is a pattern to crime fiction studies as there is to crime fiction, and this must be studied before being transcended. With The Pleasures of Crime Platten places himself at the fore-front of scholarship and prepares himself for digressions to come.