Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet (review)

In this ambitious study of French crime fiction, spanning 1860’s feuilletons through to twenty-first century cyberpunk, Andrea Goulet groups close readings of an impressive range of novels into “Archaeologies,” emphasising the “vertical” contrast between subterranean crime and surface order, and “Cartographies,” focusing on “horizontal” phenomena such as maps, grids, and locked rooms. These sections are separated by an intervening chapter, appropriately entitled “Intersections,” in which the titular addresses of “street-name mysteries” emerge as sites where the “horizontal” and the “vertical,” along with a number of other apparently antithetical pairings (present/past, real/imaginary and private/public), can be seen to coincide.

“Archaeologies” begins with an examination of “catacomb fictions” such as Berthet’s Les catacombes de Paris, which exemplify the influence of Cuvierian catastrophism on Second Empire feuilletons. Cuvier’s influence persists in the scenes of cataclysmic flooding that punctuate later serials. A subsequent chapter looks at cliffside settings as “sites of intersection between national historiography and paleontological discourse.” Goulet compares Leroux’s Le parfum de la dame en noir and Leblanc’s La Comtesse de Cagliostro, before turning to Leroux’s Balaoo, in which spatial logic is overlaid with evolutionary discourse; our ongoing troubled sense of difference from the “other” (criminal? terrorist?) is examined through a lens of paleontological discovery. Analyses of Japrisot’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles and of several Vargas novels follow. Goulet draws fruitfully on Abraham and Torok’s notion of the “transgenerational phantom” to evoke “a gradual internalization or psychologization of subterranean space.”

The “Cartographies” section opens with a chapter on the cartographic mystery inaugurated by Gaboriau. The rationalist project of the map, especially in Leroux, struggles to offset “the ragged realities of space, time and crime.” Specific map features are shown to have theoretical implications beyond their sociological accuracy. The terrain vague, for example, evokes the marginalisation of the criminal class under the Second Empire, but also invites a post-structuralist reading (terrain vague as blank page). This nascent self-reflexivity is accentuated via the “playfully subversive spatiality” of Malet’s Nouveaux mystères de Paris and Butor’s L’emploi du temps, experimental crime novels whose maps interact with their textual fabric, thus destabilising anew the order sought by Lecoq and Rouletabille. A final chapter considers Dantec’s La sirène rouge and Radoman’s Ballade d’un Yougo. Here, the Balkans become a “shadow-space” whose violent cartographic fragmentation threatens Western European social space and French identity in particular.

Goulet leaves us in no doubt that French crime fiction is complex terrain. The characteristic anfractuosities of the genre could easily have been obscured by an unduly simplistic chronological structure, but Goulet embraces the all-important spatial dimension, as well as demonstrates, with great conviction, the imprint of shifting scientific paradigms. The equation of a final novel, Dantec’s Babylon Babies, to a sort of literary Big Bang, “bursting out of national, individual, and generic boundaries while reflecting on the traces of the policier genre,” serves to crystallise the spatial, temporal, and scientific premises of the volume, confirming both the aptness of the approach adopted here and the scope for further research in this field.