French Crime Fiction, 1945–2005: Investigating World War II by Margaret-Anne Hutton (review)

This study of representations of the Second World War and Occupation in an impressively large corpus of French-language crime novels is informed by a belief that, with the passage of time and a generational and ‘epistemological break’ with the reality of the conflict, ‘fictional representations of the war are likely to gain increasing importance’ in the twenty-first century (p. 1). Combating value judgements according to which ‘crime fiction’ is always a pejorative epithet, Margaret-Anne Hutton argues persuasively that the works from her corpus — from bestselling texts by authors such as Georges Simenon, Didier Daeninckx, and Fred Vargas to a wide variety of lesser-known works — ‘merit the same degree of attention as other discursive representations of World War II’ (p. 196). In her Introduction, Hutton points out that an analysis of crime fiction is likely to be particularly illuminating for a study of the ‘stock figures’ of the war, its ‘protagonists and problematics’, given crime fiction’s constitutive concern with ‘the relationship between morality and legality, the potential difficulty in identifying clear-cut heroes and villains’, and the question of ‘how to uncover and represent “the truth” about “the past’” (p. 4). The study proceeds thematically. The first chapter, on Simenon, examines the boundaries between crime novels and self-styled ‘romans romans’ in Simenon’s work, going on to query generic labelling in general — ‘are these works of crime fiction or just fiction?’ (p. 44). Paying rigorous attention to the often reductive effect of typologies, Hutton highlights the elisions that are frequently produced by generic labelling in the critical literature on crime fiction, and avoids reproducing them. Chapter 2 demonstrates the multiplicity of subgenres that subtend the category of ‘crime fiction’, arguing that the characteristics of each subgenre may ‘both restrict and facilitate types of representation’ (p. 78). The third chapter, on ‘Crimes, Criminals, and the Forces of Law and Order’, shows conclusively that an ahistorical account of crime fiction’s concern with social order is simply invalid when analysing representations of the profoundly disrupted legal and social orders existing during the Occupation. The nuanced account of context here is salutary. Chapter 4 concerns investigative figures (journalists, historians, sons) in post-war representations of the Occupation, and the final chapter engages with the temporality of war memorialization in a corpus variously treating war as trauma and as legacy, the threat of Holocaust denial, the regrowth of Nazi ideology, and questions of state criminality. Throughout, Hutton alternates between close readings of individual novels and more synthetic accounts of thematically grouped sets of texts. The work is amply signposted and meticulously documented, with an impressive breadth of reference. This is a nuanced and valuable text advocating a much-needed epistemological vigilance in relation to the constitution of crime fiction as a category, and the diachronically and synchronically shifting resonances of the Occupation in literature. Along with Claire Gorrara’s French Crime Fiction and the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2012; see French Studies 67.2 (2013), 281), Hutton’s text persuasively advocates the central role played by popular fiction in reflecting on and challenging collective understanding of the war.