Of Murder and Love: Peregrinations of the African Detective Writer

This article discusses the status of the African detective writer in francophone Africa, using examples by Driss Chraïbi and Mongo Beti, two key figures of francophone African literatures. I offer a reading of L’inspecteur Ali and Trop de Soleil tue l’amour as novels that signal the shift of both writers from the realist novel to crime fiction. I also scrutinize the metafictional comments in the novels, that is, passages when fiction deals with the writing of fiction as a whole, and the conventions and potentialities of detective fiction in French-speaking Africa. I therefore propose that the practice of detective fiction does not necessarily lead to the popularity of the writer. Rather, I suggest that—given that the novels I have studied also expose love, murder, and politics, none of which seems to guarantee celebrity—the ultimate lesson with regard to the status of the French-speaking African detective writer is that he seems to only enjoy a post mortem popularity, one that clearly rests on profanation.