Category Archives: France

Spiral 2 and ‘Romanzo Criminale’

Posted on by Kat Hall
18

Following the Sebastian Bergman two-parter, BBC4 will be repeating series 2 of Spiral (Engrenages) from this Saturday, 9 June, at 9.00pm. It looks like there will be two episodes each week, following the pattern of The Killing, Borgen and the like.

For those catching up, there’s a nice little review in the Radio Times to set the scene.

Spiral: gritty and urban, innit?

While looking around the website, an Italian crime series that aired back in October 2011, but is being repeated on Sky Arts 1, also caught my eye. Romanzo Criminale (‘Crime Novel’) has been styled as an ‘Italian Killing’ (pure hype, as the two series are completely different to one another), but I must say that I like the look of it, especially given its interesting historical and political setting.

70s mobster chic means looooaads of wonga

Amy Raphael describes the series in her Radio Times article as follows:

‘Set in Rome between 1977 and 1992, Romanzo Criminale has been an Italian television sensation, based on the exploits of a real-life criminal street gang.

La Banda della Magliana was a mob of fearless, ultraviolent suburban youths, who became, in the words of judge [and author] Giancarlo de Cataldo, “a real criminal power”.

De Cataldo’s novel [on La Banda] was first made into a film, but the television series that followed has aired in Italy to rapturous acclaim. One broadsheet called it “perhaps the best series ever made in Italy”, while another insisted that “it’s the only Italian series of which we can be proud… that we can export abroad”.

Opening in 1977, the drama is sharply written, beautifully shot, funny, violent and political. These were Italy’s “years of lead” when student protesters fought the police and the Red Brigades tried to destabilise the country. It’s a compelling backdrop for a series that’s brutally honest about Italy’s bloody criminal past.’

Has anyone already seen the series, and if so, what did you think of it?

An intriguing trio of Jewish detectives

Posted on by Kat Hall
21

When reading lots of books randomly in quick succession, I often find that they form themselves into little groups in my mind. This was recently the case with Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Mala Nunn’s A Beautiful Place to Die and Peter May’s The Blackhouse, which had lots of interesting connections (see previous post). Now another three novels have gravitated towards one another, and this time the common denominator is their innovative treatment of the Jewish detective.

It all started on a long train journey from Manchester, which thanks to double engine failure took twice as long as scheduled. While the delay was annoying, it supplied me with some extra reading hours, which I used to start the first of the Rabbi Small novels by Harry Kemelman. By the time I got home, I’d pretty much finished it, and was eyeing up another novel high on my TBR list, Harri Nykänen’s Nights of Awe. Then it was straight to my bookshelf to pull down an old favourite, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union…

There are eleven novels in the Rabbi Small series, the first of which, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, was written in 1964. The rabbi has not long arrived in the seashore town of Barnard’s Crossing when he’s pulled into the case of a young girl murdered near the synagogue. As much as anything, the novel is a study of small-town America, exploring the tensions between the quiet Talmudic scholar and his congregation, whose main goal is to be financially and socially successful. Some of its members don’t think much of Small, but it turns out that his training as a rabbi is extremely valuable to their Jewish community, especially when it comes to proving that the murder wasn’t committed by one of them.

As Kemelman has Small explain: ‘In the old days, the rabbi was hired not by the synagogue but by the town. And he was hired not to lead prayers or to supervise the synagogue, but to sit in judgement on the cases that were brought to him […]. He would hear the case, ask questions, examine witnesses if necessary, and then on the basis of the Talmud, he would give his verdict’. This background places Small in the perfect position to help with the murder case – and is a wonderfully original premise for a detective.

Pulitzer prize-winning Michael Chabon is one of the world’s finest writers in my view: an incredibly inventive and original author whose use of language makes me swoon. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, published in 2007, is his homage to the hard-boiled detective genre, featuring world-weary P.I. Meyer Landesman. But what’s most extraordinary about this novel is its audacious starting point: it’s set in an alternate present in which 3 million Jews escaped the Holocaust through a resettlement programme to Alaska (an actual idea suggested in 1940 by US politician Harold Ickes). They are the ‘Frozen Chosen’, but now face a problem because their lease on the Federal District of Sitka is up. The Independent on Sunday called it ‘a dazzling, individual, hyperconfident novel. Only a shmendrik would pass it up’. I concur.

I’ll be reviewing this extraordinary crime novel in more detail in another post, but if you’re interested in learning more, Patricia Cohen’s New York Times article on the author’s visit to the real Sitka makes for a fascinating read.

Nights of Awe

Last but not least is Harri Nykänen’s Nights of Awe, a Finnish police procedural just out with Bitter Lemon Press. Set during the ‘Days of Awe’ that lead up to Yom Kippur, it features Ariel Kafka, inspector in the Violent Crime Unit of the Helsinki police and one of only two Jewish policemen in Finland. I haven’t read this novel as yet, but purchased the book on the strength its unusual detective and the reviews I’ve seen for it (see for example Bernadette’s at Reactions to Reading and Norman’s at Crime Scraps Review).

What links these novels for me is their highly original approach to the figure of the Jewish detective (a Finn / a rabbi / someone who only exists because the author has rewritten history) and the innovative contexts in which they are situated (small-town America, Alaska and Finland). This kind of inventiveness, when teamed with excellent writing, is an unbeatable combination for me.

I’m very much looking forward to reading Nights of Awe now and will report back in due course!

The case of the missing translation: Konop’s No Kaddish for Sylberstein

Posted on by Kat Hall
20

A fellow crime researcher and friend recently read a cracking little French crime novel called Pas de kaddish pour Sylberstein and recommended it to me as one I would enjoy. I duly trotted off to find the translation but came up against a sizeable problem: it’s not available in English.

The novel, by journalist Guy Konopnicky (aka ‘Konop’), was first published in France in 1994,  and went down extremely well with the critics at the time. It was also adapted for film as ‘K’ in 1997 – as I found out courtesy of the Swedish Film Database. And yet not a sniff of it in the UK or States.

However, I then discovered that the novel was available in a German translation entitled Kein Kaddisch fur Sylberstein (btb, 2004). This was a lucky break for me, as I read German a lot better than I do French, and so I was able to sample its delights after all.

Kein Kaddisch für Sylberstein.

This meandering little journey got me musing on the logic (or simply luck) that results in some texts being translated while others are not. There are a couple of good reasons I can think of that would explain why Sylberstein was translated into German. Firstly, some of it is set in Berlin and explores 20th century German history. Secondly, Germans have an insatiable appetite for both homegrown and international crime fiction (another crime researcher colleague of mine was telling me in all seriousness the other day that Swedish crime fiction sometimes appears in German before it has even been published back in Sweden). So there’s an extraordinarily huge market for crime in Germany, as this article on the Deutsche Welle website explains (in English :)).

Here in the UK, fewer translations make it through to the English-language dominated market, although there is of course a very healthy international crime fiction scene now, thanks to visionaries such as Christopher MacLehose at MacLehose Press – not to mention the good folk at Bitter Lemon Press and Arcadia.

It looks like my Konop novel slipped through the net, but perhaps (ahem) one of the above might be interested in picking up this little gem? Here’s a taster from the blurb on the inside cover of the German btb translation:

‘Paris, 20th district. Jewish antiques dealer Simon Sylberstein shoots and kills a German tourist, whom he recognises as his old tormentor. He then hands himself into the police and dies of natural causes shortly afterwards. But Police Inspector Samuel Benamou, originally from Algeria and also Jewish, can’t let go of the case: he travels to the newly reunified Berlin to continue the investigation himself. Once there, Benamou quickly realises that he’s not the only one interested in Sylberstein and his story…’

All in all, I found No Kaddish for Sylberstein an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. Darkly humorous and entertainingly over-the-top at times, it also succeeds in addressing the serious theme of post-war justice (and its lack) following the Second World War and the Holocaust. If you’re lucky enough to speak French or German, it’s available online for a reasonable price.

#10 Dominique Manotti / Affairs of State

Posted on by Kat Hall
6

Dominique Manotti, Affairs of State, translated from the French by Ros Schwarz and Amanda Hopkinson (London: EuroCrime 2009 [2001]). A breathtaking exposé of political power games and corruption in 1980s Paris  4 stars

 

Opening sentence: Outside, it’s sunny, summer’s round the corner, but the offices of the RGPP, the Paris police intelligence service, are dark and gloomy with their beige walls, grey lino, metallic furniture and tiny north-facing windows overlooking an interior courtyard.

In one way, Affairs of State is less a crime novel than a tale of power and corruption, in which murders are inevitable as the stakes for political survival rise. In another, though, this is a crime novel through and through, in the sense that it dissects a bewildering range of criminal behaviour and leaves the reader looking at the world of politics through somewhat jaundiced eyes.

The spider at the centre of the web is François Bornand, a special advisor to the French President, who is guilty of all manner of corruption and decadence in the mid-1980s: the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, lucrative arms deals with Iran, and a never-ending consumption of high-class call girls.

Bornand is the ultimate survivor, and when information about his illicit activities threatens to reach the press, he uses a maverick security unit based at the Elysée, the very heart of the French political establishment, to protect his empire. As the bodies pile up, the novel focuses less on the puzzle of who commits each crime (readers are privy to the identities of all the murderers), than on the investigative efforts of the police and intelligence service, who would like nothing more than to bring Bornand down. In the process, we are shown the fascinating journey of rookie policewoman Noria Ghozali, who starts out at the periphery of the investigation, but makes the crucial shift into intelligence work by the end of the novel. Like one of the murder victims, Ghozali is of Arab extraction, and her battle for acceptance within the police force and wider society allows Manotti to examine French attitudes to gender and race in an uncompromising and very effective way.

What’s particularly fascinating about the novel is how closely it dares to reference the reality of French politics in the 1980s. The original title of the novel is Nos fantastique années fric, or ‘our fantastic years of dosh’, and Manotti sets out to critique what she describes in her afterword as ‘this decade in which money came to represent, for an entire political class, an end and a value in itself’. Particular venom is reserved for the Socialists who came to power with Mitterrand and who ‘assumed and practiced their new religion with the zeal of neophytes’.  A professor of economic history in Paris, Manotti demonstrates an acute understanding of the corrupting influence of money in political life – and this is really the novel’s central theme. Bornand appears to be a composite of several politicians of the time, outwardly respectable but tainted by a Vichy past, and bears a particularly marked resemblance to one individual (as I learned from Véronique Desnain’s paper at the Belfast ‘States of Crime’ conference). Manotti sails remarkably close to the wind here, and I salute her bravery in doing so.

That having been said, there are elements of the narrative that are overly melodramatic, especially towards the end of the novel. But I suspect these are designed as symbolic indicators of corruption more than anything else – and they didn’t overly detract from the power of the narrative.

One lovely extra detail: it’s noted on the inside front cover that ‘this book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs’!

 A film of the novel, entitled Une affaire d’État, was released in 2009.

Mrs. Peabody awards State of Affairs an intrigue-filled 4 stars.

BBC4 Spiral Season 3: Was I wrong to stop watching?!

Posted on by Kat Hall
15

In an earlier post I gave my reaction to the first two episodes of the French police procedural series Spiral (Engrenage).

It was a bit mixed: while I enjoyed the charactisation of Laure Berthaud and the urban noir feel, I was somewhat put off by the grisly autopsy scenes.

And although I said at the end of the post I would probably continue watching, I didn’t return the following Saturday (something came up, the hamster needed cleaning out, you know how it is…). And that was that – I never quite managed to catch up.

Now that the series has finished, my question to Spiral-watchers is:

  • Have I make a grave mistake (pardonnez the pun)?
  • Should I give Spiral another go?
  • If you think I should have kept watching, should I start at series 1 and work my way through in order, or just dive in with series 3?

Answers on a postcard please…or by comment below.

Merci!

BBC4 Spiral Season 3: The Butcher of La Villette

Posted on by Kat Hall
4

Tonight I caught the first two episodes of the French police procedural series Spiral (Engrenage in the original; literal translation ‘gears’).

My primary reason for watching Spiral was to fill the two-hour viewing gap left by The Killing, but I was also curious about the French series, having heard praise for seasons 1 and 2.  It was a interesting start tonight, and could easily become compelling viewing for me, as this crime drama features yet another strong female investigator, Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust). As in The Killing, the first two episodes also set up a number of complex characters, plotlines and intrigues, and redefine our image of the cities in question by focusing on the gritty underbellies of Copenhagen and Paris (the Little Mermaid and Eiffel Tower are conspicuous by their absence).

I wasn’t as gripped by the opening episodes of Spiral as those of The Killing, but then again, this might be an unfair expectation, especially as I’m coming in cold to season 3, and don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the investigative team that has been built up over previous two seasons.

One aspect I really didn’t like, however, was the graphic nature of the autopsy scenes. While a key focus of the series is forensic policework, I’m not convinced it was necessary to provide so much stomach-churning visual detail. And a side-effect of covering my eyes during those scenes was that I was unable to read the subtitles, thus no doubt missing vital clues!

So a slightly mixed experience for this viewer. But I reckon I’ll be back for another two episodes next week. Those who are intending to watch the whole series (10 parts) will be interested to know that The Guardian is blogging Spiral 3 episode by episode. A splendid public service. Merci!