Forgotten Book - The Tube

Regular readers of this blog will know of my admiration for the books that Pierre Boileau wrote in tandem with Thomas Narcejac. Their excellent crime stories were by no means limited to the books that were brilliantly filmed as Vertigo and Les Diaboliques. They were, like Hitchcock, masters of suspense. They were also very clever plotsmiths, and The Tube is a case in point.

The book was originally published in France in 1958, under the title L'ingenieur aimait trop les chiffres, and was translated into English in 1960 by Robert Eglesfield. It continues to surprise me, by the way, that some of the duo's work remains untranslated. You'd think that their success would make their work very much in demand.

In this novel they set out to update the locked room mystery. We are presented with a classic impossible crime scenario, but in what was then a highly topical and controversial setting - a nuclear laboratory. The story opens with a shooting. The victim is a scientist who has been working on a nuclear device, misuse of which could kill millions. Not only is it impossible to figure out how the killer escaped detection - the tube containing the lethal material has gone missing. Yes, I'm afraid that health and safety systems at the lab were astonishingly lax.

The story is told with characteristic pace, and assurance - Boileau and Narcejac really were very skilled writers. They were also pleasingly ingenious. Their taste of the macabre is not quite so much in evidence here as in some of their mysteries; then again, the threat of  the exploding tube will be potent even for most readers' tastes. It's  a quick, light read, and I'm surprised that nobody has seen fit to reprint the story in English for almost sixty years.

Quai des Orfevres - film review

The famous French film director Henri-Georges Clouzot was a fan of the Belgian crime writer Stanislas-Andre Steeman, and one of his most highly regarded movies, Quai des Orfevres, is among his adaptations of Steeman's fiction. So the story goes, Clouzot started writing the script without having access to the novel, Legitime Defense, which had been published during the war and was out of print at the time. And this reflects the fact that Clouzot, like his English counterpart Hitchcock, was not primarily concerned with whodunit.

The story features Jenny, played by Clouzot's long-time companion Suzy Delair (still alive, I gather, at the splendid age of 100), who is a talented and sexy singer and a performer ambitious to get on in the world. She's married to Martineau (Bernard Blier), a quiet pianist who is driven to jealousy by her flirtatious ways. She cares for him, but is determined not to allow him to dominate her or wreck her prospects of fame. 

A wealthy old lecher called Brignon takes a fancy to Jenny, in a scenario which, unfortunately, remains topical to this day. Martineau begs Jenny not to agree to see Brignon again, but she reckons she can take care of herself. He constructs an alibi at a theatre while following her to the place where he reckons she is due to meet Brignon, only to find that Brignon is dead. It seems clear that Jenny has killed him, and Martineau can't resist the temptation to interfere with the crime scene. Meanwhile, Jenny's friend Dora, a photographer who used to take nude pictures of Brignon's conquests, tries to help her out.

Louis Jouvet plays the detective who is soon on the trail. His performance is highly enjoyable, and overall this is a film which has earned the critics' admiration over the years. It has a depth, as well as a number of very pleasing touches, and it's probably one of those films that merits at least a second viewing to appreciate everything. I didn't find it quite as impressive as Le Corbeau, 

a film Clouzot made a few years earlier, or Les Diaboliques, which most people regard as his masterpiece, but it's definitely worth seeking out.   

Forgotten Book - Evil Eye

One of the mysteries of crime fiction is why, even today, so few of the crime novels of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac have been translated into English. This was the duo who gave us Vertigo and Les Diaboliques, yet even when they were in their prime,in the Fifties, a good many of their collaborative novels went untranslated. And try laying your hands on an English language version of their earlier solo efforts...All very odd, for they were marvellous writers. I've featured their work several times on this blog, and today's Forgotten Book is Evil Eye, which Geoffrey Saintsbury translated in 1959.

It's a short novel, and the British hardback edition was bulked out by the inclusion of a novella called Sleeping Beauty, which I'll write about on another occasion (the UK paperback edition did not, I believe,include Sleeping Beauty for some reason.) The hardback is very difficult to find these days. When John Norris reviewed the book on his blog four years ago,(and an excellent and very enthusiastic review it was) I commented that I was keen to track down a copy myself. But I've only just managed to find one.

Was the book worth the wait? Yes, definitely. Boileau and Narcejac never repeated themselves, and yet somehow The Evil Eye is very characteristic of their work - one can't imagine it being written by anyone else. Their stories invariably have a touch of weirdness, and the plot is often so improbable that,in the hands of a less gifted writer, the result would be hopeless. But their work is always very readable.

Here, we have a young man, Remy, who is suddenly cured of his long-term paralysis by a healer. Once Remy can walk again and becomes independent, he becomes increasingly concerned by events in the past, which may in some way have caused the paralysis. The mood is menacing, and yet the reader can't be sure what is going on. The hallucinatory style of Boileau and Narcejac is very well captured in the translation. This isn't my favourite of their work - it's too slight, really, for that -, but it held my interest from start to finish.

Forgotten Book - Les Magiciennes

When you find a writer whose work you really enjoy, it is a rather sad moment when you have finally read all of their available books. There is, though, an added frustration if the writer is foreign, and there are plenty more titles out there- but which have yet to be translated. Such is the case with one of my favourite writing duos, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The authors of the books which formed the basis for Vertigo and Les Diaboliques were prolific, but despite their success, many of their stories have yet to appear in English (which I find very surprising, I must say.). And having stopped studying French at the age of 16, regrettably, I'm not up to reading the originals.

Happily, however, Mrs Edwards is, like our daughter, a more accomplished linguist than me, and she has made her own translation of a very interesting short novel by Boileau and Narcejac, Les Magiciennes, and this is my Forgotten Book for today (though whether it's forgotten in France, I don't know - perhaps not.).

As so often with these writers, the central plot idea is spooky and arresting. The central character, Pierre Doutre, comes from a family which has made its life in the theatrical world. When his father dies, Pierre and his mother (a nicely portrayed character) struggle to come up with a strong enough magic act that will keep them going.  And then they come across two identical - and enigmatic - twin girls, with whose help their lives are transformed.

Because the audience does not know that there are two girls who look exactly the same, rather than just one girl, the twins can be employed to produce illusions which cause a sensation. And that's exactly what happens. But when Pierre falls for one of the girls,the complications come thick and fast. This is a book about identity, but it's also a neat and vivid thriller. Apparently, like so many of the authors' stories, it was turned into a film ,but this does not seem to be easy to track down. I'd love to see it one day but in the meantime I enjoyed the novel and I hope that some enterprising publisher makes it more widely available one of these fine days.

Forgotten Book - Faces in the Dark

The French writing duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac are among my favourite writers of Eurocrime, and they are responsible for my latest contribution to Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books for Friday. Faces in the Dark was first published in Britain in 1955, in a translation by Geoffrey Sainsbury.

The premise is, as usual with these authors, macabre and gripping. Richard Hermantier is a wealthy businessman who has been blinded and disfigured by an exploding grenade. He lives now in a dark, unsettling world – yet, in an ironic touch, his company manufactures lamps. What is to become of him? At least he has a loving wife, a diligent business associate, a feckless yet amiable brother, as well as some devoted servants. So why does he begin to feel afraid?

The tension mounts steadily, and although some of the plot developments are foreseeable, the ending is not. With Boileau and Narcejac, you can never be sure whether the protagonists of their stand-alones will survive – or meet a terrible fate. Hermantier’s darkness is conveyed with menace, and there is one especially grim and memorable scene in a graveyard. This is a short but suspenseful book, not quite at the same high level as some of their work, but still very readable.

Boileau and Narcejac were such vivid writers that their work was often filmed – as with Vertigo and Les Diaboliques. My paperback copy of this book is a film tie-in. The movie Faces in the Dark had a good cast, including John Gregson, Mai Zetterling and Michael Denison. However, I have never come across it. Has anyone?