In the beginning is the Book. And that moment in which Cain kills his brother Abel. In the blood of this fratricide, the Mediterranean gives us the first noir novel.
There may well have been other murders before this, but this one is written down, and establishes forever the singular problem of mankind: that crime is the driving force that, over the centuries, will govern relationships between people. Whoever they are. Masters or servants. Princes or emperors. Free men or slaves. In the beginning, indeed, all the motives for murder already existed. Envy, jealousy. Desire, fear. Money. Power. Hatred. Hatred of others. Hatred of the world.
That is the basis of all the Greek tragedies. In case we had forgotten, the chutzpah of Patrick Raynal, editor of Gallimard’s Série noire, was there to remind us. When he published Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex in his famous series, some in the narrow circles of the publishing world thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. Far from it.
It was an academic, Didier Malmaison, who adapted the Greek text into a Série noire novel. This magnificent book, which opens with a classic noir scene—a stranger arrives in town, everyone watches him, closing their doors and windows as he passes, he crosses the street—can be read in one sitting. Like a real crime novel. “Well, if you look at it that way . . . ” many teachers were forced to admit. Indeed, if you look at it that way, the line of descent from Greek tragedy to the noir novel becomes obvious. In Oedipus we witness a search for the truth of a man’s life. In the noir novel, beginning with the Americans, the same process is developed, in parallel with an investigation into the social conditions of contemporary man, the modern form of fate. This is very clear in the works of David Goodis and Jim Thompson, who both deal with the tragedy of modern societies.
In a 1995 interview appearing in the review Les Temps Modernes, Patrick Raynal explained this lineage: “If we can broadly define noir writing, noir inspiration, as a way of looking at the world, at the dark opaque criminal side of the world, shot through with the intense feeling of fatality we carry within us due to the fact that the only thing we know for certain is that we are going to die, then Oedipus can indeed be said to be the first noir novel.”
James M. Cain, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, is another exponent of modern tragedy. I have not plucked Cain’s name from the air. We now know that his work was a major influence on Albert Camus’s The Outsider. The similarities are striking. A man, in no way predisposed to become a criminal, kills another man and finds himself in prison. Beneath “the stars in the night sky,” he discovers the “benign indifference of the world,” and his last wish, in order for the drama to be fully consummated, is “that there should be a crowd of spectators at [his] execution and that they should greet [him] with cries of hatred.”
For me, The Outsider is the beginning of the modern Mediterranean crime novel. More so, in my opinion, than the novels of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who owes more, in both form and content, to Chandler and Hammett than to Cain. Today, there are many authors continuing this line of descent from Greek tragedy. The Spaniards Andreu Martín and Francisco Gonzales Ledesma, the Italians Peppe Ferrandino, Nino Filasto, Santo Piazzese, Nicoletta Vallorani and Carlo Lucarelli, the Algerians Yasmina Khadra and Abdelkader Djemaï, and the Frenchmen René Frégni, Pascal Dessaint and Marcus Malte. All of them combine the viewpoint of Camus with that of Montalbán. The inspiration comes from this observation by Camus, in Helen’s Exile (1948): “Such moments make one realize that if the Greeks knew despair, they experienced it always through beauty and its oppressive quality. In this golden sadness, tragedy reaches its highest point. The despair of our world, on the other hand, has fed on ugliness and crisis. For which reason, Europe would be ignoble, if ever suffering could be.” The Mediterranean crime novel is the fatalistic acceptance of this drama that has hung over us ever since man killed his brother on one of the shores of this sea.
Individual tragedy is echoed in the collective tragedy of the Balkans and Algeria, where the same dark blood flows. Faced with these conflicts which have punctuated the history of the Mediterranean, artists have tirelessly responded with their passion for the sea that unites. Paraphrasing Camus, I would call it a recognition of our ignorance, a rejection of fanaticism and of the limits of the world and of man, the beloved face, and finally beauty: that is the theatre in which we play out the same drama as the Greeks. And along with the other authors of these two shores, I affirm here, in the Mediterranean, in the name of a blue Mediterranean against a black Mediterranean, that the meaning of the history of tomorrow is not what we think. Far from it.