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A cult detective novel of anarcho-communist-fascist intrigue in late twentieth-century Paris

A 78-year-old man is attacked in the basement of an apartment building in the south of Paris, brutally beaten and left for dead. Reading the story in the newspaper the next morning, Gabriel Lecouvreur—AKA private detective Le Poulpe—recognizes the victim's name as that of a once-gifted and controversial author, Andre Sloga, who had slipped into obscurity. Rumor has it that Sloga had become an alcoholic after being dropped by his publishing house.

But Lecouvreur discovers that Sloga had in fact been hard at work on an explosive book exposing the scandals of a prominent industrialist and his family. Sloga's research had taken him deep into Paris's political underworld, to the place where communists and anarchists meet fascists. Plenty of characters on any side might have wanted him dead, and Lecouvreur sets himself the task of finding who among them acted on that impulse.

A rollicking noir set in Paris, during the anarchic days following World War One

In January 1920, in the aftermath of “the war to end all wars,” private detective René Griffon is hired to investigate the marital infidelities of the wife of a war hero.

But what he uncovers is more than shabby behavior, and more than a sex scandal—what he uncovers is a scandal with devastating national implications. And as Griffon’s investigation plunges him into the murky world of blackmail, murder, anarchists, profiteering, and the repercussions of the war’s dark secrets, he discovers that the people who helped France win the war are being made to pay for the peace.

Both homage to its American predecessors and critique of the Americanization of French—and global—culture, A Very Profitable War is a tense and evocative book that will linger long after its startling conclusion.

On the evening of October 17, 1961 twenty-thousand Algerians marched in Paris in defiance of and in protest against a curfew imposed by Maurice Papon, chief of the Paris Metropolitan Police. The protesters were met with ferocious and uninhibited violence. Eleven-thousand were arrested; more than one thousand injured; as many as three hundred were killed, many of them thrown into the Seine, from which their bodies were later recovered.

In recreating the scene of the atrocities in Murder in Memoriam, his controversial alarum first published in 1984, Didier Daeninckx introduces a fictional observer of the riot, Roger Thiraud, a middle-aged history teacher in a public school, only steps from his home and his waiting, pregnant wife. In the first few minutes of the demonstration, he will be assassinated, in cold blood, by a member of the anti-terrorist secret police.

For nearly forty years after October 1961, France would deny the killings. Upon the independence of Algeria in 1962 an amnesty put its perpetrators safely beyond prosecution. The records were buried.

In 1981, Bernard Thiraud, Roger's son, is researching the archives in Toulouse, intent on completing his father's history of his birthplace, Drancy, now notorious as the site of a detention and transit camp from which Jews were deported to Auschwitz. One afternoon, after leaving the town hall, he too is murdered -- the victim of what appears to investigating officers to be a professional killing.

When inspector Cadin of the Toulouse prefecture learns of the unsolved murder of the young man's father, he suspects a connection. But why would anybody want to kill two bourgeois, politically unconnected history teachers?

Didier Daeninckx has located the link between the two murders in the history that France had yet to confront -- in its colonial racism and its complicity in genocide. Daeninckx made this connection in fiction, deliberately provoking its acknowledgment in fact. Murder in Memoriam anticipated by more than a decade the shocking revelations provided by the exposure, trial, and conviction of Maurice Papon -- the Parisian chief of police in 1961, and the never-named villain whose real crimes, unrevealed at the time of its first publication, haunt this account -- for crimes against humanity; for his part in the administration of the deportation of the Jews from Bordeaux to Auschwitz.

Mentre la periferia di Parigi va in fiamme riempiendo le pagine della cronaca quotidiana, mentre politici e intellettuali dell'Europa intera si accapigliano sui come e i perché di tanta latente e palesata violenza, l'autore di questo volume racconta da dentro le pieghe di quei pezzi di mondo urbano da cui egli stesso proviene. Ne deriva un ritratto disincantato e partecipe dello screpolato universo delle periferie industriali, di quel teatro di vite svogliate e dolenti perennemente a ridosso di un confine, limite invisibile del dolore e del delitto metropolitano.

Figlio della periferia 'rossa' parigina, cresciuto nella cultura della Resistenza, Daeninckx è un autore autodidatta, ha fatto il tipografo e poi ha scritto su giornali di provincia. Ha composto una trentina di gialli, alcuni romanzi e una serie di racconti, una parte dei quali sono qui raccolti. L'autore giustappone luce e buio, personaggi e situazioni solari che scivolano improvvisamente nel cono d'ombra di una notte corrotta e malsana, e schizza una galleria di ritratti pedinando le gesta di perdenti e cani randagi, di cui sa restituire violenza e tenerezza, amoralità e disagio.

Ispirato a un fatto realmente accaduto durante la grande Esposizione coloniale di Vincennes nel 1931, questo breve ma intenso romanzo, apparso in Francia nel 1998, svela attraverso le vicende di un gruppo di Kanak (i nativi della Nuova Caledonia), improvvisamente trapiantati in Francia, le imposture e le illusioni che nutrono la nostra società. Il racconto segue le tracce di due Kanak che ricercano alcuni loro compagni 'dati in prestito' come attrazione ad un circo tedesco. Da questa vicenda paradossale si sviluppa una storia rocambolesca, attraverso la quale l'autore riesce a mettere a nudo la gretta mentalità coloniale di una Francia che, di lì a breve, si ritroverà a fare i conti con il proprio passato.