Sunday, October 12, 2003		Books

Murder in Memoriam
by Didier Daeninckx. Rupa France. Pages 176. Rs 195.
The Fairy Gunmother
by Daniel Pennac. Rupa France. Pages 247. Rs 295.

THE murder-mystery genre seems to belong to just a few writers. Names like Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, PD James, Anne Perry keep cropping up. It is unfortunate that newer writers do not seem to be getting the exposure required to catch up with these giants.

Rupa’s effort to promote new writers and cross-cultural literature is commendable. Didier Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam and The Fairy Gunmother by Daniel Pennac are both translations from the French and introduce us to a new set of detectives and new settings for murder and detection.

Didier Daeninckx takes us all the way back to the Second World War and the German occupation of France. The connection between the murder of a young history teacher during a demonstration by Algerians in 1961 and his son’s murder 20 years later lies somewhere in the township of Drancy and its wartime role as a stopover for Jewish prisoners on the way to concentration camps. It is up to Inspector Cadin of the Toulouse Police Department to make this connection as he sifts through convoluted wartime politics. An impressive amount of research seems to have gone into the writing of this debut novel. Daeninckx reveals the frightening world of racial prejudice and political corruption that has conveniently been forgotten by entire generations of French.

The Fairy Gunmother brings us the very strange character of Benjamin Malaussene, who is a professional scapegoat. One of four novels based on this character, the book takes us through the streets and shanties of the tiny town of Belleville, where old women get murdered in their little houses, where pensioners are sold drugs by so-called health workers and where journalists disappear when they try to report all this. In this situation of general crime an old woman shoots a cop at point-blank range. It takes two dedicated policemen—Van Thian, a sceptic ingeniously disguised as an old Vietnamese woman, and Pastor, the boy genius with interrogation skills—to get to the bottom of this murder and the widespread rot in the system. While the story clips along well enough, the plot does not allow the main characters to evolve beyond the clich`E9d cop and robber, lengthy descriptions notwithstanding. Towards the close, the writer seems to have run out of ideas and ends the book with almost embarrassing haste.

French literature today reflects the social and political changes taking place in the country and is a blend of various genres. Both books bring visions of modern France along with its historical past. The presence of Algerians in the country and the various racial and political problems arising from it form the rudimentary framework for both writers to base their work on. They take us to a dark world of crime where it is easier to avoid the murkiness than to confront it.