`Toutes des salopes`: representations of

089
’Toutes des
women
salopes’: representations of
in French crime fiction
STEPHEN F. NOREIKO*
In English-language
detective fiction, women crime-busters are as likely
also to be mould-breakers. Their authors and authoresses seem to be seeking
striking originality, the character with characteristics which will fire the
imagination, fuel the fantasies, and stick in the memory, so that the public
will read and return. In genre fiction, the author’s name is a trademark, but
crime fiction additionally tries to cultivate brand loyalty to its heroines and
heroes.
V. I. Warshawski is one obvious example, a tough woman in a man’s
world, on men’s terms, with a masculine name and delicate Italian shoes.’
Penny Wanawake, black and over six feet tall, is another.~Stephanie Plum,
erstwhile lingerie buyer bounty hunting to pay the rent and keep her
hamster, is a third.3 Perhaps the most unlikely sleuthette is a modern
languages lecturer from Hull,4 but even Miss Jane Marple, that archetypical
village spinster, by the very fact of her detecting, signals refusal to conform.
Their Gallic sisters are much less up front and in your face. They are in
fact almost invisible, and one has to wonder why. It is not that the French
reading public will not accept women detectives. The appetite for translated
women is voracious: the first title in Albert Pigasse’s collection Le Masque
was Le Meurtre de Roger Ackroyd (1927); Agatha Christie’s work still bulks
large in the catalogue;5 and the same publisher’s label ’les reines du crime’
confirms the appetite for women authors. On station bookstalls throughout
the Hexagon, Patricia Cornwall, Ruth Rendell and Mary Higgins Clark seem
at times to crowd out France’s own production, and the native creation
Address for correspondence: Department of French, The
E-mail: [email protected]
University of Hull, Hull
HU6 7RX.
90
in comparison, surprisingly short on both women authors and female
detectives.
There are some French women authors - Bachellerie, for example, winner
of the Cognac Prix du Roman policier in 1985 for Pas de quoi noyer un
chat - but not many whose names immediately spring to mind. And the
investigators are still predominantly, overwhelmingly, male. Television goes
some little way towards redressing the balance: there is, for example,
Commissaire Marie Saint-Georges, heroine of Quai n ° 1, a popular series
broadcast on France 2, though she does in fact belong to the transport police.
But television, terrestrial television in the main evening slot, supposes a
family audience. We would expect it to appeal to wider tastes, or at any rate
not be too ready to offend or alienate a good half of its potential audience. By
contrast, the printed polar is in general a universe of males. Cover
illustrations suggestive or explicit often imply as much, and though there are
here and there exceptions, they are not of a kind which might seriously
undermine the tradition. Michel Grisolia’s Helene Frank,6 though vaunted by
the Le Masque catalogue as ’une nouvelle heroine policiere’, turns out to be a
missing persons specialist and ’recherches dans l’int6r6t des familles’, as the
French call it, can easily be dismissed as a feminine interest, something
separate from the murder and mayhem of the mainstream. Then there is of
course Exbrayat’s Imogene, heroine of seven of the many novels this author
has published in the Masque collection.’ But this red-headed and irascible
Scottish virago is, like so many of the other characters in the Exbrayat ceuvre,
a deliberate caricature, a representative of insular women as the French like
to imagine them, and a figure of fun. Indomitable, certainly, Imogene is
hardly credible, and nobody’s role model.
We might, therefore, suppose, as a working hypothesis, that the universe
of polar is intrinsically inimical to women, and that the parameters of the
genre, the suppositions generally and unconsciously accepted, tend not to be
favourable to the appearance of autonomous, aggressive, or even mildly
feisty, women. Going back to the early examples of the genre, we do in fact
find, in Gaboriau’s Le Crime d’Orcival, published in 1867, a strong woman in
the figure of Laurence, who is at least prepared to stand by her man in
adversity, but she has previously shown weakness in falling for the villain,
thus aligning herself with ’miss Jenny Fancy’ (real name Pelagie Taponnet),8
and also, but more significantly, with Berthe, who, for the sake of the same
villain, had poisoned her husband. Bravery in standing by the wrong man is
bravado, and Laurence is only saved by the love of the doting old judge
Plantat and the intervention of Monsieur Lecoq. Berthe poisons her too
trusting husband, and Laurence shoots her vacillating Tremorel, but for her
sake Plantat and Lecoq intervene to deflect the course of justice. Where the
detective is concerned, women - generally weak, fickle, frivolous - are a
risk. Monsieur Lecoq ’terreur des voleurs et des assassins’,9 is disarmed by
women: witness his manipulation to save Laurence, and his own admission,
seems,
91
’il est telle femme, pour laquelle je ne suis qu’un imbecile’.1° The only
he trusts is Janouille his housekeeper, but Janouille, ’une robuste
a moustache,&dquo; is not a woman but a monster, and the terms in
with
virago’
which Lecoq expresses his confidence are subverted by the author. Janouille,
says Lecoq, ’me soigne comme son enfant et (...) pour moi passerait dans le
feu’, before innocently juxtaposing, just four lines further on, the revelation
that she had been ’condamnee pour infanticide et incendie’.12
In another of the monuments of the French tradition, Gaston Leroux’s Le
Myst6re de la chambre jaune, together with its sequel Le Parfum de la dame
en noir,13 we see an CEdipal detective, the adolescent Rouletabille, grappling
with the ambiguities and contradictions of a situation where the Protean
villain is his own father and also a representative of the law.14 Even worse,
the victim, Mademoiselle Mathilde Stangerson, who is revealed in the
second volume to be his mother, is an accessory after the fact to the act of
violence which took place in the famously locked yellow room. It is evident
that, for Rouletabille, who spends two volumes attempting to protect his
mother from his father even though she colludes with him - ’la sauver
malgre elle!’ he confides to his notebook&dquo; - watching outside her bedroom,
bursting in with the vain hope of catching the father in the act, relations
with women are going to be problematic, if not poisoned. The fatuity with
which the narrator of the two novels, Sainclair, parades his sentiments for
Mrs Edith Rance does nothing to redress the balance.
A more modern detective hero, the inspector Cadin, who features in
several of the novels by Didier Daeninckx,’6 is similarly unfortunate and
uncomprehending in his relations with women, sad and suffering, consoling
himself with a prostitute,
woman
blonde elancee qui l’accueillit en souriant. Dans la chambre on
entendait les manoeuvres des trains, le crissement presque humain des
aiguillages. Il 6teignit la lumiere, pour ne pas lire l’indifference dans ses
une
yeux17
Nor, in the work of another author,
of the pioneers of polar in a French
to the left in political terms, Jean
Amila the so-called ’homme rouge du roman noir’,18 are relations between
the sexes any easier. Combat is a term often used of these relations in a
fictional universe where women are either garce or rombière, siren or
Xanthippe, but in either case to be fought against.19 Elsewhere, in the work
of ’Peter Randa’, a prolific author, not much appreciated by left-wing
intellectuals perhaps, but reportedly admired by the professionals of the
underworld, 20 the assumptions are still the same. The title Cette fille dans
ses pattes21 manages to combine all aspects, since Antoinette Salbris the
secretary is sent by the hero-narrator’s lawyer to entrap his client, while the
echo of the phrase ’un fil a la patte’ recalls the narrator’s treacherous wife.
And although Lobasten the narrator does in the end win the love of the
one
setting, situated, like Daeninckx, well
92
secretary, render his first wife harmless, and
rescue their daughter from
end
is
achieved
his
happy
prostitution,
through uncommon physical and
mental strength: he dominates, and none of the women are innocent (except
possibly Adeline the cook).
There is of course an obvious counter-example in the person of the
happily married Inspector Maigret,22 stolidly faithful in spite of the
temptations that come his way. The impossibly perfect Madame Maigret is,
however, hardly a character in her own right, always there to open the door
because Maigret would lose his keys if he carried any, driving their car
because Maigret is too absent-minded to be trusted at the wheel, a motherfigure who tells him what to wear (and why), and uncomplainingly prepares
meals for which Maigret may or may not come home. Maigret is incomplete
without her
the
Maigret, lui, n’y
automobile,
connaissait rien, pas plus qu’en photographie ou en
bien pourquoi c’etait sa femme qui conduisait. Le
s’il était capable, a la television, de passer d’une chaine
et c’est
soir, c’est a peine
6 1’autre23
she may, for example in L’Amie de Madame Maigret,24 pursue
her own account, she is more typically an extension of Maigret
inquiries
himself (as in Le Fou de Bergerac,25 where the injured Maigret sends her out,
not to investigate, but to discover the answers to his questions); on his own,
as for example when Madame Maigret is ill in Les Vacances de Maigret, he is
at a loss.26 Monsieur and Madame Maigret, Jules and Louise, seem rather to
be the hermaphroditic halves of one Platonic being, and the reader is as
surprised as Maigret when his wife asserts an existence outside of his ken:
and
though
on
Tu connais les parfums Mylbne?
Bien sur ... Tout le monde ...
Et bien, c’est eux
Ils sont tr6s riches ... Ils possbdent un chdteau en Sologne, un yacht à
Cannes et ils donnent des f8tes 6blouissantes.
Comment le sais-tu?
Tu oublies qu’il m’arrive de passer des heures a t’attendre et que je lis
...
-
-
...
-
-
-
parfois les potins des journaux?2’
Just as Maigret is not really a typical detective, nor the novels in which he
features typical of crime fiction as a whole (it is surely not good practice to
reveal the identity of the killer in the title, as Simenon does with Le
Charretier de la Providence28), so the reliable ’brave Madame Maigret’ is not
at all, I would suggest, typical of the women of polar. The field, however, is
three hundred titles a year, in the estimation of one authority. 29
claim to read more than a fraction of this huge corpus, and any
generalizations are not merely rash: they are quite simply unverifiable. On
the other hand, it might prove instructive to attempt to falsify the working
vast -
some
No-one
can
93
hypothesis declared earlier against examples of the genre,
in particular suggest themselves as potentially significant.
Although Le Masque was launched (in 1927) with
and two
examples
a woman
author,
Gallimard’s S6rie noire had admitted a Frenchman (under a pseudoAmerican name, ’Terry Stewart’)3° before Gertrude Walker’s A contre-voie 31
brought a woman into the catalogue, five years after the series was created. It
was to be another twenty years before any French woman took her place
between the black and yellow covers, and even then Janine Oriano hid her
sex with a non-committal initial J. Her first offering, B comme Baptiste,32 is
likely to be an interesting test case for several reasons. Over and beyond the
distinction of being the first novel by a French woman to appear in the
series, there is the fact that Oriano, under her own name of Janine Boissard,33
was later to write L’Esprit de famille, a decidedly woman-centred four
volume family saga of four sisters, their mother and unobtrusive doctor
father: Pauline the teenaged narratrix has an affair with an older man and
nurtures her vocation to be a writer; Claire the oldest, discovers herself in
motherhood and marriage; Bernadette looks after her stables and dispenses
sound horse sense to the others; while the mother, when Cecile the youngest
is no longer a ’poison’ and a burden, finds her fulfilment as an artist and as a
prison visitor. 31 What is more, Schweighaeuser, praising Oriano’s freshness
of tone and her use of everyday characters, close to the reader, insists that
before writing herself for the S6rie noire, she had not read any of its novels.35
It is true that the opening of Oriano’s first polar strikes a relatively new note,
explicitly rejecting romantic cliches of the moon, and pointing up the
contrast between three Americans stepping out on the moon and a few
million Parisians crammed beneath the earth in the Metro at just after six
o’clock on a summer evening. It is, however, the point of view of a man.
While it is hardly surprising that Oriano does not use an obviously female
narrative voice, the option of a neutral third person narrator could not a
priori have been excluded, and yet Oriano chooses a first-person male
narrator. There is, it is true, a disavowal of machismo. ’Yves, Marie, Prejean’
is no super-hero, and certainly not, by his own admission, a super-stud:
’rayon minettes je n’ai rien du volcan. Regards, frolements, je serais plutot
poesie qu’action’, but simply ’... un d6gingand6 plus tr6s frais, la jambe en
italique, le cheveu pauvre, l’air gentil mais rudement cloche dans son
costume minable’.36 This at least is original, even iconoclastic, in a genre
which from its very beginnings has, vehemently, deliberately, and
unconvincingly, repudiated its fictionality and affected to deny its
conventions: Gaboriau pretends to mock the accepted stereotype of the
policeman, 37 and Leroux has his narrator deny that what his reader is
reading is a ’roman policier - l’abominable mot’.38 One of the constants of
polar seems to be that the gentle reader should receive frequent reassurance
that he - why else would such reassurance be necessary? - is not engaged in
anything so effete as reading a book, but plunged in the thick of action. This
94
manifestly untrue, but it is nonetheless a convention ritually observed,
and, in overturning it in this way, by making her character admit that he is
given to dream rather than deed:
is
premier geste n’etait plus non plus pour aller lui faire un mimi parderribre comme a 1’epoque du grand aveuglement, mais pour filer dans
ma chambre et m’y carrer avec de la lecture39
mon
Oriano is thereby kicking against the traces. Like her narrator, however, who
thinks of defacing a poster but does not translate the impulse into action, her
boldness does not go very much further. The refusal to sacrifice to the
stereotype in one direction serves only to reinforce it in others. It is precisely
the fact that her narrator is a weak, down-trodden dreamer which gives
weight to the portrayal of his wife Madeleine as typically overbearing and
domineering, ’bobonne’ in all her glory, ’ma grosse’ as the narrator
repeatedly calls her. Yves, squashed in the Metro, is stifled at home, since
this Malouin transplanted to Paris is afflicted with a Parisian (or at any rate
francilienne) wife who comes with the in-laws behind her: her brother, a
beauf’ with grandiose ideas, and her mother, newsagent and tobacconist at
Conflans [-Saint-Honorine].
The impact of these two on the Prejean couple is encapsulated the first
time
they
are
mentioned between Yves and
Madeleine, in
a
conversation
which is, as might have been expected, more of a monologue by Madeleine,
with meaningless interjections from Yves, who has his mind on other things.
Andr6 the brother-in-law is likely to borrow money from his sister, and the
mother-in-law, conveniently kept at a distance by her tabac, is to be
introduced into the household by proxy in the form of the bahut. This
monumental item of furniture, long coveted and finally secured for herself
by Madeleine, represents in a concrete form the middle-class and misplaced
aspirations of the rombiere, and a further encroachment on Yves’ living
space, seventy square metres with a shower that does not always work, over
towards the Saint-Ouen cemetery, ten minutes from the Porte de la Chapelle
interchange. The narrator leads a closely circumscribed existence, between
the record shop where he works and the cramped apartment where he
suffocates with the windows shut and is deafened with them open (’chez
nous, Qa vit, Qa vibre, c’est 1’asphyxie ou les tympans en compote’),4° the two
connected in a Parisian trinity of métro-boulot-dodo by his subterranean
daily journey, which hides from him the Paris that he traverses, so that he is
astonished at what he finds when, instead of changing trains one fateful
evening, he comes up to the surface to discover an idyllic Paris whose
existence he had been unaware of:
C’etait bath! Et c’est tout dire sur la betise humaine. Voila dix ans que
changeais la sans jamais avoir l’id6e de monter jeter un coup d’oeil.
Qa ressemblait a la campagne:
une
petite place de village
avec son
je
eglise,
95
bancs sous les arbres, ses vieux sur les bancs, et autour, tout ce qu’il
fallait pour l’apero, le digestif, les jeux de cartes, de d6s, de 421, le repos
du travailleur.41
ses
comforting and reassuring; calm and tranquil for a
the French saying has it, ’tranquille comme Baptiste’, a
saying recalled by the title, and underlined, at the end of chapter two, just
nine pages into the text, by the repetition, with, the second time, an ironic
exclamation mark and a paragraph to itself, of the phrase ’en toute
tranquillite’.42 Yves Prejean’s existence provides stability in its regular and
predictable sequence of events - ’Madeleine (...) Ce n’est pas le genre à
aimer la fantaisie, ni dans les horaires, ni dans le reste’43 - but even when he
seems to appreciate its advantages, the narrator’s tone betrays a certain
resentment at the restrictions imposed on him. Madeleine’s regular Monday
dinner at her mother’s leaves him a free evening, but in the description of
her expressions of wifely solicitude, one can detect a note of exasperation:
Such
an
existence is
narrator who
is,
as
Ce matin, avant mon depart, j’avais eu droit au cirque habituel. Mon
diner serait dans la casserole, le pain dans la boite a pain, les couteaux
dans le tiroir a couteaux, les serviettes la ou on les gare depuis dix ans,
bref, tout ce qu’un mari est cens6 oublier sit6t que 1’ange du foyer a
deploye les ailes44
Hen-pecked and vulnerable, allowed
a
clean shirt
Mondays
- by a wife
on
Thursdays - ’On voit que ce n’est pas toi qui frotte!’ (SiC)41
has taken over from his mother in telling him what to wear,
and
who
Aussi loin que je me reporte, il y a toujours eu le samedi soir, une bonne
femme pour sortir d’une armoire un costume que je d6teste et planquer
celui ou je me sens a peu pr6s.
J’esperais qu’en me mariant on me laisserait enfin la paix, impossible,
c’est une manie 46
not, like the idealized Madame Maigret, justifying her advice by reference to
the passers-by she observes from the bedroom window, but arbitrarily in the
name of domestic routine. Yves-Marie Pr6jean is like many others around
him, and meant to be so. The admissions of weakness, the weary resignation
and the daily frustrations, are a captatio benevolentiae, devices to appeal to
the assumed reader, who can to an extent identify with the character, and to
an extent also allow himself to feel a certain pity. And like the hypothetical
reader who has bought the book for that very reason, Yves, father and
husband faithful faute de mieux, is ready to escape into a fiction.
The fiction is supplied when he meets, in the corridor of the Metro station
where he changes lines, Sandrine, a young woman who claims to know him
and calls him ’Baptiste’, and here the name with its proverbial overtones of
unsuspecting naivete could be taken as casting the narrator in the role of
dupe. The cover illustration for the 1981 Carr6 noir edition depicts two
96
characters - presumably Yves and Sandrine - with human heads and the
bodies of pigeons, thus very neatly and appropriately bringing together the
twin symbolisms of this bird. Emblem of sweet young love when labelled
colombe and said to roucouler, the pigeon is also the dupe who unwarily falls
into the piège:47 the term is used in the novel when the mechanism of the
plot is explained by the private detective.48 While not exactly suspicious,
Yves is initially disbelieving. Young beauties claiming he is their long lost
lover do not spring out of the grubby tiling of underground corridors for such as
him, and in any case she has got his name wrong. But her evident sincerity, her
apparent fragility, and her mention of times they have spent together at
Saint-Malo overcome his initial hesitation, and he follows her above ground
for a drink in a bar, where, while she has dashed to the toilet to sob her heart
out because ’Baptiste’ cruelly and obtusely refuses to recognize her and
acknowledge their common past, Yves sneaks a look in her conveniently open
handbag to read her name - ’Sandrine Elinde’ - off an envelope.
The descriptions of Sandrine present her as almost a child, trusting and
ready to cry at any sign of rejection. The two features which are first
mentioned are the sparkling eyes (so ready to fill with tears) and the ’corps
fragile’.49 Other details are added to complete the picture: the smell of soap,5o
’son air de gamine, innocente, inconsciente de 1’effet qu’elle produisait’,
mention of Petit-Bateau knickers&dquo; (plain, practical, and not particularly
seductive). There are also however hints that point the other way: alongside
the innocence of fillette, there is perhaps a note of menace in the unexpected
use of the word dard in the initial description:
des cheveux en balade sur les reins, des jambes bavardes comme
quatre et des seins de fillette, haut dresses, drus, dont on voyait le dard
sous le mince tissu de la robe52
...
and while the narrator frequently refers to Sandrine as m6me or gosse, this
latter term is inconveniently close to the word he frequently uses to designate
his wife: ’ma grosse’. This fortuitous similarity between the two words takes
significance in this context: it unites the comfortable but claustrophobic
Madeleine with her younger sister, the captivating Sandrine, as the two ends
of one process: all women, it implies, are basically the same.53
And of course Sandrine is not the innocent child she appears to be: the
progress of their mutual seduction is her entrapment of Yves, who is simply
the latest in the string of dull, bored, and boring husbands that Sandrine
(and her manipulator) are ensnaring and blackmailing with the same story.
Yves has been chosen as her last victim because he is in fact Baptiste: calm
and trusting, he is destined to take the blame for the murder of Sandrine,
strangled by her accomplice because she was starting to threaten him,
threatening to become a burden:
L’assassin
...
Mais
pourquoi?
97
- La
petite s’est 6nerv6e!
’Tu
m’epouses ou je dis tout a ta femme.’
(...)
(...) Pris entre deux furies, il a sacrifi6 la plus faible.54
The ambition of the gosse was in the end to become a grosse, these being the
two poles, from temptation to encumbrance. Though the encumbrance, even
when resented, is recognized as necessary
Une bonne femme
bouffer moisi.55
qui
se
barre, c’est
un
malheureux de
plus condamné a
just as the pursuit of the temptress is irresistible, ineluctable,
almost
a
law of
nature:
Il y
a
chaque nuit des champignons mortels qui naissent de la pourriture,
jamais de
doigts après,56
et ~a ne manquera
se
lecher les
cons
pour les trouver beaux, les
ramasser
et
comme Baptiste does not therefore disprove the hypothesis of an intrinsic
climate of misogyny in polar, and moreover, these expressions of misogyny
from such a writer as Oriano-Boissard are persuasive evidence in favour.
Whether or not Oriano had read any other S6rie noire titles before writing
hers, she seems to have acquired a certain number of assumptions about her
potential readers and their attitudes, and, like the professional that she
undoubtedly is, she has set about supplying them with what she supposes
they want. Just as her Esprit de famille series was to cater for another
readership, in artistic terms rather less successfully, since her involvement
and her closeness to the subject matter prevent the irony and the archness
which are part of the panoply of polar : since there is little or nothing of
Oriano-Boissard in Yves Pr6jean, she is never tempted to take him seriously.
That however is another topic.
Time has passed, however, since Oriano’s first polar; a new generation has
grown up, and a more modern novel might be expected to show a different
picture. Among the more promising places to look for another test-case
would be, I suggest, the novels of the Poulpe series, with their avowedly
political - even politically correct - stance and their not-too-well-matched
hero and heroine. This series is original in that though the leading characters
and their backgrounds are given as constant, each book is written by a
different author, who is provided with a title and who then must devise a
story to fit it while respecting the cahier de charges that guarantees the
consistency of the series. Le Poulpe was launched in 1995 with La Petite
Ecuy6re a caft6 by Jean-Bernard Pouy. Pouy devised the concept and the
characters, and he continues to invent the titles and commission the
authors. 57 Since then, the Editions Baleine have published some seventy
titles featuring either Le Poulpe or his compagne Cheryl.
Pouy himself is an author who does not set out to conform: his La Belle de
B
98
Fontenaý8
has
as
its narrator,
protagonist
and
investigator
a
dumb Catalan
anarchist, retired after a career with La Vie du rail to plant potatoes on his
allotment,59 but still faithful to his slogan ’Veuillez laisser 1’Etat dans les
vous 1’avez trouv6 en entrant’. A similar Catalan refugee appears
Poulpe novels, as the provider of firearms and false documents to the
hero, and other peninsular and political echoes are to be found in Le
Poulpe’s ruling passion, the restoration of a Spanish Civil War fighter plane,
a Polikarpov ’Mosca’, a machine which, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, kills
fascists. Le Poulpe himself, Gabriel Lecouvreur by his real name, though in
his investigations he generally uses forged papers and a pseudonym, stands
outside organized society, living in hotels, unencumbered by possessions
other than his few clothes and books, assuming a new identity each time he
takes it upon himself to leave on another mission, robbing the rich or the
wicked as he goes, in order to take the restoration of the Polikarpov one stage
further. The villains he unmasks and confounds are generally of the political
Right: Nazis dans le Metro as in the episode written by Didier Daeninckx.’o
Playing opposite this ’personnage libre, curieux, contemporain’, as the
back-cover blurbs label him, is a character of a rather different stripe. Even
the iconography of the series suggests that Cheryl is in some way secondary.
chiottes ou
in the
The books of the series have a uniform appearance: the cover illustrations
are recognizably in the same style, by the same artist, and for the Poulpe
volumes, the mention ’Le Poulpe’, author’s name, title, and lower down,
publisher’s name, all appear, on front cover and spine, in the same plain
squarish block capitals, as if stencilled. When the protagonist of the action is
Cheryl, however, author, title, publisher keep the same style, but the
mention ’Cheryl’ which replaces ’Le Poulpe’ is not white like the rest of the
legend, but added in lipstick pink, as if scrawled; ’Le Poulpe’ still appears,
even if the character doesn’t, at the bottom of the front cover, with the
publisher’s imprint. Character and social status are different too. Le Poulpe
is an outsider, without possessions, hiding his identity behind the nickname
(a reference to his gangling length of limb) or a false name, living (when he is
not sleeping in Cheryl’s bed) in hotels. Cheryl on the other hand is a fully
paid-up member of society, of capitalist society even, since she is the owner
of a hairdressing salon, and ’Cheryl-Coiffure’ proclaims her name and status
to the rue Popincourt, and the world in general. While one might allow that
her profession endows her with the capacity for disguise which was always
the hallmark of the classic detective, there is no escaping the fact that
hairdressing is not exactly a profession that proclaims feisty female
independence. The contrast with American assumptions, with for example
Robin in Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels, who is a woodworker
and guitar-maker and competent to oversee the building of a new house,61 or
with Spenser’s lover Susan Silverman, who is a clinical psychologist,62 is
great.
Cheryl
is over-defined with
hyperconventional femininity.
Pink is her
99
favourite colour; she collects pink fluffy animals, and she has a particular
fondness for fluffy pink kangaroos, a trait which is interpreted by one
author’s avatar of Le Poulpe as evidence of ’d6sir maternel refoulé’.63 Though
the intention at the outset may well have been to avoid ’the worst kind of
chauvinistic cliche’ and turn ’a female character into a real, complicated
human being’ ,64 Cheryl appears to have the weight of tradition against her. In
at least one of the titles in the series, the authoress fvane Hanska does
attempt to subvert the stereotype by attributing Cheryl’s attributes to a
deliberate deuxieme degr6 on her part:
Depuis qu’elle s’etait mise, elle aussi, a filer les filous, elle cultivait le
style femelle futile. Au besoin elle en rajoutait en jouant la belle 6vaporee
qui ne comprend rien au film. De fil en talons aiguilles, elle avait pouss6
le bouchon jusqu’a s’amenager un int6rieur de poupee Barbie conforme à
composition&dquo;
One might suppose by this flicker of revolt, as well as from her
antecedents, that Hanska, ’authentique petite prolote’ possessing ’une plume
assez libre et trbs ébouriffée’ ,66 is as likely as anyone to disprove our
hypothesis. Though in her first book she admits, ’chui une vraie souillon.
Pour moi 8tre femme c’est pointer ses p’tits nibards vers le ciel et tortiller du
cul sur des grands talons’, she also proclaims that ’je n’ai jamais ete trbs
son
role de
dou6e pour les travaux de dames’, and advises a friend ’Lili faut pas t’laisser
coloniser. 11 a qu’a bosser ton vieux. C’est nous qu’on est des n6nettes
liberees. On lave plus les chaussettes’.67 Certainly, her Cheryl is often in
revolt
jour elle avait balance toutes les affaires du
lui hurlant ’Tire-toi ! Tu es disqualifié ! ,68
Un
Poulpe
par la fen8tre
en
and she does have her own secret stash containing false identity papers
and other items, including ’un passe-partout, copie de celui du Poulpe
ex6cut6e par un amant pas trbs recommandable’,69 This does not however
add up to full emancipation: evasion kit and skeleton key are modelled on
her man’s; she may take lovers, but then the ’cephalopode phallocrate’ (:25)
turns this to his own advantage:
appel, il lui avait demande de contacter son
1’Education nationale pour obtenir des renseignements sur
une certaine Marjolaine Lagarde, professeur de français70
Though she throws him out, she takes him back; and although they both
Lors de
son
dernier
admirateur de
their investigations, Le Poulpe leaves on his
own initiative to unravel
mystery, while Cheryl’s departures seem in some
way to depend on him, because he is exhausted, because he has taken time
to work on the Polikarpov, or, as in the present case, because he has
disappeared and she wants to find him. The author Hanska and her
disappear into the unknown
a
on
100
(inherited) character Cheryl want to change the rules, but neither author nor
character is at liberty to choose the game she plays: Hanska kicks at the
restrictions, complaining about the pink bedroom and the fluffy toys, giving
Cheryl a new lover, a biker who finds them inappropriate:
au milieu de la chambre de meme couleur que
mine extr6mement dubitative:
Bison, plante
afficha
-
-
une
sa
Harley,
Je t’imaginais pas dans un decor pareil.
Parce que t’es sarement 1’un des seuls a
ne
pas
me
prendre
pour
une
conne. 71
and offers to paint it blue. Cheryl chooses to throw water over herself to
avoid confrontation with ’Miss Gros Nibars’, but she is thereby competing in
(and winning) a wet tee-shirt contest 7’ and in spite of the protestations,
Hanska’s heroine, also protesting, still has to conform to the stereotypes. One
of the tenets of the belief system which underpins polar, is that men are
supposed to act as hunters and assume women are prey (a view which is
never, of course, incompatible with seeing the prey as bait and the hunter as
risking entrapment). We have seen signs of this in the way Cheryl uses her
admirers to obtain information or lock-picks, and from the moment of her
arrival in Lapraline on the trail of Gabriel her feminine allure is foregrounded : the taxi driver who picks her up attempts to pick her up; she is
pursued by three young soldiers ’revant d’une bonne cuite agr6ment6e d’un
coup facile’ (:30), and on entering one bar Cheryl plays on this attraction: ’elle
était probablement tombee sur le coq du village et sauta sur l’occasion’ (:31).
The series as a whole, and Hanska’s text in particular, makes it plain that
both partners collect lovers occasional and more permanent whether at
home or away. What puts Cheryl on Gabriel’s scent in Lapraline is only
secondarily the choice of beers in the Indigo: the first intimation is the
appearance of the waitress Odile (:32). Further on in the text, Cheryl, hoping
for a phone call from her Poulpe, is enraged by repeated calls from another
woman wondering where he is:
Monique Tamaire voulait savoir ’si elle pouvait toucher Gaby quelque
part’. D6cid6ment, les radasses du Poulpe lui couraient sur le haricot. ’Je
vais changer de num6ro et me coller sur la liste rouge ! Toutes ces pouffes
en chaleur qui me prennent pour le standard !’3
The symmetry however is not total. Just as both Cheryl and Gabriel have
their turn to shout angrily at the answering machine when the
human is absent, 74 only one of them is upbraided for it:
tu telephones huit jours
bien a la casbah 75
(...)
est
expected
plus tard, juste histoire de v6rifier si la fatma
the promiscuity of each is presented as differently motivated. Odile
‘1’accorte serveuse’ (:34-5) may have a pink bedroom and a fluffy pink
so
101
kangaroo, but her attraction for Le Poulpe is her looks. When Cheryl takes up
with Bison, her ulterior motive is to find Gabriel; she is brazen in her
enticement,
Si vous m’aidez a le retrouver, je vous demanderai de me tatouer une
coccinelle sur la riviere parisienne.
Elle pointa un index entre les deux seins. Bison perdit les pedales (...)’6
though she takes the relationship further because of the personal
qualities she finds in him, she is still only using him, and feels guilt about it:
and
elle allait devoir se montrer injuste et cruelle. Bison commengait à
s’attacher a elle comme un lierre et ga lui filait des boutons d’angoisse&dquo;
she still uses him to excite Gabriel’s jealousy (:75), and though she
does find Pierre Gropiero superficially attractive at first sight, her real reason
for accepting his invitations is, once again, her exasperation with Le Poulpe
and her intention not to give in too easily (:81-2). Just in case the reader
misses the point the first time around,
though
Elle songea a Gabriel, si sur de 1’avoir
recuperee,
et
se
sentit pousser
un
temperament de Messaline 78
the
motif is repeated, rather more strikingly, since Cheryl is insisting
leaving, and has in fact told Pierre that she does not like his manners
when a chance association reminds her of Gabriel and prompts her to change
her mind abruptly.
same
on
On m’attend a Paris. Tu leur pr6senteras ta prochaine conquete. Et puis,
t’avertir, je suis pas fana de la fagon dont tu me traites.
Il palit et resta bras ballants et bouche ouverte. Autour d’eux, on
s’activait sec (...). On se serait cru au Pied de Porc a 1’heure du coup de
feu. Cheryl pensa a Gabriel. L’idee de lui planter un lapin a la moutarde
-
autant
qui monte au nez 1’enchanta.
- je reste. 71
There is, it is true, a technical narrative
reason for this outwardly inconseof
mind:
the
author
has
to have her heroine solve the
quential change
to
a
close.
The
key to the mystery which Cheryl
enigma, and bring the story
is
to
found
in Pierre’s retreat for new age
and Gabriel are investigating
be
and
and
mystics
ageing hippies,
Cheryl duly uncovers it with the help of
some chance accomplices, and without Gabriel. Her success in this does not,
however, alter the impression that the construction of the story has created:
Cheryl is vindictive, capricious, and manipulative. She stumbles on the
solution by chance while following her whim and her libido, and her
conduct is motivated by spite and the desire to bring her man into line. As
she says when the rescued victim compliments her on her choice of partner,
Faut savoir les dresser des le
depart. Apres, ga roule.8°
102
All men are basically the same: it is surely not a good omen that the last
words of Le Poulpe in this book (:133) are the ’Alors? Heureuse?’ previously
identified as typical of pretentious and disappointing one-night stands (:87).
But then, so are all women sisters under the skin, and Cheryl, however much
Hanska has her protest at her status as ’patronne’, shares traits with both
Sandrine and ’bobonne’ Madeleine. The Poulpe series set out to be
politically correct, and in them sex is always safe: contraceptive sheaths are
used every time, imposed by one or other partner but always accepted. The
depiction of the characters and the way they act and interact suggests that
’rapports proteges’ applies to the old relations of power and dominance
between the sexes too. There, at least, there is no innovation.
ENDNOTES
In novels by Sara Paretsky, e.g., Guardian Angel (Delacorte, 1992; published in the UK by
Hamish Hamilton). While the initials ’V.I.’ are epicene, the form ’Warshawski’ (as opposed to
) is decidedly masculine.
Warshawska
2. Written by Susan Moody: for example, in Penny Dreadful (London: Macmillan, 1984).
3. Heroine of a series by Janet Evanovich, One for the Money (New York: Scribner, 1994; UK
publication by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin), Two for the Dough (1996), Three to Get Deadly
1.
(1997).
4. Felicity Travers, who appears in Barbara Deighton,
A Little Learning (London: Quartet, 1988).
5. In the Masque series, in Le Club des Masques, and also in a special collected works edition.
6. In for example, La Madone noire
, Masque n° 1847 (1986).
7. Starting with Ne vous fâchez pas, Imogène
!, Masque n° 647 (1959).
8. Le Crime d’Orcival (Paris: efr, 1963), 170.
9. Ibid
., 131.
10. Ibid., 131.
11. Ibid
., 332.
12. Ibid., 335-6.
13. Respectively, 1907 (Livre de Poche 547/548), and 1908 (Livre de Poche 587/588).
14. This is pointed out by Jean-Jacques Tourteau, D’Arsène Lupin à San-Antonio (Paris: Mame,
1970), 21-3.
15. Le Mystère de la chambre jaune
, 260.
16. For example, Le Géant inachevé (Série noire n° 1956: 1984; Folio n° 2503); Le Bourreau et son
double (Série noire n° 2061: 1986; Folio n° 2787); Le Facteur fatal (Denoël, 1990; Folio n°
2326).
17. Le Facteur fatal, 139.
18. Cf. the title of Jean-Paul
Schweighaeuser’s
essay in Michel
Lebrun, L’Almanach du
crime 1982
(Paris: Guénaud, 1981).
in Noces de soufre (Série noire n° 878: 1964; Carré noir n° 96:1972), but the
thread runs through most of the novels:, from Y a pas de bon dieu! (Série noire n° 53:
1950; Carré noir n° 36: 1972) to Au balcon d’Hiroshima (Série noire n° 2007: 1985).
Pseudonym of André Duquesne, according to Maurice Périsset, Panorama du polar français
contemporain (Paris: l’Instant, 1986), s.v., ’l’auteur le plus prisé [des truands] durant les
années 60/70, ce dont son éditeur n’osera pas tirer publicité’.
Paris: Fleuve noir, 1980; Spécial Police n° 1550.
’Commissaire’ generally in the originals, but often ’inspector’ in English, apparently at
Simenon’s insistence: see Pierre Assouline, Simenon, a Biography (London: Chatto & Windus,
1997, translated from his French original Paris: Julliard, 1992), 255.
Maigret et le tueur (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1969; n° 48), 43.
Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1950.
Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1932.
Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1948.
19. Most
same
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
obviously
103
27. Maigret et le tueur, 28.
28. Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1931.
29. M. Périsset, Panorama du polar français contemporain.
30. Serge Arcouët, author of L’Ange et la bête (Série noire n° 18, 1948); he later translated his name
(’ar couet’ is Breton) into French and moved to the Fleuve noir as ’Serge Laforest’. The first
avowedly French signature in the Série noire was André Piljean, with Passons la monnaie in
1951.
31. Série noire n° 67, 1950.
32. Série noire n° 1391, 1971; Carré noir n° 385.
33. Claude Mesplède et Jean-Jacques Schléret, SN-Voyage au bout de la Noire (Paris: Futuropolis,
1982); s.v., and also Jean-Paul Schweighaeuser, Le Roman noir français (Paris: PUF, 1984; Que
sais-je? n° 2445), 64-5.
34. L’Esprit de famille (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1977; Livre de Poche n° 5260), L’Avenir de
Bernadette (1978; LdP n° 5470), Claire et le bonheur (1979; LdP n° 5554), Moi, Pauline (1981;
LdP n° 5600).
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
Le Roman ,
noir français 65.
B comme Baptiste, 28; 16.
Le Crime d’Orcival, 60.
Le Parfum de la dame en noir
, 151.
B comme Baptiste, 8.
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
156.
13.
15.
15.
15.
62.
33.
Pierre Guiraud or John Orr could
association.
48. B comme Baptiste, 243, 247, 248.
no
doubt have
supplied the erudite justification
for this rash
49. Ibid., 11.
50. Ibid., 13.
51. Ibid., 19.
52. Ibid., 11-12.
53. And one could substantiate the same arguments with reference to another of Oriano’s polars
,
O.K. Léon! (Série noire n° 1531, 1972; Carré noir n° 441).
54. B comme Baptiste, 246.
55. Ibid., 180.
56. Ibid
., 156.
57. This information is gleaned from an interview with Michel Boujut, broadcast on Europe 1,
12.30 GMT. Thursday 26 February 1998, on publication of his contribution Les Jarnaqueurs
(Paris: Baleine, 1998).
58. Série noire n° 2290 (1992).
59. Hence the title, but ’La Belle
de
Fontenay’
is also the
investigate.
60. Paris: Baleine, 1996.
61. In Self Defence (London:
schoolgirl
whose death he sets out to
Little, Brown, 1994). A solid dependable
woman
makes
or
guitars for temperamental men to play.
repairs
62. She
gets her doctorate in Robert B. Parker Valediction (London: Severn House, 1984 ), then
leaves to fend for herself.
63. Laurent Fétis, L’Aorte sauvage (Paris: Baleine, 1997), 34.
64. These interestingly phrased remarks are taken from a mutual interview
by
two of
Cheryl’s
authors, Stéphanie Benson and Sylvie Granotier, published by The French Embassy Cultural
Department London
column b).
65.
66.
in French Book News 14
(Spring 1998),
’Crime
Special’,
11-13
(page
12,
Évane Hanska, Le Bal des dégoûtantes (Paris: Baleine, 1997), 12.
Jacques Cellard, review of her first book (which he puts in the category of ’autobiographies
post-pubertaires’) Les Raouls (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1976), Le Monde 2 August 1976.
104
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
Les Raouls, 16-17; 7; 205.
Le Bal des dégoûtantes
, 24.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.
Le Bal des
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
,
dégoûtantes
12.
61.
56-7.
Le Bal des dégoûtantes
, 66; cf. 61 ’Monique Tamaire, copine de cheval du Poulpe’. The name,
like the multi-layered ’Michèle Préfaire’ of Cheryl’s false passport (24; cf. 58 ’Michelle ]
sic
[
(...) comme Pfeiffer’), is part of the tissue of allusion and linguistic play which is typical of
polar and which Hanska relishes too.
74. ’T’es pas là ? merde, qu’est-ce que tu fous?’ says Gabriel (:59); Cheryl’s version is ’Alors, pauvre
tache, jamais là quand on a besoin de toi!’ (114).
75. Le Bal des dégoûtantes
, 72.
44.
71.
82.
88.
132.
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1. Works about polars
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Windus, 1997,
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Department London ’Crime Special’ French Book News 14 (Spring 1998), 11-13.
Boileau-Narcejac, Le Roman policier (Paris: PUF, 3e édn 1988, Que sais-je? n°1623).
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Amila, Jean, Au balcon d’Hiroshima (Série noire n° 2007, 1985).
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