The Maltese Falcon for #Noirvember

As I mentioned before, I read , The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet for this year's #Noirvember. The first time in decades, but I watched the I watched the movie over and over again. I read it at a snail's pace, shame on me, but it was great to read a proper old fashioned hardboiled novel and to revisit a classic in its original form, and meet again so many larger-than-life characters, private eye Sam Spade and all the array of shady, vulgar, obscene villains the plot has to offer. And at the heart of the plot, the Maltese Falcon of the title, the most perfect and maybe the most emblematic MacGuffin crime fiction (or indeed fiction in general) ever offered. I don't think any other book or film ever gave us a MacGuffin that is so perfect. Anyway, I don't want to give anything away for those who have not read it or watched the film, but if you are still looking for some #Noirvember read, this is the novel for you.

The Maltese Falcon (#Noirvember)

 No, no, I did not forget the 5th of November, I just don't care about it all that much. Right now, as it is #Noirvember, I have started reading crime fiction and to kickstart the month I am reading a classic, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet. Obviously, it's not the first time that I have read it, but I haven't revisit it in years. In fact, while I watched the movie countless time, it will be the second time that I read the novel and the first time that I read it English. I saw it in the local bookshop and I thought that it was long overdue. (On a side note, this is one of the things I love about local bookshops: you bump into a book and you know it's time to read it.)

Calembours policiers

Au cours de mes vacances, j'ai lu avec plaisir Fatale Liaison de Jean-Hugues Oppel, "un polar dont vous êtes les héros". Petit détail: je l'ai payé, alors que ce livre était lors de sa sortie offert gratuitement, comme article promotionnel. Il est donc maintenant rarissime. Qui sait, un jour, il vaudra peut-être même plus cher que le prix payé par moi. Mais je digresse... C'est bien entendu un livre-jeu, mais aussi une parodie des romans policiers. Il est truffé de calembours, pas toujours bons, mais ils m'ont fait tous fait rire. Le titre est déjà un peu un calembour, on s'en rend compte plus tard. De même que le sous-titre. Et je vous donne déjà la clé de l'énigme en disant cela. Mais il y en a d'autres dans le bouquin. Mon préféré est un  hommage au classique de Dashiell Hammett: alors que la femme fatale vous frappe avec la satue d'un oiseau de proie, vous dites: "C'est un faucon" et elle répond: "Et vous un vrai." Comme jeu de mots tordu, difficile de faire mieux, ou pire.

Why I read crime fiction

Leigh Russell recently blogged about why she writes crime fiction. I don't write any (yet), but I thought that the appeal of crime fiction would be an interesting topic for a post. So why do I read crime fiction?

While I read "serious" literature and even studied it as an academic, I am a genre reader. Crime fiction especially. The first novels I managed to get through as a child was Agatha Christie's. After a few years, I grew out of whodunits and Christie is now a far away memory. But a few years after, when I was a young adult, I started reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and then a string of American crime novelists, I started reading hardboiled novels, romans noirs, etc. And I got hooked again. I am still.

I read crime fiction because it is the genre of modernity, it is the fiction that espouses better our time and because it is also one that often shows a reality that may be far from pretty but that is necessary to see. I say reality, as I think it reveals it, albeit sometimes in the exagerated tones of caricature and escapism, life and civilisation as it is. Crime fiction belongs to realism.

It is also a hell of an entertaining genre. It deals with sex, violence, greed, jealousy, anger, the primitive pulsions of mankind. That is always nice to witness it. Those emotions create such brilliant, beautiful, larger than life characters.There is a cathartic notion, central to crime fiction. There is also a certain notion of solace in it: when in reality (always way to real in comparison to even a realistic genre) urban violence and criminality is helped by endemic corruption, the impotence of the justice system, sometimes a flawed police force, it is nice to see that the good guys can win, at least in fiction.

So that's why I read crime fiction.