Book Around the Corner

• After the Dogs by Michèle Pedinielli (2019) Not available in English French title: Après les chiens
• All She Was Worth by Miyabe Miyuki (1992) French title: Une carte pour l’enfer. Translated by Chiharu Tanaka and Aude Fieschi
• L.A. Noire – Collected Stories (2010) Not available in French.

These three crime fiction books are nothing alike and my favorite one is the Après les chiens by Michèle Pedinielli.

Set in Nice on the French Riviera, where the author lives, Après les chiens is the second volume of the Boccanera series.

We’re in 2017 and Boccanera, a private detective, stumbles upon the body of an Erythrean young man. He was an illegal immigrant who arrived in Nice through the border with Italy in the Nice countryside. It’s in the Alps, near the Vallée de la Roya. So, picture high mountains and dangerous trails. We’re also in 1943 and peasants in the same mountains helped Jews cross the border from France to Italy to save their lives.

Après les chiens is a political crime fiction novel. The Alps near Nice are a hotspot for migrants and there has been conflicts between a part of the local population who rescues them and the police who wants to block them out. Intolerance against migrants is more and more vocal and especially in the South East of France, where Nice is located. Pedinielli’s opinion is clear through Boccanera: there’s a tradition of crossing borders in the area and a tradition of assisting people who are in danger in the mountains.

The plot is secondary to the political message. It could be heavy but it’s not because of all the side characters around Boccanera, Pedinielli’s wonderful descriptions of Nice, a good way of tying together the two threads of her plot, the one in present times and the one in 1943. I just wanted to hop on a train and go visit Nice.

Après les chiens was our Book Club choice for December 2023 and is published by the independant publisher Les Editions de l’Aube. They also publish Stéphane Hessel and Gao Xingjian. I read it a few weeks ago but I’ll mention it for Karen and Lizzy’s Read Indies event anyway.

Totally different atmosphere but similar intention: In 1992 Tokyo, Miyabe also wrote a political novel with his book All She Was Worth.

It’s more oblique than Pedinielli’s intentions but it’s still there. Inspector Honman is on sick leave while his leg recovers after he got shot. A relative comes to him because his fiancée Sekine Shoko has disappeared. Honman quickly discovers that she stole someone’s identity to escape from mafia debt collectors. Miyabe describes the scandal of deregulated access to credit cards and debt overload.

The plot felt a bit sluggish to me but I enjoyed Honman and his family. His wife died a few years ago and he’s a single dad, raising his ten-years old son Satoru. His housekeeper is a man who chose this job while his wife has an office job. I don’t know much about Japanese culture but I imagine it goes against the usual vision of a family and what a man’s job should be.

I read it from the TBR and it’s my contribution to January in Japan, hosted by Meredith.

Our next stop is to L.A. in the 1940s for L.A. Noire – Collected stories edited by Jonathan Santlofer. It’s part of my Tame the TBR project. All the stories are set during the Golden Age era and I noticed that the title is L.A. Noire, with an e at the end of Noir. As a French, I see it as agreeing the adjective noir with the feminine form. It implies that L.A. is a woman.

The eight stories included in this collection are:

• The Girl by Megan Abbott
• See the Woman by Lawrence Block
• Naked Angel by Joe R. Lansdale
• Black Dahlia and White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates
• School for Murder by Francine Prose
• What’s in a Name by Jonathan Santlofer
• Hell of an Affair by Duane Swierczynski
• Postwar Room by Andrew Vachss

I’m not very good at defining literary genres but I thought that Noir implied femmes fatales, gang, hidden criminals and normal Joes who make a bad decision at some point and whose life turns for the worst.

Here we have a lot of naïve and helpless female victims. Young would-be actresses who get drugged, fall into prostitution, and get murdered. Only in Hell of an Affair and Naked Angel do we have actual take-charge women who are more cunning than the men around them. See the Woman was well-drawn too, a twisted story of solving a recurring problem of domestic violence.

Otherwise, I thought that the stories were a little weak. Duane Swierczynski is a hell of a writer, though, if you like pulp and Noir. I’ll point out again his Charlie Hardie series, that was a lot of fun.

So, my recommendation would be to read the Pedinielli for readers who can read in French and go for the Charlie Hardie series for the ones who love pulp entertainment.

PS: I also read In the Name of Truth by Viveca Sten (2015) translated by Marlaine Delargy. (French title: Au nom de la verité.) It’s the eight volume of the Sandhamn Murders series and it’s very good. It felt like Sten was finding a new breath with the series, more thriller than whodunnit. She also shifted her attention to Nora, the female character of the series as she made her change of job and go into a more investigative position. Excellent.

The books in this billet contribute to several blogging events or to my personal reading goals.