Detecting and (re)solving conflicts in French crime fiction: introduction

It is estimated that some twenty per cent of all books sold in France are crime novels (Gorrara, 2009, p. 4). Add to this fact the current ubiquity of the crime genre in popular culture—bande dessinée, the graphic novel that has such a strong tradition in France and Belgium, as well as film and television—and it becomes clear that crime narratives possess a powerful cultural voice, one that has the potential to go beyond their value as entertainment. Above all, they offer the perfect framework within which to explore conflict of all kinds. While the form, in its French embodiment, has evolved considerably from its American-inspired beginnings when Gallimard’s Série Noire was established by Marcel Duhamel in the aftermath of the Second World War, its central topoi of investigator versus criminal, of good versus evil, of past crime versus present justice, are inherently conflictual.