On the evening of October 17, 1961 twenty-thousand Algerians marched in Paris in defiance of and in protest against a curfew imposed by Maurice Papon, chief of the Paris Metropolitan Police. The protesters were met with ferocious and uninhibited violence. Eleven-thousand were arrested; more than one thousand injured; as many as three hundred were killed, many of them thrown into the Seine, from which their bodies were later recovered. In recreating the scene of the atrocities in Murder in Memoriam, his controversial alarum first published in 1984, Didier Daeninckx introduces a fictional observer of the riot, Roger Thiraud, a middle-aged history teacher in a public school, only steps from his home and his waiting, pregnant wife. In the first few minutes of the demonstration, he will be assassinated, in cold blood, by a member of the anti-terrorist secret police. For nearly forty years after October 1961, France would deny the killings. Upon the independence of Algeria in 1962 an amnesty put its perpetrators safely beyond prosecution. The records were buried. In 1981, Bernard Thiraud, Roger's son, is researching the archives in Toulouse, intent on completing his father's history of his birthplace, Drancy, now notorious as the site of a detention and transit camp from which Jews were deported to Auschwitz. One afternoon, after leaving the town hall, he too is murdered -- the victim of what appears to investigating officers to be a professional killing. When inspector Cadin of the Toulouse prefecture learns of the unsolved murder of the young man's father, he suspects a connection. But why would anybody want to kill two bourgeois, politically unconnected history teachers? Didier Daeninckx has located the link between the two murders in the history that France had yet to confront -- in its colonial racism and its complicity in genocide. Daeninckx made this connection in fiction, deliberately provoking its acknowledgment in fact. Murder in Memoriam anticipated by more than a decade the shocking revelations provided by the exposure, trial, and conviction of Maurice Papon -- the Parisian chief of police in 1961, and the never-named villain whose real crimes, unrevealed at the time of its first publication, haunt this account -- for crimes against humanity; for his part in the administration of the deportation of the Jews from Bordeaux to Auschwitz.

Murder In Memoriam

Literature & Fiction

DAENINCKX, DIDIER

Genre Fiction

Melville International Crime

A rollicking noir set in Paris, during the anarchic days following World War One In January 1920, in the aftermath of “the war to end all wars,” private detective René Griffon is hired to investigate the marital infidelities of the wife of a war hero. But what he uncovers is more than shabby behavior, and more than a sex scandal—what he uncovers is a scandal with devastating national implications. And as Griffon’s investigation plunges him into the murky world of blackmail, murder, anarchists, profiteering, and the repercussions of the war’s dark secrets, he discovers that the people who helped France win the war are being made to pay for the peace. Both homage to its American predecessors and critique of the Americanization of French—and global—culture, A Very Profitable War is a tense and evocative book that will linger long after its startling conclusion.

A Very Profitable War (Melville International Crime)

United States

A riveting novel of political intrigue, set on the Left Bank of Paris From France’s leading political crime writer comes a novel that delves into the country’s radical political movements on both the left and the right, in the wake of a brutal attack. When André Sloga, an apparently washed-up novelist with a history of baiting the system, is assaulted and left for dead in the basement of his apartment building, the freelance private eye Gabriel Lecouvreur takes on the case. The police consider it a robbery gone wrong, but Lecouvreur, a great reader who admires Sloga’s books, thinks the matter runs deeper than that. And as he looks into it further, he discovers that Sloga had not in fact quit writing after he was dropped by his prestigious publishing house for his increasingly provocative novels. Instead, Sloga was at work on an explosive book that had led him into extremist political circles . . . until someone put a stop to it. Steeped in the real Paris, where graffiti, squats, and skinheads dominate the streets, Didier Daeninckx’s Nazis in the Metro is a vivid portrait of a side of the city few foreigners see, wrapped in an utterly gripping mystery.

Nazis in the Metro (Melville International Crime)

Literary

Recipient of the French "Detective Fiction Prize" in 1984, this novel features the laconic Inspector Cadin in his attempt to solve the puzzling double murder of a father and son. The trail of clues he must follow leads to the time of the German occupation of France during World War II.

Murder in Memoriam (Mask Noir)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Serpent's Tail

Rene Griffon, a hard-up private detective, is hired to unmask the marital infidelities of the wife of a World War I hero. Griffon's investigation plunges him into a post-war nightmare world of black marketeers and property speculators, uncovering more than he was ever meant to know.

A Very Profitable War (Mask Noir)

";Murder in Memoriam is the kind of book that begins to restore one’s confidence in the detective story.";?Nick HornbySet against the backdrop of a demonstration in Paris in 1961, in which hundreds of Algerians died, Didier Daeninckx’s chilling novel created uproar when first published in France in 1984. Roger Thiraud, a young history teacher, is killed during the demonstration. Twenty years later, his son is murdered in Toulouse. To find the connection between the murders, Inspector Cadin must delve into the secret history and devastating compromises of wartime politics. Murder in Memoriam is a tense and unsettling indictment of France’s racist past.Born in 1949, Didier Daeninckx lives in Paris. Recognized as France’s leading left-wing mystery writer, his work is translated into all European languages.

Murder in Memoriam (Five Star Fiction)

Five Star

Raconteur D Histoires 1;Folio

Contemporary

Фоліо

MEURTRES POUR MEMOIRE

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