Literature Review
Boileau, Pierre and Narcejac, Thomas (writing as Boileau-Narcejac)
Thomas Narcejac, a high school teacher who went on to write best-selling novels, died on June 7 in Nice, France. He was 89.
Mr. Narcejac’s highly successful collaboration with his co-author, Pierre Boileau, produced more than 40 books, making them France’s most popular postwar detective writers. Their work was interpreted by film directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Born Pierre Ayraud on July 3, 1908, Mr. Narcejac taught philosophy and literature at a high school in Nantes and spent his spare time writing mysteries. He published his first manuscript in 1946, almost 12 years after it was written while he was serving in the French Army. ”The Midnight Assassin” was an immediate success.
In 1948, his book ”Death’s on the Trip” won the prize for France’s best adventure novel.
But Mr. Narcejac was reluctant to follow in the footsteps of American writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who were creating a new genre of detective thriller. Instead, he wrote a treatise on the detective novel, which he saw as following the style of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
He met Mr. Boileau soon afterward, and the two eventually published 43 thrillers, 100 short stories and 4 plays. Mr. Narcejac was known as the literary master, while Mr. Boileau worked out the twists and turns of the plot. Their books were translated into 20 languages.
Among their best-known works was ”The One Who Passed Away,” rejected by French editors but finally published in 1954. Hitchcock wanted to make it into a movie, but Mr. Clouzot beat him to the rights and turned it into the 1954 thriller ”Les Diaboliques,” which starred Simone Signoret in a suspenseful tale about a murder victim who seemingly rises from the dead. The film was recently remade in Hollywood, starring Sharon Stone.
Hitchcock used a Narcejac-Boileau novel, ”From Among the Dead,” as the basis for his 1958 film ”Vertigo,” in which James Stewart, as a fear-haunted detective, pursued Kim Novak through the scary heights of San Francisco.
Mr. Boileau died in 1989, but Mr. Narcejac continued to write, producing three more novels.
Their first work together was L’Ombre et la Proie, under the nom the plume Alain Bouccarèje – an anagram of Boileau-Narcejac. In 1952, She Who Was No More became their first novel under the Boileau-Narcejac pseudonym. Although it was a worldwide success, the novel was initially rejected by several publishers before it was accepted by Denoël’s, The novel turned out a favorite of the genre and was adapted to cinema several times. The most notable adaptation is the 1955 French thriller Les Diaboliques. According to an urban legend, director Henri-Georges Clouzot beat Alfred Hitchcock to the film rights by mere hours.
Their fruitful collaboration ended in 1989 with the death of Pierre Boileau. Thomas Narcejac continued a single time, before dying in 1998. Their first work together was L’Ombre et la Proie, under the nom the plume Alain Bouccarèje – an anagram of Boileau-Narcejac. In 1952, She Who Was No More became their first novel under the Boileau-Narcejac pseudonym. Although it was a worldwide success, the novel was initially rejected by several publishers before it was accepted by Denoël’s, The novel turned out a favorite of the genre and was adapted to cinema several times. The most notable adaptation is the 1955 French thriller Les Diaboliques. According to an urban legend, director Henri-Georges Clouzot beat Alfred Hitchcock to the film rights by mere hours.
Boileau-Narcejac published more than 40 novels together, always writing in a unique style. They did it by correspondence, and never sat together to work on a project. Boileau provided the plots and main ideas while Narcejac decided the atmosphere and characterization.
Their fruitful collaboration ended in 1989 with the death of Pierre Boileau. Thomas Narcejac continued a single time, before dying in 1998.
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
London: Hutchinson, 1956. First British Edition. Preceded only by the wrappered French First, the British Edition was the first in hardcover and the first to be translated into English. Basis for the 1958 film noir ‘Vertigo,’ directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. The Dark Page, Vol.2, p.10-11. Item #715
First Impression. Octavo; brick red paper-covered boards, with titles stamped in gilt on spine; dustjacket; 192pp. Light foxing to endpapers, else Near Fine. Dustjacket is the second issue, both prices clipped, resulting in an uneven cut to bottom corner of the front flap; rear panel a bit soiled, shallow chipping at crown and upper corner tips, a tiny chip at the base of the front joint, and a larger one at the lower right corner; several edgetears with attendant creasing; Very Good only.
Synopsis
No longer with the police—for a reason he did not care to re-member—Flavieres was not a man to be surprised by the little side-slips of human conduct. And so, when his old acquaintance Gevignc suddenly looked him up and asked him to keep an eye on his wife, he jumped at once to the idea of infidelity. Any woman, he thought, might be forgiven for straying from Gevigne; but then Madeleine was not any woman, she was … The words were hard to find.
Soon she was more his problem than Gcvigne’s, yet though he came to know so well the graceful movement of her walk, the exquisite line of her clothes, and the soft glint of her hair at the nape of her neck, he had only to look into those pale other-worldly eyes of hers to find himself still baffled. Baffled may-be, but not diverted from his feverish quest for the truth, which was to enmesh them both in a web of crime and violence from which there was no escape.
The first part of this story begins in Paris, 1940, with a meeting between a former police detective and now lawyer, Roger Flavières and an old acquaintance, Gévigne, now a shipbuilder married to Madeleine, the daughter of a “big industrialist.” Gevigne reveals to Flavières that his wife is acting strangely, having odd periods of withdrawal, but in trying to narrow down exactly why he’s worried about her, Gévigne finally says that he knows it’s “ridiculous,” but that Madeleine is “someone else,” and that “the woman living with me isn’t Madeleine.” Ruling out mental illness, he confides in Flavières about Madeleine’s strange obsession with her great-grandmother, a woman named Pauline Lagerlac, who had met her own end by suicide. After observing her from a distance at the theatre that same evening at the suggestion of Gévigne, Flavières is enchanted. He lurks and follows while Madeleine does some pretty bizarre things, and then one particular incident pulls him out of the shadows and into Madeleine’s life. Their chats together lead Flavières to begin to wonder if she isn’t indeed a reincarnated Pauline Lagerlac, putting the idea of reincarnation into his own mind. As he begins to fall in love with and starts becoming truly obsessed by this woman, he realizes he’s not really doing it for Gévigne at all, but rather for himself because “he wouldn’t recover his peace of mind till he’d got to the bottom of the mystery.” Little does he know that the “mystery” of Madeleine is just beginning; because of the disruption of the war and the Nazi occupation of France, it will be another several years before it is actually solved.