Elfriede Müller : When did you start to write and why ?

Jean-Bernard Pouy : There is no reason, I was forced to do it. I owed some money to a friend and couldn’t payback and by chance he was a series director at a publishing house. So there you have it : it’s Mosconi. Somebody very big, he’s the one who started Fajardie and all. He’s the one who started the French ‘neo-crime story’ genre in the 80’s and who started Fajardie, Jonquet, Raynal, myself and since I owed him some money he told me : write a novel for me, I won’t pay you but, at the same time, you’ll pay me. He was a publisher. I had already written Spinoza encule Hegel, but it’s not really a crime story. It was something I had done in high school. And then I wrote a novel and it so startled him that he carried the manuscript he had to the Série Noire and I found myself into it that way…I was doing something completely different : I was painting. So, from one day to the next I found myself writing novels, writing fiction because since he was fiction editor for crime stories at a publishing house, he had asked me to write a crime story. If I had been involved with somebody into erotic fiction or science fiction, then that’s what I would have gone for. That first one was Nous avons brûlé une sainte. He gave it to the Série Noire people and they took it. The Série Noire publishers asked me to give them another one in the same vein and I said no. I did a different one and that second one, Suzanne et les ringards, was taken too so, then I told myself I should give it a go. It was great. And it worked immediately so very quickly it was the only thing I was doing. I wrote some articles on the side for the press, from women’s publications to the truly specialized ones, political or otherwise. I wrote about everything and anything. For example I got specialized in perfumes and since I smoke a lot, I can’t smell anything, yet I’m an expert in the field. God knows why ? I am a bag o’livin’shame.

In the crime stories genre what happened is that Nous avons brûlé une sainte was published three or four months after Meurtre pour Mémoire . So it is at that time that the French crime story school got going in a rather odd way, and all those that were around it like Fajardie, Daeninckx, Jonquet a little later and myself and Raynal, not really since he was somewhere else yet he also got integrated into the group. We benefited from the Meurtre pour mémoire syndrome, since it was a very important novel, but we didn’t benefit from the Manchette syndrome. Manchette, he came before and for us it was a question of taste. Which means a question of pleasure, since suddenly came through a French author who was a little on our side. But Manchette brought in something very important, he brought a specificity to the French novel. For once there were French noir novels that were not copies at large of the anglo-saxon, American models, but in which there was a true French voice. Take first Le petit bleu de la côte ouest, the story of the nurse, Ô Dingos, ô chateaux! and Fatale even after, but above all Le petit bleu de la côte ouest and Ô Dingos, ô chateaux! which took place in the provinces with non-cop heroes, Nada, which was directly connected to May 68, we adored all that because it was a different voice. These were neither copies of the anlo-saxon world nor the Pigalle-Simenon-Simonin standard French stuff. So it all happens after Daeninckx, five or six years after, with Meurtre pour mémoire, and independently of what one thinks of that book, not perfect in my view, but it is a novel which suddendly gave legitimacy to the French crime story. For the first time a voice spoke about an event that everybody was hiding. For the first time there was a voice and guess where that voice was : in a crime story. Because when you read Meurtre pour mémoire, it comes off as a more traditional crime story : a death, the cop, the love story, the sting, the investigation, but that book messed things up big time in France. Suddenly crime stories were legitimate and us, we came just behind it and we profited a bit from this movement and thus became a school with people totally different from each other. We were put into a noir novel school which is ending now. Jonquet, Raynal, Fajardie, Daeninckx and I, we are people totally different from each other. That’s what makes this school great, there was a school in fact because all its members were not telling the same story.

 

E. M : And what do you have in common ?

Jean-Bernard Pouy © La Noir'rôde

J-B. P. : I believe there’s the generation thing, and the era, there is all that, but it’s quite mysterious. Why didn’t Manchette’s rise create a school ? Why was French crime story writing born with Manchette, and at the same time with Vautrin and also at the same time with Prudon and also with Amila. They are totally different people and oddly enough, they didn’t generate a school. Us, we did create a school, so why ? I think because we are of the same generation, I think all the authors-except for ADG-were ex-leftists, or still leftists or rather leftists still and remain so and also because everybody is different. Check for example Daeninckx who is somebody quite taut, who works with inquiries and who is very much the traditional militant. Check Jonquet whos’ also very militant, trotskyist yet also attracted by psycho-patology and by things evil. Check Fajardie who is a pure and hardened leftist troublemaker, the one who is the most ‘neo-crime story’ writer among us. Check me : a total ‘wild-and-crazy-guy’ and Raynal who is trying to do something else even. Everyone is different. But at the same time we became a school. When we became concious of that we started to actively militate for our type of literature. So we travelled all around France, went to all the festivals, the high schools, the jails all that, and went in a militant way to promote our literature but also for the very reasons why these things were done : access to reading, fight agaisnt illiteracy, and other rather political motivations… so ultimately all this got mixed and it created a true group which got linked to all the effervescence around reading groups, librarians, some journalists, all that stuff. And there was a time when the mayonnaise took. And it took for 15 years, and then, you see, a new generation took over so now we are considered as grannies, grandpas’, and all the youg ones are around. But you see, the young ones they don’t form a group. It’s everyone in his corner. Some of them do the same thing but they don’t become a school, that has never come up...Some thought that Dantec example could create a school, but fortunately he didn’t. But at one time we thought like, here’s a new way (mixed with science-fiction) that could rally some authors behind him, but no, he remained alone. There are authors like Manotti & all who are on the same basis as us but remain rather isolated, or Pécherot, but Pécherot he’s very deep into the historical stuff, and there’s Colin Thibert who’s very much like modern tv fiction, so all these young ones are rather in their respective corners. There’s no ‘group effect’.

 

E. M : Was the missed revolution of 68 the seed for this group or the reason why you decided to write noir novels ?

J-B. P. : For the generation thing yes, you can’t deny it. But besides that, I always rebel agaisnt the saying taken from to the journalists’label "from the red flag to the noir novel". That’s completely wrong, there were not only red flags but also black flags. But this is also false in the sense that such a label would imply that the militants of 68 abandonned political struggles in order to write noir novels.That’s false. But the people who write noir novels, each in their own corner, Jonquet, Delteil, Daeninckx, me or Fajardie, continue to be active militants with our own strength, our own will, our own choices. It is not because we write noir novels that we stopped being active militants.

 

E. M : Do you see noir novel writing as a form of militantism ?

J-B. P. : I think not. Even if writing was their choice, why did all these people started writing ? At the same time they are not that many if you consider the total group, it is not a strong reality. But in the world in which we live, those who chose to tell stories were telling contemporary stories and thus by doing so, were telling that kind of story. One can tell love stories, travel stories or car building stories but at the same time there is another type of literature which concerns itself with factories and all that. We chose the noir, the crime stories for that reason. We chose a ‘popular’ literature but a ‘popular’ literature does not mean a literature for the people. For us ‘popular’ literature is the one that can be read by the larger number of people which means that the codes, the gates, the referents, the ideological affiliation, all come after, not before. Whereas in general literature brings up codes and gates before. This means that for us Joyce is not ‘popular’ since there are gates to be opened first. With us it is the reverse. And I believe in the strength of the French school whose participants, as they were chosing to be part of a ‘popular’ literature, remained bent on showing that they were not idiots, not illiterate, not opinionless about the world, not lacking any cultural or ideological references but people who wanted to put it all within the novels themselves. All the references they use are not held/given beforehand but are written in afterwards, are put into the novels themselves. And thus from the start we write a novel which can be read by the larger number of people which is the case for noir crime stories.

 

E. M : To come back a little to the start, what did you do in May 68 ?

Jean-Bernard Pouy © Claude Mesplède

J-B. P. : I was 22 years old, I was a student, therefore I did what all the students of 22 did, which means it was a moment of intense pleasure and multi-facetted agitation. I was a little tricked though because since I was already in a anarchist group, we punched it up with the powers in place in a rather nasty way, but on top of that we got it also from all the leninists at the same time which means that everybody messed with us. It’s a little bit like in Spain, but we were not risking our lives. But it is true that we didn’t have what the maos’, the stalinists, or the trostkyites had (althought the trostkyites and the maos’ were bashing each other) and therefore we were beat up by everybody, and it was a struggle of every moment, but at the same time it was a time of formidable agitation. But it is also more complicated than this because there were meeting points in organisations that were named Tout, VLR (Vive la révolution), which were a mixture of maos’, of trotskyites and we called them ‘the desiring ones’ which means that from these goups came the big stuff on new sexuality, abortion, feminist ideas and all that, and also cutural and social activism. From the political groups came out people and what remains of the spirit of 68, and what remains in life, in the laws and in practice.

 

E. M : This leads a bit to my next question, for you, what remains of the spirit of 68 ?

J-B. P. : In France what we have now, and I don’t think it will change, is that those who lived 68 in an effective/operative way, who were between 15 and 30, are called ’68’ers’, already a pejorative, are also called ‘ex-68’ers’ which is doubly pejorative, and are also called ‘ex-68’ers retards’ which is three times pejorative. The people from the right or reaction, let’s say the reactionaries, think that all the problems come from that. Women rights, homosexual rights, sex, in short all that, all the liberations come from that and those are the most visible, but the least visible are all the principles of education, of non-repression, which all come from 68 and not from before. And we get bashed on the head pretty good for that, when it is in fact a victory. And [they say] that if now there’s trouble in the schools it is because of 68, when in fact it is because the powers in place are abandoning the educators and because they have no novel ideas about schooling and education.And the 80’s, what role do they play in your novels and in French society ?
80, that’s Mitterrand, who is elected. So suddenly you have the feeling that social-democracy is all powerful, which is true for one or two years, with some strong moments like the abolition of the death penalty, things like that, which were the result of struggles started before. But we see very quickly that the French leftists were like Rosa Luxembourg : they were not shot yet slowly things get passed one after the other, to the benefit of of a ruling and scared bourgeois class, which is cynical at the same time and ready to accept the givens derived from 68 ideas. There are some givens to which one cannot touch, some that one can’t say anything about, psychoanalysis for example, the preponderance of psychoanalysis in France, one can think anything he wants about it, is a given from Guattari/Deleuze and there are other givens about which the powers in place have no control. They tried vaguely to start some things up to counter/replace them but it didn’t work, in doing so they presented some lines of resistance but they are lines of resistance only because the powers in place themselves do not understand and have no new ideas. Economically at the same time capitalist powers and practices made a comeback and, at the same time, there was a disapearance of working class union representation and at the same time there is in France a very strong emergence of civil society actions which come to unite the leftists. I’m not saying that the French become only that. But all the leftists are now all well comitted to action against unemployment and things like that, in hard core militant associations, more libertarian in spirit than anything else, a fact that bugs the founders of these associations who are ex-stalinians who now realize that their associations have become generally more libertarian, not anarchist, but libertarian. So there are also tensions because of that.

 

E. M : In fact what role does history play in your literature? Which events do you deal with and how do you pick them ?

J-B. P. : A small role, but I’m not an investigator, I’m not an investigative journalist, I’m not an historian, so I don’t work on very precise historical or news-driven subjects from which I could dig information, but nonetheles in general I lean onto some events, some things, a bit from a side angle. To take an example, not many people know that, a number of militants were steared to a kind of reserve stance in wait for the advent of the future/next revolution and with Larchmütz 5632 I tried to write a novel which is not historically correct but which borrows that idea. In Le cinéma de papa things are more exact in the sense that I had, from my family, informations about the struggles between political groups to get films for schools and universities. It is not part of the political struggle but it is quite maddening to think that stalinians and troskyites shot at each other for these films. And that is the truth. So I work with little facts. I’m more into the contemporary, the immediate kinda areas, which means I deal with an athmosphere, a state of things without positioning myself like an investigator or a journalist. I’m not talking about precise facts, this may come in time, but I’m inspired now by everything that occurs around, things that go by.But the background is still a bit historical which means that the novels occur nowadays, but the crimes always have a connection with things that took place before. Yes, which means I don’t speak in a vacuum. In La Belle de Fontenay which took place during the Spanish civil war, there was the fact of the presence of maoists educators in a communist town, but I didn’t make it the main topic, I left it in the background because I know very well that I cannot do it as well or as bad as Daenninckx on some stuff, and I cannot do it as well or as bad as Fajardie on a given subject. Everyone has his own thing, you see. It’s a natural division of labour. Daeninckx for example is implicated into all kinda things, he has means of info that I don’t have, and in the same way I can start Le Poulpe in 1995, and he couldn’t have done that. And also with Le Poulpe I gather everybody throught the kind of libertarian world that everybody had more or less forgotten, and that pleased me because for this libertarian series there were maoists, trostkyites, everybody wrote one. If I had said that Le Poulpe was an anarchist, I would have had three or four of those as writers also.

 

E. M : Here everybody was in agreement, so it’s a great lesson.Is there a context between the subject of your novels and the signpost that May 68 represents ?

Jean-Bernard Pouy © La Noir'rôde

J-B. P. : Yes and no. Yes because I come from that. I was 22 in 68 so it shaped me intellectually, it left a mark on me but no mark was left by the fact of leaning my stories on those events, on what occured in 68. Yes, to be a ‘68’er’ is a bit like those who lived the war, or those who lived before 34, or like the young ones who lived the arrival of Mitterand, or the defeat of Jospin, or the rise of Le Pen. These were strong moments, which forced you to find yourself , to think, to react. The benefit of 68 - because there is one - is that there was three months of activity and then ten years of work about these three months. Which is not the case for many political events. At least, these were nonetheless three very intense months. In France it all went well and it went well because there was no great drama, because there was a link to the working class world. The changes possible in the society did not occur but after that the damage, so to speak, had been done and for 10 years there were radical changes in the thinking through cultural, educational, socio-educational means, more than through political ones, but these changes lasted ten years and now there is a backlash. I think for example that the ‘Carnations Revolution’ in Portugal, even if it was totally different, was about the same scope, with two intense months, during which anything could happen, with a liberal military taking power, and then… But for five or six years there was a renewal, not as radical as what we thought and different from what happened in France, but a small yet strong event which suddenly made its way into time. Whereas in Italy, where events were stronger and had sharper and more terrible consequences in time, yet the Italian society did not change. There is always the pope, but there it was a lot stronger. There was clandestinity and armed struggle and all. In France there was none because there was a cohesion, not a long one, but a sudden one with the working class world. Bizarre but good.

 

E. M : What role plays the main character (by opposition to the groups) in your novels ?

J-B. P. : Oh, it is a mirror, the character way in front is a fictional device, it is uniquely a point of focalisation because one has to go through that. But it is true that they are characters that portray more a state of mind than themselves. They are people whose age is quite defined and they are portrayed as handicapped, which means that they always have something less. It is a symbolical way to tell what we lost in 68, it is also a means by which you lose a hand, an arm, a foot, an eye. They are handicapped and as handicapped people they apparently have more difficulties to solve their problems, but at the same time they use it. The handicap is not a way to say that they hurt even more than others. No, It is easier to explain it like I do than psychologically and I know it well and when the Grenelle accords came down, it was like an amputation. And I believe that this amputation remains. For that reason I never trust the communist left in France, nor the unions brain trusts. And this amputation was very very radical. So, was it felt in a stronger way by those who were communists and who witnessed the germano-soviet pact, or is it felt as strongly when a normal eastern militant sees the wall fall, like a vopo guard who gets utterly bored protecting the wall for five years, gun in hand, and who bugs all others around ? I think this vopo guard was already perturbed in any case. He will be less confident in the stuff he used to be confident about.

 

E. M : Do you consider these individuals as bearers of ideas, of hope, of change or are they only witness of a time lost ?

Jean-Bernard Pouy © Claude Mesplède

J-B. P. : Ah no, they are witnesses of course, but they also say things even if I don’t write militant novels. They say something, they are not people who give up theoretically.Even if it is less driven than before. There is a whole literature with peoplle who have lost and I’m not saying that it is a bad literature. There are lots of heroes among the French ‘neo crime stories’ where the people are conscious to have lost, bear the guilt to have lost, so they do either everything and anything or are desperate or attack banks. More and more with age I have trouble giving lessons and I tend to say : I was young and when I was 20 I lived absolutely extraordinary things, but this was lucky and by pure chance. But I was more or less prepared for that. And those who prepared me to this, like Henri Lefebvre and all, i threw them out. But at the same time they were the ones who prepared me. I don’t try to teach lessons. It’s difficult. One should never say : "Me, I did…, You should…", one should let the young ones chose their own struggles. The shit is gonna fall on them, that’s for shure, I have nothing to say on that. I try as much as I can to integrate myself in these struggles. But above all say nothing and don’t teach lesseons. Lessons are killers. And above all in literature.

 

E. M : The success of the FN in elections and in life since 83 was the subject of many crime stories. Do you think that this kind of literature embodies the means of struggle against the rise of fascism ?

Jean-Bernard Pouy © La Noir'rôde

J-B. P. : There is a French extreme right which exists for a long time which is at the same time monarchist, catholic of the ‘integriste’ kind, antisemitic, but since Le Pen it’s different and he reflects the problems between France and Algeria. The true question is that we lost the war with them. We don’t have the same problem with Africa, or with Morocco. You can go on vacation in Morocco. Nobody takes a vacation in Algeria. For Tunisia the same. Algeria got us. It’s like Vietnam, you could have dropped an atomic bomb on it, like the Americans, but thank god… They were beating us and we were bringing them to France, because in France the capitalists needed working hands and the French didn’t want to work in the fields in winter. So we have a true problem with Algeria and I think that Le Pen plays on that. The Algerian becomes ‘the Arab’ and French racism is there. Yet there is immigration from the Maghreb and Algeria because there are still very strong links between France and Algeria and people who go there and vice-versa. There is a woeful incomprehension and fear among the people who don’t have enough access to information. For example three days ago, one of the arguments of Le Pen fell thanks to Sarkosy who published some statistics and so on. These were not numbers from the Ministry of the Interior, so you can trust them, they came from the INSEE and said that Algerian women in France have as many babies as French women. Because the big argument was that they have more children. And the INSEE just said that this is not true and that for French women it is 1.68 and 1.69 for Algerian women. Which is really nothing. They became like the French, they say ‘kids are OK, one or two, but not more’.They are integrated that way too. Integration, at least in Paris, and mixing of races, are working. When you take the subway in Paris you understand that they are Parisians and not immigrants anymore. And this is Paris which is a fifth of France. So it’s important. On that point Le Pen completely lost. In France, immigration and mixing of races are working and that’s very good.

 

E. M : Are you speaking to a specific audience ?

J-B. P. : No, and this links up with what I said before, we make the effort to write novels that can be read by the greatest number of people, and this is true for all those who write noir, crime or ‘popular’ fiction. Beyond that, contrary to a kind of popular literature which goes towards people by being ‘easy’ just like TV can be, we say that even if we give novels to all, it is not a reason to hide our tastes, our differences, our references, our ideological point of views. When I go to the provinces I meet with old people clubs, the old grannies and they love it. And they ask me questions about the differences between the leftists groups and all that. They are interested but if they are interested it’s because they could read the novel before. I think that all the authors who write crime stories have this in their minds. And those who step away from crime stories, they write ‘blanc’ novels because in the first place they plant the codes in which they bury themselves later and they try to show off with that. Us, we are novelists before being writers.

 

E. M : Manchette said that the noir novel was a throwback to a literary form of the 19th. Do you think this was correct ?

J-B. P. : Manchette is a pure and hardenned leftist whose intellectual mind set changes: one day he’s situationist, and I don’t know what the next, but in my view, in the situationist group there are extremely unpleasant people. He writes in his journal some stuff about the arts that seem grotesque to me and above all his last novel La position du tireur couché seems rather fascistic to me. That’s a book that I don’t like at all. Very interesting from a behaviourist point of view but in which the secret service character is far from the preocupations of the time. An author looking at himself is not a character that I would totally lay claim to. But I see the impact.

I think that his idea about literary form is correct, but more than the 19th, one should think about the 30’s. The crime story fathers are Balzac, the authors of the 19th. But what Manchette writes is the opposite of Balzac because he writes like James Cain, Horace McCoy, people like that. Like American authors who come after the crisis of 29, and who are into behaviorism. They are not explainers, they are not lessons teachers, they tell things. In my case, what interesses me in The postman always rings twice, it’s the psychoanalysis explained in two sentences. When Camus read that he was stricken and said to himself ‘I would have taken 500 pages, and he took two lines’. He wrote The stranger just after and The stranger is one of the French behaviorist novels. It’s an example among others, like Emmanuel Bove and others. I think it is more that school that influenced Manchette because Manchette doesn’t write like Balzac, which means that when he is close to Balzac, it is only like Balzac looking around himself and telling stories. In Une ténébreuse affaire, you think that you are in Chirac’s France with a cop investigating pedophile stories, bank stories, it’s exactly like now : written to make money. But at the level of themes, they are the same type of stories. At the thematic level it’s the 19th century, at the stylistic level it’s more the 30’s. Yet it is equally interesting. Us, we are very influenced by the hard-boiled, communisto-behaviorist school.

 

E. M : You were talking about the end of a group of noir writers. But, nonetheless, you still all write ?

J-B. P. : Yes, but it is a normal end because it lasted nonetheless between 15 and 20 years, so we get old and if one gets old, one becomes an old asshole, so you better be careful about what you say. Moreover there are plenty of young ones coming. Times are a’changing. We will keep on. There are some among us who left right after the start, but I wrote 40 books, some others tried to do something else after three books. There may be also tiredness among the readers and maybe the fact that we did not renovate enough, these are changing times. There are plenty of factors. I don’t believe that the most interesting and important authors will disapear radicaly, but I believe that the ‘group effect’ will disapear. Maybe because we spoke too much, because we did our job, maybe it is time for the other to do theirs, and maybe not the same things but they better find something. We are always tempted to say : « it should be this way..it should be that way » and in fact we shouldn’t do that. It’s also up to them to find their angle of attack, their path. One thing that we learned in 68 is that one must be careful not to become and old asshole teaching lessons. I regret that there is no different school appearing. But in literature one should never hope for something, it creates itself against all hope in fact. But I would still like that something quite radical pop up, in the end something literary even more radical than our stuff. Crime stories were a ‘low’ literature and because of that we had time to impose our thing bit by bit. In any case Le Poulpe is dead. Capitalism gobbled us up. And it’s OK by me.