EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT, FERNAND RAVINEL RETURNS TO HIS WIFE MIREILLE, WHO WAITS PATIENTLY FOR HIM AT HOME. BUT FERNAND ALSO HAS A LOVER, LUCIENNE, AN AMBITIOUS DOCTOR. TOGETHER, THE TWO LOVERS CONCOCT A MURDEROUS PLAN. THEY STRANGLE MIREILLE, BUT IN THE MORNING, BEFORE HER "ACCIDENTAL" DEATH IS DISCOVERED, THE BODY DISAPPEARS, AND THIS IS WHERE FERNAND'S PLAN STARTS TO UNRAVEL – ALONG WITH HIS SANITY...
A BOOK OF SUCCESSIVE HEART ATTACKS: This is how Les Diaboliques has been described, considered a classic noir novel – without losing an ounce of its dark allure – a book that is "incredibly modern," with "perfect intrigue" and "tension that does not take a moment's respite until the end." In Les Diaboliques, several characteristic elements of the subversive prose of Boileau and Narcejac appear for the first time: the triangular motif, the provincial and petty bourgeois setting, the motive of a guilt-ridden and fearful perpetrator, the interplay of innocence and guilt, and particularly the reversal of roles: In a real spiral of terror, the murderer becomes the victim hunted by the one who is no longer there – the woman he knows he has killed.
As is the case with the best novels of Simenon, what matters here is the protagonist's progressive loss of perception of reality, his ever more intense plunge into dizzying anxiety and terror, where his delirious ideas mix with childhood memories and a diffuse sense of helplessness. It is no coincidence that Francis Lacassin (screenwriter of many TV adaptations of Maigret and a deep connoisseur of Simenon) wrote that thanks to Boileau and Narcejac, "The detective novel without detectives has become a tragic variation of the short detective stories."
The books of the writing duo inspired great directors such as H.G. Clouzot with Les Diaboliques and Alfred Hitchcock with Vertigo. PIERRE BOILEAU and THOMAS NARCEJAC, born respectively in 1906 in Paris and 1908 in Rochefort, met in 1948 and decided to join forces to write "something different." Individually, both had already published many novels: Pierre Boileau, thanks to his collaborations with various newspapers and numerous magazines, was already an established mystery writer, one of whose works, Le Repos de Bacchus, won the Adventure Novel Prize in 1938.
Thomas Narcejac was a writer of thrillers and detective novels before receiving, like his colleague, the same award in 1948 for his book La Mort est du voyage. After their meeting, the writing duo embarked on a successful and long-lasting collaboration that profoundly shaped the detective genre, placing psychology at the heart of their novels. After a somewhat slow start, their duo established itself under the pen name Boileau-Narcejac. In 1952, they published Les Diaboliques (She Who Was No Longer), which would be adapted for the cinema two years later by Henri-Georges Clouzot under the title Les Diaboliques. That same year, D’entre les morts was published, the story of which shocked Hitchcock and inspired him to create Vertigo featuring James Stewart and Kim Novak.
The novels they wrote together continue to be immensely successful: Les Magiciennes, Les Louves, Le Mauvais œil, Carte vermeil, Maléfices, J’ai été un fantôme, ...Et mon tout est un homme, etc. They also created a literary hero for children: the fearless Sans-Atout. Their works have been adapted numerous times for television and cinema by great directors, and both established themselves as masters of suspense novels. For forty years, they remained at the forefront of French detective fiction writers, which they renewed from the ground up, infusing it with themes from fantastic literature.
COVER PHOTO Scene from the film Les Diaboliques by Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955.
