{"id":35453,"date":"2024-12-06T10:10:42","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T08:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=35453"},"modified":"2024-12-06T10:10:42","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T08:10:42","slug":"salacious-criminality-trenchcoat-detectives-rogues-smoking-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/salacious-criminality-trenchcoat-detectives-rogues-smoking-guns\/","title":{"rendered":"Salacious Criminality\u2014Trenchcoat Detectives, Rogues & Smoking Guns"},"content":{"rendered":"
Did repressive governments and dictators contribute to the downfall of a popular 20th-century fiction genre?<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Marcia Lynx Qualey<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Elias
Children of the Ghetto<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his 2019 novel <\/span>Children of the Ghetto<\/span><\/i>: <\/span>Star of the Sea, <\/span><\/i>Elias Khoury\u2019s narrator claims that although a story he knows belongs in a detective novel, \u201cunfortunately no such thing exists in Arabic literature, and, if it did exist, it could never rise to the level of the true detective novel or of thrillers of the sort written by Agatha Christie …\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The narrative lens in <\/span>Star of the Sea <\/span><\/i>\u2014 which appeared this November in the late Humphrey Davies\u2019 translation \u2014 is unreliable, and sometimes tongue-in-cheek. After all, Khoury himself wrote a sort of detective novel in 1981, which was published as <\/span>White Masks <\/span><\/i>in maia tabet\u2019s translation. As far as Agatha Christie goes, she was widely read across the Maghreb and Mashreq; more than 50 of her novels are available in Arabic translation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Elias
White Masks<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And while, at the moment, the Arabic detective novel can\u2019t compete with other genres \u2014 such as satire or horror or the historical novel \u2014 it hasn\u2019t always been that way. In mid-20th century Cairo, the genre of detective fiction was thriving. If the 1940s and \u201850s were a \u201cGolden Age\u201d of Arabic pulp fiction, then perhaps no pulp had wider reach than the detective story. Smoking guns and trench-coated detectives were splashed across magazine pages throughout the mid-20th-century, when the low cost of paper and rising literacy rates created a boom in popular literature.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a form of pop lit, crime generated both titillation and controversy. Literary critics maligned the formulaic plots of the genre, while moralists criticized its overt sexuality, deploring the spread of \u201cvulgar tales and cheap novels.\u201d The police even found a crime novel in the possession of the famous serial killer Saad Iskandar (1911-1953), the \u201cKarmouz Killer\u201d \u2014 damning evidence that these books were a bad influence, or so one critic argued in <\/span>Majallat al-Risalah<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The
13th-century author Al Jawbari, Kitab al Mukhtar fi Kashf al Asrar<\/em> (“Book of Select Revealed Secrets”).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yet despite these complaints, detective stories remained\u00a0an obsession in Egypt and beyond throughout the forties and fifties. Pulp magazines such as\u00a0<\/span>Akhir Sa<\/span><\/i>\u02bf<\/span><\/i>ah\u00a0<\/span><\/i>and\u00a0<\/span>al-Ithnayn\u00a0<\/span><\/i>churned out true-crime stories, locked-room mysteries, and crime puzzles for their hundreds of thousands of readers; a few examples are reproduced in translation in <\/span>ArabLit Quarterly\u2019s<\/span> Summer 2020 \u201cCrime\u201d issue<\/span><\/a>. At book stalls and kiosks, readers could find not only Agatha Christie novels, but also Sherlock Holmes stories, Ponson du Terrail mysteries, and tales of the detective Monsieur Lecoq. In addition to these translated works, Egyptian authors raced to pen original murder mysteries \u2014 and Egyptian artists such as Husayn Bikar sketched dramatic pulp art to accompany the tales.<\/span><\/p>\n

Certainly, European crime stories were a key influence on these Arabic works. But there were also earlier crime stories in the Arabic tradition. Back in the tenth century, Al-Tanukhi included short, compelling crime narratives in his collection <\/span>Al-faraj ba<\/span><\/i>\u02bf<\/span><\/i>d al-shiddah (Deliverance Follows Adversity)<\/span><\/i>. The 13th-century author Al-Jawbari, in his <\/span>Kitab al-mukhtar fi kashf al-asrar (Book of Select Revealed Secrets)<\/span><\/i> relates the stories of charlatans, criminals, and assorted scoundrels. And naturally there is the \u201cThree Apples\u201d tale of the <\/span>Thousand and One Nights.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\""Arsene
Ars\u00e8ne Lupin, Gentleman Thief<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But it was the end of the 19th century when Arabic-language readers began to enjoy the crime writing familiar to European readers. <\/span>Critic and crime-fic fan Jonathan Guyer has called\u00a0the period from the 1890s through the 1960s \u201c<\/span>the golden age of illicit crime fiction translation<\/span><\/a>\u201d because of the number of English and French novels translated or adapted to Arabic in various undocumented editions. The first Arabic translation of an Arsene Lupin adventure was published in 1910, and thousands of other crime novels followed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A number of the 20th-century\u2019s major Arab writers have said that they grew up reading crime and mystery novels. Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz said,<\/span>\u00a0in an interview with\u00a0<\/span>The Paris Review<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>\u00a0that his earliest literary influence was Hafiz Najib<\/span><\/a>, a popular thief who wrote 22 detective novels. For the great Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, his passion was for books about the gentleman thief, Arsene Lupin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet toward the end of the 20th century, traditional police and detective novels lost much of their glamor. One reason might be the way the genre can take the side of police and repressive state institutions. Toward the end of the 20th and early 21st centuries, readers were more likely to find prison novels in Arabic than police procedurals, as many serious novelists seemed more interested in humanizing prisoners than allying themselves with jailers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus Arabic crime writing seemed to disappear, at least for a while. This is one reason why some have said \u2014 as in Elias Khoury\u2019s <\/span>Star of the Sea <\/span><\/i>\u2014 that there are no detective novels in Arabic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But in their introduction to a recent scholarly collection, <\/span>Le r\u00e9cit policier arabe<\/span><\/i><\/a>,<\/span><\/i> Katia Ghosn and <\/span>Beno\u00eet Tadi\u00e9<\/span> write that academics sometimes miss out on the world of contemporary crime writing in Arabic because it doesn\u2019t quite line up with their idea of the \u201cclassic detective novel.\u201d They quote scholar Gianluca Parolin as saying that we can find a lot more crime writing when we \u201ccast a net with a different generic mesh.\u201d So, in order to catch a wider range of Arabic crime writing, we\u2019ll need to stretch our understanding of the genre.<\/span><\/p>\n

One place to start is the Arabic detective novel without a detective. These narratives use incidental investigators, such the photographer in Ahmed Mourad\u2019s <\/span>Vertigo <\/span><\/i>(2007)<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>or a whole community of investigators, as in Said Khatibi\u2019s <\/span>End of the Sahara <\/span><\/i>(2022). And Khatibi is hardly alone among Algerian novelists in returning to the detective novel, using it as a lens on Algeria\u2019s recent past.\"\"<\/span>Corruption, the Black Decade, and Algerian Sleuths<\/h4>\n

It was 1970, according to historian and leading Algerian crime-fic critic Nadia Ghanem, when the Algerian government-run publishing house SNED Editions brought out four French-language detective novels by \u201cYoucef Kader,\u201d the pen name of Catalan novelist Roger Vilatimo. \u201cThis editorial decision seems to have opened the doors to the genre in the country, so that, within ten years, crime novels written by Algerian novelists became part of a publishing house\u2019s repertoire.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Le
Le Dingue du Bistouri.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even as Algerian publishing struggled in the 1990s, during the country\u2019s \u201cBlack Decade\u201d of civil war, detective novels continued to appear. Meanwhile, in France, Algerian novelist Muhammad Moulessehoul began publishing what became the internationally popular \u201cInspector Llob\u201d series under the pen name Yasmina Khadra. Around the same time, acclaimed Moroccan novelist Driss Chraibi was publishing his acclaimed \u201cInspector Ali\u201d novels, also in French.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A newer flowering of the Algerian detective novel has happened in the last ten years, starting with Ismael Ben Saada\u2019s 2014 detective-espionage novel\u00a0<\/span>Shifra min sarab (Code from a Mirage) <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Abdelatif Ould Abdellah<\/span>\u2019s 2015 novel <\/span>Kharidj al-Saytara (Out of Control<\/span><\/i>). Moreover, the Algerian detective genre has started to attract regional attention and acclaim, with novels like Amara Lakhous\u2019s <\/span>Tir al-Layl<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>The<\/span><\/i> Night Bird<\/span><\/i>), which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), and Said Khatibi\u2019s 2023 Sheikh Zayed Book Award-winning <\/span>Nehayat Al Sahra’a<\/span><\/i> (End of the Sahara)<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Amara Lakhouss, Tir al Layl<\/em> (The Night Bird<\/em>), 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In <\/span>a 2023 episode of the Bulaq podcast<\/span><\/a>, Khatibi said that all his previous literary work had been building toward a crime novel like <\/span>End of the Sahara, <\/span><\/i>a polyvocal detective novel in which members of a small Algerian community are all investigating the murder of a young woman in different ways. Indeed, it is <\/span>despite<\/span><\/i> the incompetent and greedy Inspector Hamid, rather than because of him, that the murder of young Zakia Zaghouani is solved.<\/span> Inspector Hamid is the very picture of a corrupt government official, attempting to railroad Zakia\u2019s fianc\u00e9 \u2014 both so that the case is resolved quickly and because he was jealous of the man \u2014 rather than do any actual investigation. Fortunately, many other people in the community want to know who killed Zakia, and we discover the identity of her killer in a thrilling finish, right as the protests of October 1988 send Algerians out into the streets.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his IPAF-shortlisted <\/span>The Night Bird, <\/span><\/i>by contrast, Amara Lakhous does use the figure of the inspector in Karim Sultani, head of an anti-terrorism unit, who investigates the murder of a former freedom fighter. Lakhous does this fully aware of the landscape of corruption and mistrust, saying in <\/span>a 2021 interview with IPAF organizers<\/span><\/a>, \u201cAfter much thought, I became convinced that the crime novel, or noir novel, was the form most suitable for approaching the complicated and unhappy state of affairs in Algeria.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lakhous\u2019s next project, he said, was to turn Col. Karim Sultani, the hero of <\/span>The Night<\/span><\/i> Bird<\/span><\/i>, into the lead in a series of books. Hopefully, a series of Karim Sultani novels will later become available in a variety of world languages.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/h4>\n

More Maghrebi Crime Fiction and Lady Detectives<\/h4>\n

In neighboring Morocco, authors largely avoided the detective novel and police procedural during the country\u2019s repressive \u201cYears of Lead,\u201d which started in the 1960s and continued through the \u201880s. Instead, the seed for crime fiction seems to have been the government\u2019s desire to clean up the image of local police.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Al
Al Hut al-A’ma<\/em> (The Blind Whale<\/em>), by Abdelilah Hamdouchi & Miloudi Hamdouchi, Okaz Press, 1997.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

According to scholar and translator Jonathan Smolin, the shift toward crime writing in Morocco started in 1993, toward the end of Hassan II\u2019s reign. This was when an influential police commissioner, Hajj Mustafa Tabit, was put on trial, accused of abducting and raping more than 500 women and girls. The Moroccan press was given an unexpectedly free hand to write about the trial of this powerful figure, and it was coverage of his trial, Smolin says, that led to a new wave of Moroccan crime journalism. It was also around this time that novelist Abdelilah Hamdouchi met former detective Miloudi Hamdouchi (no relation). The press had nicknamed Miloudi Hamdouchi \u201cColumbo,\u201d after the 1970s American TV series, and this \u201cColumbo\u201d was considered a rare clean cop.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time, the Years of Lead were drawing to a close, and Morocco was entering into a new political period,\u201d Abdelilah Hamdouchi said in an interview with Emily Drumsta, which was published in <\/span>Le Recit Criminel Arabe<\/span><\/i>. \u201cThe state was trying rehabilitate the police, and this was very fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of crime fiction in Morocco.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this environment, the Hamdouchis co-authored a detective novella, <\/span>Al-Hut al-A<\/span><\/i>\u02bf<\/span><\/i>ma (The Blind Whale<\/span><\/i>) in 1997 and <\/span>al-Qiddisa Janjah <\/span><\/i>(Saint Janjah) in 1999. From there, each went on to write more crime novels; four of Abdelilah Hamdouchi\u2019s crime novels have since been translated to English and published by AUC Press. He also wrote the scripts for several televised police serials.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Sakarat
Sakarat Najma<\/em> (Flutters of a Star<\/em>), Amal Bouchareb, Al Shihab Press, 2015.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Throughout the past 50 years, most Moroccan and Algerian crime novels have featured male detectives \u2014 even when they were written by women. Yet in the last decade, as an increasing number of Algerian detective novels have appeared in Arabic, some of them have been led by women protagonists. The woman detective in Nassima Bouloufa\u2019s fast-paced<\/span> Nabadhat Akher al-Layl<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Heartbeats in the Dead of the Night<\/span><\/i>) must fight not only crime, but also misogyny. In the opinion of scholar and critic Jolana Guardi, \u201cI think\u00a0the best woman detective writer at present is Amal Bouchareb. She wrote\u00a0<\/span>Sakarat Najma (Flutters of a Star),<\/span><\/i> a wonderful novel published in Algeria in 2015.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another recent star of Algerian crime fiction is <\/span>Djamila Morani. Her 2016 YA novel <\/span>Tuffahat al-Djinn (The Djinn\u2019s Apple,<\/span><\/i>) is part crime novel, part historical fiction. Set during the eighth-century <\/span>caliphate of Haroun al-Rashid and narrated by a 12-year old girl detective named Nardeen, the novel explores justice <\/span>in a broken system, and it came out in 2024 in Sawad Hussain\u2019s English translation.\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Genre Combinations and Re-combinations<\/h4>\n

While English genre publishing often abides by strict rules \u2014 policing the boundaries between subgenres like cozy mysteries, police procedurals, and capers \u2014 Arabic publishing is generally fast and loose with genre distinctions. As Alessandro Buontempo pointed out in <\/span>Le r\u00e9cit policier arabe<\/span><\/i>, the same books are sometimes called alghaz (mysteries or enigmas), riwaya bulisiyya (detective novel), or riwaya jasusiyya (spy novel).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Nawara
Laqd Tam Hazruk<\/em> (You Have Been Blocked<\/em>), by Nawara Negm, published by Dar Al Shorouq, 2024.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As for the crackling new novel by Nawara Negm <\/span>Laqd Tam Hazruk (You Have Been Blocked<\/span><\/i>), which was released in August 2024, <\/span>the publisher says she calls it<\/span><\/a> a \u201cpolice fantasy.\u201d The novel, which explores a collage of different women\u2019s struggles during a single (eventful) day at the Internet Complaints office in Cairo, pays deep attention to the effect of these crimes on women\u2019s lives. Then a shooting happens in front of the building, and the novel races to its fast-paced conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Genre bending has long been a part of the Egyptian literary landscape. The constantly self-reinventing Naguib Mahfouz penned many different sorts of books, including crime. His <\/span>Thief and the Dogs <\/span><\/i>(1961) has been cited as an inspiration by Egyptian novelist Ahmed Mourad, author of literary-realist thrillers like <\/span>Vertigo <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Diamond Dust <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>The Blue Elephant<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Other contemporary authors weave crime writing together with a <\/span>Thousand and One Nights <\/span><\/i>sort of nested stories; among these are Saudi novelist Raja Alem (<\/span>The Dove\u2019s Necklace<\/span><\/i>), Tunisian novelist Hassouna Mosbahi (<\/span>A Tunisian Tale)<\/span><\/i>, and Egyptian novelist Tareq Imam. In Imam\u2019s acclaimed 2018 novel <\/span>City of Endless Walls, <\/span><\/i>a new inhabitant of the city is murdered every day. In the book\u2019s thirty-six interlinked tales, murder meets the strange and supernatural.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Palestinian writer Abbad Yahya\u2019s 2016 novel <\/span>Jarimah fi Ramallah<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>Crime in Ramallah<\/span><\/i>), meanwhile, uses a murder to examine other crimes by police. In Yahya\u2019s novel, three young men work together in a bar where a young woman is murdered. The one among them who is gay is arrested by authorities and interrogated. Although police recognize he\u2019s innocent, they also turn up the fact that he\u2019s gay, and begin torturing and humiliating him for that other \u201ccrime.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Nael
Women of Karantina<\/em>, Nael Eltoukhy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Egyptian novelist Nael Eltoukhy argues that publishers never really lost their interest in publishing crime fiction. His 2013 novel <\/span>Nisaa\u2019 al-Karantina (Women of Karantina) <\/span><\/i>follows competing crime families. He wrote in a 2020 essay, \u201cSome Advice on Avoiding Censorship,\u201d that contemporary Arabic publishers and filmmakers are interested in anything on the topic of \u201ccriminal society.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI saw countless publishers\u2019 eyes light up just on hearing these two little words,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the subject of the novels that\u2019s changed, Eltoukhy observes, but the focus. He writes that, when he was a kid, he read books where the police were heroes. But the books he reads now \u201cglorify the figure of the criminal, not in the sense that they explicitly say that crime is ethical, but in that they dedicate page after page to their criminal characters, while simultaneously marginalizing the role of the police.\u201d\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Crime and (In)justice<\/h4>\n

As Eltoukhy notes, even when the detective novel fell out of favor, \u201ccrime\u201d and \u201ccriminal justice\u201d were always of interest to writers and readers. After all, even the prison novel is centered on the relationship between the state and those it deems \u201ccriminal.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But interest in the detective genre also seems to be growing once again. In the announcement of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction\u2019s 2021 longlist, which included Amara Lakhous\u2019s aforementioned <\/span>The Night Bird, <\/span><\/i>as well as Moroccan novelist Abdelmeguid Sabata\u2019s crime thriller <\/span>File 42 <\/span><\/i>and Kuwaiti novelist Abdullah Albsais\u2019s <\/span>M for Murderer: S for Sa\u2019id, <\/span><\/i>organizers wrote that, \u201cCrime novels also have a strong presence on the list this year, with narratives exploring crimes committed against the backdrop and aftermath of wars and conflicts.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, as the narrator of Elias Khoury\u2019s <\/span>Star of the Sea <\/span><\/i>suggests, contemporary Arabic crime novels aren\u2019t likely to tell us about a strange stabbing murder committed on a train that must be solved by a mustachioed Belgian detective. Instead, contemporary Arabic crime novels are more interested in the context in which these violations of the social order exist. They explain not only who did it, but also why, how, who \u2014and sometimes, who gets away with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Arabic crime novel can’t compete with more popular genres including satire, horror, or historical fiction, but that hasn’t always been the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":765,"featured_media":35579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2656,12,4052],"tags":[4086,4084,4085,4087],"coauthors":[4088],"class_list":["post-35453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-essay","category-tmr-47-genre-fiction-double-winter-issue","tag-agatha-christie","tag-criminality","tag-detectives","tag-sleuthes","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSalacious Criminality\u2014Trenchcoat Detectives, Rogues & Smoking Guns - The Markaz Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Arab crime novel can't compete with more popular genres including satire, horror, or 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