Did repressive governments and dictators contribute to the downfall of a popular 20th-century fiction genre?
Marcia Lynx Qualey
In his 2019 novel Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, Elias Khoury’s narrator claims that although a story he knows belongs in a detective novel, “unfortunately 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 …”
The narrative lens in Star of the Sea — which appeared this November in the late Humphrey Davies’ translation — is unreliable, and sometimes tongue-in-cheek. After all, Khoury himself wrote a sort of detective novel in 1981, which was published as White Masks in maia tabet’s 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.
And while, at the moment, the Arabic detective novel can’t compete with other genres — such as satire or horror or the historical novel — it hasn’t always been that way. In mid-20th century Cairo, the genre of detective fiction was thriving. If the 1940s and ‘50s were a “Golden Age” 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.
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 “vulgar tales and cheap novels.” The police even found a crime novel in the possession of the famous serial killer Saad Iskandar (1911-1953), the “Karmouz Killer” — damning evidence that these books were a bad influence, or so one critic argued in Majallat al-Risalah.
Yet despite these complaints, detective stories remained an obsession in Egypt and beyond throughout the forties and fifties. Pulp magazines such as Akhir Saʿah and al-Ithnayn 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 ArabLit Quarterly’s Summer 2020 “Crime” issue. 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 — and Egyptian artists such as Husayn Bikar sketched dramatic pulp art to accompany the tales.
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 Al-faraj baʿd al-shiddah (Deliverance Follows Adversity). The 13th-century author Al-Jawbari, in his Kitab al-mukhtar fi kashf al-asrar (Book of Select Revealed Secrets) relates the stories of charlatans, criminals, and assorted scoundrels. And naturally there is the “Three Apples” tale of the Thousand and One Nights.
But it was the end of the 19th century when Arabic-language readers began to enjoy the crime writing familiar to European readers. Critic and crime-fic fan Jonathan Guyer has called the period from the 1890s through the 1960s “the golden age of illicit crime fiction translation” 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.
A number of the 20th-century’s major Arab writers have said that they grew up reading crime and mystery novels. Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz said, in an interview with The Paris Review, that his earliest literary influence was Hafiz Najib, 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.
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.
Thus Arabic crime writing seemed to disappear, at least for a while. This is one reason why some have said — as in Elias Khoury’s Star of the Sea — that there are no detective novels in Arabic.
But in their introduction to a recent scholarly collection, Le récit policier arabe, Katia Ghosn and Benoît Tadié write that academics sometimes miss out on the world of contemporary crime writing in Arabic because it doesn’t quite line up with their idea of the “classic detective novel.” They quote scholar Gianluca Parolin as saying that we can find a lot more crime writing when we “cast a net with a different generic mesh.” So, in order to catch a wider range of Arabic crime writing, we’ll need to stretch our understanding of the genre.
One place to start is the Arabic detective novel without a detective. These narratives use incidental investigators, such the photographer in Ahmed Mourad’s Vertigo (2007), or a whole community of investigators, as in Said Khatibi’s End of the Sahara (2022). And Khatibi is hardly alone among Algerian novelists in returning to the detective novel, using it as a lens on Algeria’s recent past.
Corruption, the Black Decade, and Algerian Sleuths
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 “Youcef Kader,” the pen name of Catalan novelist Roger Vilatimo. “This 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’s repertoire.”
Even as Algerian publishing struggled in the 1990s, during the country’s “Black Decade” of civil war, detective novels continued to appear. Meanwhile, in France, Algerian novelist Muhammad Moulessehoul began publishing what became the internationally popular “Inspector Llob” series under the pen name Yasmina Khadra. Around the same time, acclaimed Moroccan novelist Driss Chraibi was publishing his acclaimed “Inspector Ali” novels, also in French.
A newer flowering of the Algerian detective novel has happened in the last ten years, starting with Ismael Ben Saada’s 2014 detective-espionage novel Shifra min sarab (Code from a Mirage) and Abdelatif Ould Abdellah’s 2015 novel Kharidj al-Saytara (Out of Control). Moreover, the Algerian detective genre has started to attract regional attention and acclaim, with novels like Amara Lakhous’s Tir al-Layl (The Night Bird), which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), and Said Khatibi’s 2023 Sheikh Zayed Book Award-winning Nehayat Al Sahra’a (End of the Sahara).
In a 2023 episode of the Bulaq podcast, Khatibi said that all his previous literary work had been building toward a crime novel like End of the Sahara, 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 despite the incompetent and greedy Inspector Hamid, rather than because of him, that the murder of young Zakia Zaghouani is solved. Inspector Hamid is the very picture of a corrupt government official, attempting to railroad Zakia’s fiancé — both so that the case is resolved quickly and because he was jealous of the man — 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.
In his IPAF-shortlisted The Night Bird, 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 a 2021 interview with IPAF organizers, “After 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.”
Lakhous’s next project, he said, was to turn Col. Karim Sultani, the hero of The Night Bird, 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.
More Maghrebi Crime Fiction and Lady Detectives
In neighboring Morocco, authors largely avoided the detective novel and police procedural during the country’s repressive “Years of Lead,” which started in the 1960s and continued through the ‘80s. Instead, the seed for crime fiction seems to have been the government’s desire to clean up the image of local police.
According to scholar and translator Jonathan Smolin, the shift toward crime writing in Morocco started in 1993, toward the end of Hassan II’s 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 “Columbo,” after the 1970s American TV series, and this “Columbo” was considered a rare clean cop.
“At the time, the Years of Lead were drawing to a close, and Morocco was entering into a new political period,” Abdelilah Hamdouchi said in an interview with Emily Drumsta, which was published in Le Recit Criminel Arabe. “The state was trying rehabilitate the police, and this was very fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of crime fiction in Morocco.”
In this environment, the Hamdouchis co-authored a detective novella, Al-Hut al-Aʿma (The Blind Whale) in 1997 and al-Qiddisa Janjah (Saint Janjah) in 1999. From there, each went on to write more crime novels; four of Abdelilah Hamdouchi’s crime novels have since been translated to English and published by AUC Press. He also wrote the scripts for several televised police serials.
Throughout the past 50 years, most Moroccan and Algerian crime novels have featured male detectives — 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’s fast-paced Nabadhat Akher al-Layl (Heartbeats in the Dead of the Night) must fight not only crime, but also misogyny. In the opinion of scholar and critic Jolana Guardi, “I think the best woman detective writer at present is Amal Bouchareb. She wrote Sakarat Najma (Flutters of a Star), a wonderful novel published in Algeria in 2015.”
Another recent star of Algerian crime fiction is Djamila Morani. Her 2016 YA novel Tuffahat al-Djinn (The Djinn’s Apple,) is part crime novel, part historical fiction. Set during the eighth-century caliphate of Haroun al-Rashid and narrated by a 12-year old girl detective named Nardeen, the novel explores justice in a broken system, and it came out in 2024 in Sawad Hussain’s English translation.
Genre Combinations and Re-combinations
While English genre publishing often abides by strict rules — policing the boundaries between subgenres like cozy mysteries, police procedurals, and capers — Arabic publishing is generally fast and loose with genre distinctions. As Alessandro Buontempo pointed out in Le récit policier arabe, the same books are sometimes called alghaz (mysteries or enigmas), riwaya bulisiyya (detective novel), or riwaya jasusiyya (spy novel).
As for the crackling new novel by Nawara Negm Laqd Tam Hazruk (You Have Been Blocked), which was released in August 2024, the publisher says she calls it a “police fantasy.” The novel, which explores a collage of different women’s struggles during a single (eventful) day at the Internet Complaints office in Cairo, pays deep attention to the effect of these crimes on women’s lives. Then a shooting happens in front of the building, and the novel races to its fast-paced conclusion.
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 Thief and the Dogs (1961) has been cited as an inspiration by Egyptian novelist Ahmed Mourad, author of literary-realist thrillers like Vertigo and Diamond Dust and The Blue Elephant.
Other contemporary authors weave crime writing together with a Thousand and One Nights sort of nested stories; among these are Saudi novelist Raja Alem (The Dove’s Necklace), Tunisian novelist Hassouna Mosbahi (A Tunisian Tale), and Egyptian novelist Tareq Imam. In Imam’s acclaimed 2018 novel City of Endless Walls, a new inhabitant of the city is murdered every day. In the book’s thirty-six interlinked tales, murder meets the strange and supernatural.
Palestinian writer Abbad Yahya’s 2016 novel Jarimah fi Ramallah (Crime in Ramallah), meanwhile, uses a murder to examine other crimes by police. In Yahya’s 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’s innocent, they also turn up the fact that he’s gay, and begin torturing and humiliating him for that other “crime.”
Egyptian novelist Nael Eltoukhy argues that publishers never really lost their interest in publishing crime fiction. His 2013 novel Nisaa’ al-Karantina (Women of Karantina) follows competing crime families. He wrote in a 2020 essay, “Some Advice on Avoiding Censorship,” that contemporary Arabic publishers and filmmakers are interested in anything on the topic of “criminal society.”
“I saw countless publishers’ eyes light up just on hearing these two little words,” he says.
It’s not the subject of the novels that’s 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 “glorify 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.”
Crime and (In)justice
As Eltoukhy notes, even when the detective novel fell out of favor, “crime” and “criminal justice” 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 “criminal.”
But interest in the detective genre also seems to be growing once again. In the announcement of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction’s 2021 longlist, which included Amara Lakhous’s aforementioned The Night Bird, as well as Moroccan novelist Abdelmeguid Sabata’s crime thriller File 42 and Kuwaiti novelist Abdullah Albsais’s M for Murderer: S for Sa’id, organizers wrote that, “Crime 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.”
Indeed, as the narrator of Elias Khoury’s Star of the Sea suggests, contemporary Arabic crime novels aren’t 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 —and sometimes, who gets away with it.
