Rating: 8/10 · Translated from French
- Plot: A travelling salesman and his mistress drown his wife, and then her body disappears.
- Clues: Planted inside the narrator’s panic, so they are easy to mistake for symptoms.
- Reveal: A swift, cold final turn that recasts every page before it.
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac were two French crime writers who decided to write as a team. Boileau had written classical puzzles; Narcejac was drawn to psychology. Their first collaboration fused the two, and it remains one of the tightest suspense novels of the century.
Fernand Ravinel, a salesman, and his lover Lucienne, a doctor, murder his wife Mireille. They drug her, drown her in a bath, and carry the body back to his house outside Paris, arranging it so the death will pass as an accident. Then the body is not there. Letters arrive in Mireille’s handwriting. People claim to have seen her.
Almost the whole book stays inside Ravinel’s head, and that is its strength. He is weak, timid and suggestible, and as the evidence piles up his rational explanations run out. Is he being hunted, going mad, or haunted? The novel keeps all three possibilities alive for a long time.
The authors understood that suspense lives in waiting. There are no chases, only a man in cold rooms, trains and shabby hotels, trying to make sense of small facts that refuse to fit. Grey, drizzly postwar provincial France suits the mood exactly.
The ending is brief and devastating, the kind of solution that makes you turn back to page one.
Why only 8? The book is short, and Lucienne is more a function than a person. The older English translation also shows its age. But its influence is enormous. Henri-Georges Clouzot filmed it as Les Diaboliques in 1955, reshuffling the characters, and its structure of doubt fed straight into the psychological thrillers that followed.he most chilling and believable portrait of a warped criminal mind he had read. The book is more precise than even that suggests. It frightens because it is calm.
Leave a Reply