It’s the return of the thriller in Lisle-sur-Tarn and Toulouse
Two festivals guaranteed to detective novels will follow one another to the delight of fans.
The 14th Toulouse polars du sud festival will take place from October 7 to 9, mainly at the Renaissance bookstore, and will be sponsored by the Spaniard Rosa Montero and the South African Deon Meyer. But lovers of detective novels could first draw… their blue card in Lisle-sur-Tarn, on September 17 and 18, for a 7th edition of Lisle Noir, sponsored by Henri Loevenbruck and whose theme will be the historical thriller. Among the thirty authors present in this festival located near Gaillac, 50 km from Toulouse, three are not to be missed as long as their latest work is successful. Let’s first find ourselves in the liberated Paris of 1944. Continuing his saga devoted to the Second World War on the dirty guys side, Romain Slocombe closes his series of 6 novels devoted to a Vichy inspector with “I was the Sardorski collaborator” (Laffont , collection “The Black Beast”, 530 pages, €21). The title is explicit, we place in the footsteps of a violent policeman, finally arrested and beaten up… but finds a way to avoid the execution post.
The Paris of Purification
The book is ultra-documented while being without any dead time, reminding us that in the Paris of the purge, “the French arrest the French (as Sadorski had done during the war). They arrest them, loot them, beat them, mow them, shoot them”.
François Médéline situates the action of “Tears of the Reich” (10-18, 198 pages, €14.90) in the Drôme, in 1951. An inspector goes to a farm where a retired couple has been murdered. Their 11-year-old daughter is missing. On this very classic basis, the author imagines a plot that goes from surprise to surprise, the investigator having a very mysterious profile, which brings us back to the dark years of war. A thriller, also very well written, that we read in one go.
In “No Literature! (Gallimard, collection “La Noire”, 254 pages, €19), Sébastien Rutès plays with the clichés associated with thrillers and more particularly those conveyed by the early Black Series, which adapted American novels in a very whimsical way stuffed with crooks and small swords. We are in 1950. Gringoire is a translator for the famous collection. Finally, he “slangs” texts translated by his wife, having no notion of English himself. For more veracity, he will get closer to a US bandit who remained in a carafe in Panama. Incredible story, sarcastic tone, quirky characters: enough to provide a lot of pleasure to the reader who bathes in an imaginary America, “society of plenty with Frigidaires, jukeboxes, sewing machines and all sorts of crimes”. Romain Slocombe, François Médélin and Sébastien Rutès will therefore be in Lisle-sur-Tarn. The cast isn’t bad at all in Toulouse either, with notably Jérôme Leroy, Hugues Pagan, Pascal Dessaint, Bernard Minier, Carlos Salem, Iain Levison, Carlo Lucarelli, Valerio Varesi, Jean-Hugues Oppel, etc.