Tapni Bagge gave a very good description of Giovanni's career
as HB/noir writer. Giovanni is one of the important writers
who renovated the French approach to HB lit during the late
50s. His quality of writing and of storytelling made him one
of the few real modern HB/noir French author of quality at
the time. Criminals and independent "gangsters" were most of
the time the protagonists and antiheroes of his novels.
Friendship, betrayal and denial of the values of the official
society were always at the center of his gripping stories.
Giovanni's main characters live in a world that they cannot
accept, in which they really do not fit, but they will go to
the end of their tragic destiny without flinching. The best
of his work were the first five (1958-1964) of the very
successful novels published by S鲩e Noire (which incl the
titles cited by Mr Bagge, starting with LE DEUXIEME SOUFFLE -
The Second Breath) and his second luck was that some were
quickly adapted by French cinema masters in their tremendous
films noirs. His next novels were more "adventure"
orientated, but always with marginal antiheroes and NB/noir
by essence and with the same values as center of the stories.
LE TROU (French slang for prison) is the very first novel by
Giovanni indeed, and it was published by Gallimard in his
"normal" mainstream novels series. A first class novel, dry,
without concessions and gripping. Because he immediately
understood the value of this novel, Marcel Duhamel (founder
of Serie Noire) signed him the same year for his SN. I can
understand that in these years American publishers were not
very interested by Giovanni and other French authors, as it
was still the boom period of US HB paperbacks, with a
multitude of very good American writers available. But it is
less understandable that, let us say from the 80s onwards,
they did not pay more attention to the foreign HB/noir
writers of high quality. The losers are the American
readers.
E.Borgers HARD-BOILED MYSTERIES http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6324
Tapani Bagge:
> French crime writer and film director Jos頇iovanni
died on Sunday. He
> was 80 years old and lived in Switzerland. I think
his first book, Le
> Trou (The Break), is the only one translated in
English. Jacques
> Becker, Claude Sautet and Jean-Pierre Melville
directed excellent
> movies from Giovanni's novels (Le Trou, Classe tous
risques and Le
> Deuxi譥 Souffle). /...
>
>
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