Associate Professor Alistair Rolls

In the following paper, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express are considered, and compared, as exemplars of what Andrea Goulet has labelled "Global French," which is to say that both texts convey non-English, and especially French, language use through their own original English. Both texts will be shown to be born in, stage, and depart from primal linguistic scenes: the Babelian confusion of Poe's multiple foreign witnesses will be embodied in the impediments that keep them from the scene of the crime; in Christie's case, the multilingual investigation on board the Orient Express will stand in place of stilted and curtailed conversation held, in the Global French of Christie's English, on the platform of another train. As sites of original translation and communicative excess and failure, these classic texts are about language first and crime second; indeed, the murder on Christie's Murder on the Orient Express embodies taking place but, ultimately, does not take place at all.

The Série Noire was born out of literary scandals (Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber) and traded on them. Marcel Duhamel's mission statement of 1948 promised readers violence and depravity. Its early focus on translations of so-called American thrillers also led to scandalous cases of French authors masquerading as Americans (Boris Vian's role in the Vernon Sullivan affair shocked Paris in 1946 and shone light on the practices of Duhamel's team). In time it also became famous for its colorful treatment of the original texts that it translated for its French readers. In this article we reassess to what extent the criticisms of Série Noire translation infidelities are warranted. Certainly, there has always been a degree of mythmaking at work in assessments of Duhamel's practices, but, more than that, discussion of publishing scandals often overlooks details that spoil a good story. Discussion of the trajectory in French translation of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 is an interesting case in point. The story of the original text's transformation under Duhamel's pen is surprising, but arguably the failure to tell the whole story is itself equally scandalous.

Pierre Bayard is a polarizing figure in contemporary French criticism: on the one hand, he is brilliant, innovative, and daring; on the other hand, he seems to delight in deception and sleight of hand, particularly in the way that he revisits, and arguably transvalorizes, theoretical discourse reminiscent, inter alia, of poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this article, we wish to reveal the double-sidedness of Bayard's new detective criticism in order to see how his new solutions to classic crime texts carry within themselves clues to their own undoing as well as alternative solutions that can be deemed to have been sown consciously or unconsciously into the weave of Bayard's analysis. This is the irony of Bayard's criticism: it references the work by reverting to a study of the text while keeping both, work and text, in view and, effectively, by being both, that is, by exposing the textuality of canonical literary works and presenting his criticism as transparently readable, even as "easy reading," he offers his ideas as works, which the reader can read as such but can also reread, à la Pierre Bayard, as text.

This article takes as its point of departure a number of commonly assumed ideas, or idées reçues, that have, in combination, condemned Vernon Sullivan's novel J'irai cracher sur vos tombes to the role of crime fiction parody. In order to dispel such myths as the Série Noire's unproblematic use of translation to usher American crime novels into a France craving Americana after the end of the Second World War, this article analyses Sullivan's novel in the light of Ross Chambers' model of alter ego interpretation. In this way, what has been construed as parody can be reconceived as literary, and Boris Vian's alter ego a writer of serious allegory, not of the United States and its race relations issues, but of France, its post-Liberation literary canon and its relationship to its own national Other.

The Dead Heart is American author Douglas Kennedy's first novel. It was first translated into French in 1997 as Cul-de-sac. It was this translation that made Kennedy a household name in France and that gave The Dead Heart its identity as a roman noir. In the space of just 20 years the novel has been translated twice into French and adapted twice more, as a film and now as a graphic novel. Elsewhere, we have analyzed this trajectory from the perspective of retranslation and the ostensible differences between the two translation Skopoi, and the use of paratextual branding to target specific reading publics. Focusing on the graphic novel allows us here to go beyond the problematics of translation and to broaden the scope of our study of textual adaptation. It also allows us to reassess the originality of the source text.

The novel J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, which was famously written by the black American author Vernon Sullivan and translated into French by Boris Vian only to be outed subsequently as a hoax, is generally understood precisely as a simple prank or canular. A close reading of the text, however, reveals multiple layers of mise en abyme, which correspond to the work's equally thickly layered paratextual frame. This article explores the various reflexive devices used throughout the novel, considering them in the framework of its preface, foreword, afterword, and various newspaper articles and legal documents. This book, which is as underrated as it is famous, and in which the diegesis vies for space, at times subtly and at others flagrantly, with the ever-encroaching real world of the hors-texte, in fact raises a number of questions about literary creation, parody, authorial power, and translation. In this way, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, by testing any number of limits, goes beyond those of an innocent prank. © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014.

In this article, a text, in this case an Australian crime novel, is analyzed in terms of its translatability. The framework adopted here is influenced by deconstructionism, and especially intertextuality, and as such translatability is taken as an inherent tendency of a text to extend beyond its own formal limits and to map itself onto a virtual, foreign version of itself. This mechanics will be shown to be reflected in the structure of Barry Maitland's second novel, The Malcontenta, especially in its exaggerated thickening of liminal spaces and reflexive staging of intertextuality. By comparing Benjamin's call for translation, or a text's translatability, to Genette's call of the epigraph, we consider how Maitland's referencing of a particular intertext oscillates between regimes that, again after Genette, can be considered autographic or allographic. Lastly, a re-reading of the denouement of Maitland's text will be offered - predicated on the frenchness, and specifically not the Frenchness, of a particular set of doors.

This article reviews the new light shed in 1952 on Charles Baudelaire's translation and critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe by W.T. Bandy, which exposed the French poet's plagiarism of American sources. Our aim here is to suggest that Baudelaire's Poe project, with its wilful problematisation of originality and translation, author and translator, preempts Marcel Duhamel's own translation project of 1945, the Série Noire. We compare these two Parisian translation projects as two major hoaxes of French literature and two foundational stages in the development of French crime fiction. Indeed, we suggest that Baudelaire's original translation praxis is an act of anticipatory plagiarism (of Duhamel's praxis) just as he himself considered Poe's poetry to be anticipatory plagiarism of his own work. © 2013 Copyright Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France. © 2013 Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France.