At the Paris Book Festival, of which Quebec was the guest of honor, we met three authors with radically different styles.
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Festivals often have the merit of discovering authors made invisible by the immense literary production of recent years, particularly in the field of crime fiction. From Quebec, guest of honor this year at the Paris Book Festival, we especially knew the great Andrée A. Michaud whose dark novels often take us into the great outdoors, into the forest, instilling a worry that quickly turns into fear. But she is not the only representative of the genre. At the Paris Book Festival, we had the chance to debate with three other Quebec thriller authors and it was a moment of grace like few others. Roxanne Bouchard, Chrystine Brouillet and Patrick Sénécal, who know each other well, each have a very different way of writing noir but they have the same appetite for the genre and the same way of talking about it with a lot of humor, which is rare.
Roxanne Bouchard was familiar to us since we reviewed her latest book in 2023, the Coral Bride, second volume of a trilogy begun with We were the salt of the sea, which takes place in Gaspésie in the very masculine environment of lobster fishermen. What we didn’t know was that, after a breakup, she spent many months at sea on fishing boats, learning how to lift lobster cages, and that this experience fueled her detective series embodied by a hero of Mexican origin full of flaws and nostalgia, investigator Joaquin Moralès, based at the Bonaventure police station. This in vivo experience also taught her a lot about the difficulty women have in finding a place in the very masculine world of fishermen. The third part of the adventures of Moralès is expected before the end of the year in France.
“That’s what we call creating suspense.”
Chrystine Brouillet is a star in Quebec, in thrillers but also in gastronomic novels (Room 1002). Her series featuring detective Maud Graham has sold nearly a million copies. She says she knows this heroine by heart with whom she has lived for more than twenty years, greedy like her, and tirelessly accompanied by her cat Eglantine. Thus she can concentrate on her intrigues which often interweave various social subjects, in particular violence against women. The last volume, the month of the dead, talks about the ravages of poverty, intolerance and rejection of homosexuals since it features a rich entrepreneur from Quebec who becomes mad with anger the day he learns that his son is homosexual, going so far as to want to kill him . He is indeed considering entering politics and fears that it will harm his reputation. The story takes place shortly after the pandemic, the fear has not yet subsided. Maud Graham “did not like what Covid had changed in her and wondered if this new detachment was permanent, writes Chrystine Brouillet. She had taken a certain distance from the beginning of the pandemic to keep away from panic and she had forced herself so much to remain calm, logical, Cartesian that she could not find the person she was. two years ago. Or maybe she was just getting older.”
Patrick Senécal writes in a radically different register. Civilized is a dark humor thriller. Not our type, a priori, and yet we couldn’t put down this 631-page book. The pitch is a great classic but here, it works like hell, we see that the author is also a screenwriter. Twelve people volunteer to participate in a scientific experiment intended to “study and analyze the behavior of humans when they find themselves in a specific group in a particular context.” Basically, it involves spending ten days isolated from the rest of the world, without cell phones or access to the outside world within a group whose members are supposed to be representative of society. We imagine from the start that this is going to go badly, the idea is to push everyone to be jealous of the other, to measure themselves and much worse. Despite the horror, it’s very funny and Patrick Senécal has a way of addressing the reader that works, we’re amazed. “…and this woman, if they knew what she did… he writes. Frédéric-Alexandre turns to him, curious. – Who are you talking about ? Joseph names the woman in question and, shamelessly, explains to Frederick Alexander what he has learned. But for the moment you won’t know anything about it. This is called creating suspense. A process that you can describe as either skillful or easy, depending on your school of thought, your vision of literature or simply your level of snobbery.
