FFB: She Who Was No More - Boileau & Narcejac

The crime novel plot motif of losing a corpse is often the basis for a black comedy romp. Craig Rice used this gimmick repeatedly in her novels featuring Jake & Helene Justus and John J. Malone, and it shows up in hundreds of movies notably Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry. But in the hands of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac a disappearing corpse is hardly a laughing matter. Celle Qui N'Etait Plus (1952) was the first collaboration between these two French writers who previously had both won French crime fiction awards for their solo efforts. The success of the duo's first book would lead to a long lasting friendship and over thirty more books as a writing team. In a nod to the novels of James Cain we get an avaricious, adulterous couple who drown the man's wife in a bathtub then manage to lose the body after dumping it in the lavoir (a French communal laundry near a river). It's a study in guilt, remorse and madness more than it is a detective novel. In fact, there is only one policeman who appears and he's a traffic cop who makes a brief cameo at the very start of the book. Boileau and Narcejac are more interested in the terror that resides within the mind of a guilt ridden murderer than they are the usual criminal investigation plot.

There is very little action in this book with most of the novel focusing on the thoughts and delirium of the main character. You may know the story from one of the several movie adaptations, but they are just that - adaptations. The film tells the story of two women drowning a husband while in the book a philandering couple murder the wife. The only things the book and the film have in common are a bathtub and the guilty imaginings of one of the killers. While the film takes a very different path to convey the terror of a guilt ridden mind with some indulging in horror movie motifs, the book is a bit more mundane in the way the same terror is depicted.

The main character in the novel is Fernand Ravinel, the husband. Fernand is an ineffectual travelling salesman who hawks sporting goods. His special talent is designing and creating fishing flies which take up an entire page in his company's fisherman's supply catalog. But Fernand is otherwise dull, unassuming and in frail health the result of a minor heart attack. He and his mistress Lucienne, a doctor, conspire to do in Fernand's wife Mireille and claim the insurance money. It is Lucienne who does the dirty work while Fernand unable to watch his wife being drowned in a bathtub leaves the room and listens to the murder being carried out. His only act as an accomplice drugging a beverage his wife drinks and fetching the andirons from the fireplace that will hold the body under water. It's a clinical murder carried out with the precision of a surgery. Later they transport the body to the Ravinel's home and unload her into the river that flows through the lavoir. When Fernand coaxes one of his bar mates to visit the lavoir under the pretense of assessing it for repairs he is shocked when his wife's body is no longer there. Thus begins his slow descent into a surreal world of strange events and morbid imagination.

There is an abundance of fog imagery throughout the novel. Boileau and Narcejac use this old Gothic novel trapping in a unique way. Since his childhood Fernand was obsessed with fog and used to play an odd game in which he disappeared into the fog, sort of an astral projection, where he sent his mind into the fog imagining that he has crossed over from the living to the dead. This idea of crossing over is further elaborated throughout the novel as Fernand tries to come to terms with whether or not Mireille is actually dead. She keeps turning up in their house leaving notes. There is even a report that she visited her brother though he was the only witness. The brother-in-law's wife resents that Mireille did stay long enough so she could see her too. This fact plants the seed in Fernand's mind that his wife may have been a ghost. Then he obsesses about a small detail -- Mireille kissing her brother's cheek. He wonders how the kiss felt, if it actually took place, or if Germain (the brother) was merely telling a story to make him jealous. Is she a ghost? Is she alive? If so, why does she not show herself to him? Did the murder take place or has he completely lost his mind?

There is a subtle suggestion that Mireille and Lucienne are the real adulterous lovers. Typical of the 1950s Lucienne is described as "mannish" and being stronger than Fernand. He cannot remember why he was attracted to her or what started their affair. A telling moment of his ignorance -- of his own life being enveloped in a thick fog of overlooking the obvious -- is when he finds photographs of a vacation the three took together. The pictures show Lucienne and Mireille smiling and joyful. Fernand is absent from them all. He cannot even remember taking the photographs himself. All he wonders is "Where am I? Why did no one take any photos of me?"

What little action there is comes in brief moments between Fernand and one other character. Very rarely are more than two people ever present in any scene. The novel is one of isolation. The real setting of the book is Fernand's mind. The story is almost exclusively made up of his thoughts, memories, reveries, and the "fog game". Boileau and Narcejac set the groundwork for their future crime novels centered on the aftermath of murder and how the criminal is in some ways more of a victim of his crime than the actual corpse. Like many of their best books this debut comes with one gut wrenching, shocking scene and a surprise twist in the final sentences.

She Who Was No More attempts to blend the conceits of a ghost story with a murder tale resulting in a claustrophobic, dreary world of doubt and mistrust. It is a loveless world with no real hope culminating in one of the most downbeat endings that rivals any American noir. French crime novels seem to be drenched in self-inflicted misery, more deeply affecting to the characters than the most violent crime.

After decades being out of print and nearly all scarce paperback editions in English translation having being bought up by covetous collectors She Who Was No More is once more available in a new paperback edition from Pushkin Vertigo. They have reprinted the original 1954 English translation by Geoffrey Sainsbury (published as The Woman Who Was No More) rather than having a new edition translated. He does a fine job though he lapses into a stilted British idiom a bit too often. Nevertheless, fans of Boileau and Narcejac and those familiar with Les Diaboliques (or The Fiends), as it is known in the movie version, ought to grab a copy soon. Reading the novel is a revelation and an education into the beginnings of a writing team who unlike many lived up to the promise of their first book and proved to surpass this experimental crime novel with a handful of similarly groundbreaking work.

FFB: Three Green Bottles - Dominic Devine

THE STORY: A teenage girl is found strangled at the edge of the golf course in a quiet village. Suspicion turns to the last men seen with her. When the prime suspect is found dead a few days later of an apparent suicide the village slowly settles back into routine. The man’s brother comes to town and is not satisfied with the suicide verdict suspecting his troubled brother was not only innocent but was murdered because he knew something about the girl’s death. Then another girl is found dead killed in the same manner and left at the same scene. Is Mark Kendall right about the possibility of a serial killer hiding in the quiet village?

INNOVATIONS: Three Green Bottles (1972) is told in five separate parts narrated by three different characters. Each section is preceded by a “prologue” told in an author omniscient voice. Parts One and Five are narrated by Mandy Armitage, an eighteen year old part time Sunday school teacher and volunteer for an organization that helps developmentally delayed children (or “spastics” as the British called them until very recently). Parts Two and Four are told by Mark Kendall, the physician brother of Terry Kendall who was found dead at the foot of a cliff. Mark serves as an amateur sleuth of the piece. There is also a police investigation going on but we learn of it only through Mark’s encounters with Inspector Hugh Robens. Part Three, the most interesting portion of the novel, is narrated by the most fascinating character – Celia Armitage, a 13 year old girl with a reputation for being stupid, unruly, and thoroughly nasty. Her voice is unique and feels utterly authentic for a foul mouthed little girl. Her worldview is that of an opinionated brat who at times lets her nasty nature and artfully developed mask of a brat drop to reveal that she is very misunderstood and almost completely unloved. She’s quite a creation and one of the most original facets of this tricky, plot heavy novel.

THE CHARACTERS: Because of the various viewpoints we get a variety of presentations of the fairly large cast of characters. It is up to the reader to make decisions about the authenticity of each narrator and their perceptions of the characters in the story. Who is telling the truth, who is prejudiced? There are several teenage girls who we get to know through the narrative of the two Armitage sisters, actually half sisters as they have different mothers. Mark Kendall’s two narrative sections tend to spend most of the time figuring out the mystery surrounding his brother’s plunge off the cliffside and he does quite a bit of amateur detective work trying to find out what Terry knew about the death of Janice Allen, the first victim. Suspicion falls on some women and even Celia who had threatened to kill many of the girls for treating her so poorly. But this is almost immediately dismissed by police since the girls were strangled and left naked on the golf course. The crimes suggest a male sexual predator at work though a coroner’s reports prove none of the girls were sexually assaulted. Among the suspects are Tom Baines, a history teacher dubbed “peeping Tom” by the girls for his supposed proclivity for looking up their dresses; Dr. Ben Radford, who shows an unusual interest in Celia and has an altogether too close relationship with Baines; Miss Carey, another teacher at the girls’ school who has a habit of giving rides to the children if she thinks they ought not to be walking around at night alone. Celia also does a fair bit of girl sleuth work as she spies on one girl and is witness to some events that might lead to the capture and arrest of the killer, but she has no desire to share what she knows with the police until it is almost too late.

Dominic Devine as seen on the US edition DJ
Photo by Ian Joy, ©1972

THINGS I LEARNED: A “lilo” is a slang term for an air mattress in England. Just like other eponyms like Xerox -- a trademarked brand name which has come into use as a verb -- Frank Lilo, inventor of a type of inflatable raft, has had his surname turned into a word. Though Lilo’s invention was a kind of raft used in pools and at the beach rather than an air mattress meant to be a substitute bed or a piece of rec room furniture the lower case lilo can mean any type of air mattress. Seems to be strictly a British term. I’d never heard or read of it before.

The title of the book comes from another bit of British trivia I knew nothing about. “Ten Green Bottles” is a monotonous and annoying children’s counting rhyme similar to the equally monotonous and annoying “99 Bottles of Beer” we have in the US. Both have a countdown method with the green bottles rhyme having the line “If one of those bottles should accidentally fall” matching the US line “Take one down and pass it around”. I think it’s a rather weak metaphor for the three victims in the book since they don’t die one right after the other, several months pass between each killing.


EASY TO FIND? At one time Three Green Bottles was fairly easy to find at affordable prices in the used book market. It was published by the Doubleday’s Crime Club in the US and by Collins Crime Club in the UK. There was also a reprint edition for a book club in the UK. No paperback edition exists that I can confirm. I’ve seen US book club editions a long time ago, but they all seem to have vanished now. Only a few copies are for sale and many of them are steeply priced. You might try your local library. But be warned: some of the US editions had a horrible printing error. Pages 165-188 were printed twice and bound in the book and pages 141-164, including the prologue to Part Four, Chapters 1, 2 and some of Chapter 3 of Mark Kendall’s second narrative section, are completely missing! This may explain why so few US copies are for sale. My guess is most of those misprinted books were returned to the publisher who then disposed of them.

At one time Devine’s books were very popular and he was in many US and UK libraries. His first crime novel, My Brother’s Killer (1961), seems to be his best known book and has been reprinted several times in paperback editions, the most recent by Arcturus about three or four years ago. Some of his other books were made into movies or TV shows including The Fifth Cord which was adapted into an Italian giallo thriller starring Franco Nero.