WEBORGERS - Hard-Boiled Mysteries - Série Noire History

SN : ACHIEVEMENTS AND THE FUTURE

!This Hard
-Boiled and Noir, whatever is the
! EN ROUTE TO THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
AND SN No 3000...

When, in 1991, Patrick Raynal took over the direction of the collection, Série Noire was in a deep crisis created by the loss of his public. The mid-80's to 87, saw already the lowest point, as the collection was losing its readership.

Many factors are at the origin of this, such as: increased popularity of TV serials, lower interest by the new generation for all that is reading material. But, at the same time there was an equivalent crisis in the USA, starting in the mid seventies, where hard-boiled and Noir were losing grip and finally becoming "socially- incorrect", and seeing the "mollification" of Hollywood that was confusing crime and hard-boiled with comic-type overexaggerated action movies. Added to this, the major American publishers were pushing only 'sensational' authors who mimicked crime novels that appealed to a non aware public (ignoring where and who the historical American writers of the genre were), or were concentrating on the classic detection novel (derived from the English tradition), preferably by women, where real social criticism is absent.
All this led to a decline in production of American hard-boiled and a disinterest of the contemporary public, creating a major impact on the traditional sources of Série Noire for new authors.

To add to this, there were the radical changes in the profile of the average French reader who was either a young adult who was very influenced by all the social turmoils of the seventies, or was a more mature individual, previous reader, asking for better quality and ...novelties.

At the same time, due to loss of interest of some part of the public, Série Noire was issuing lower volumes of prints no longer present at all newsstands, and general bookshops were not always good at promoting this kind of 'popular' literature.

But, under the leadership of Raynal, the collection survived. He could nurture the young French talented writers, already linked to the collection, and attract new ones as well, accounting on local resources with a real success... and a better commercial stand. The future of the series lies in powerful authors such as: Tonio Benaquista, Daniel Pennac, and Marc Villard.
Others will grow, and the ambition of Raynal is to publish at least one original novel in French each month in Série Noire. There is already a pool of talented authors, on which he capitalizes, like Jean- Bernard Pouy, Serge Quadruppani, Nadine Monfils, Alix de Saint-André, Konop, Maurice Dantec, and Daniel Picouly. The latter being successful, in 1995, with a literary novel describing the chronicles of his childhood, and this type of duality happens more and more for the best contemporary Série Noire authors.

It is no secret that modern literature is presently living a deep crisis, in terms of the production of creative novels. This is even more true in France, where after more than a century of producing the best creators for the genre, came the deep decline, already obvious during the 60's. Formalism, mannerism, "nombrilisme" (=looking only to one's own belly button), "parisianisme', are all negative quotes that can be applied to most of the present French literary novels, with reasons.
Therefore, quite a number of new French Noir and hard-boiled authors claim that their genre of literature, that was often despised by the literary world, stays today as the last refuge for literary creation, with freedom of speech and unrestricted subjects developed in the novels.
They openly oppose la litterature Noire to la blanche (=the white one- colloquial name for the literary novels; reference to the literary novels published by Gallimard under mainly white covers).

Part of the public supports these views, and Noir or hard-boiled novels, and their authors, continued to receive a good follow-up in France, even when Série Noire was in a crisis, as there were enough other collections publishing quality material.
One of the best examples was the high acclaim given to James Ellroy in France, recognized as one of the most important authors since he was published there. And this was more than ten years ahead of the nowadays emerging recognition in America.

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