Brad Spurgeon's Blog

PARIS – Wait, it’s Sunday night and I have not been to an open mic in Paris or elsewhere since the final open mic of the P’tit Bonheur la Chance – mentioned below -? Either that one really took the wind out of me, or something else happened. Up to you to decide. Well, in any case, this blog MUST live on, even if my open mic-ing takes a break. And I realized yesterday – but had not time to attend to it – that there was an area of the blog that had been neglected for some time. I’m talking about the Blog articles as opposed to posts section, where I planned to put a number of my already-published articles, and write some new ones. Last night, I suddenly realized that there was a complete entire aspect of my life and writing that had been neglected on this blog: My crime writing.

At the same time as I was beginning my career as a writer about car racing, Formula One being the main emphasis, I was also establishing a career as a writer about the French crime novel. Because I myself had written several published crime stories and several unpublished, but agented, crime novels, I grew tired of this not-well-paid area of meta-writing that, while it was vastly interesting, was also vastly frustrating. I was a published crime fiction writer, and I had begun to establish myself as crime fiction writing journalist…but who was not considered by the writers themselves as a writer.

The auto racing writing was more attractive in that I could never, ever claim to be a car racer, but I had a subject to write about that involved amazing human endeavor, and therefore, made for interesting material. So it was that I stopped writing about crime fiction. But by the time I stopped, I had amassed a fair sized trove of journalism, especially about the French crime novel.

This story that I am posting today in Blog Articles as Opposed to Posts, was the highest point of the whole period, probably, and covered a massive swathe of French crime writing of final quarter of the 20th Century. Many of the people are still around or still read. The story, one of the best surveys of the French crime novel written in English, appeared in print in The Armchair Detective, in 1997. Check it out.