PARIS – Today I have published on my blog the third in a series of never-before-published Q&A interviews that I did in the 1990s in preparation for a big article about the French crime writing scene. This interview, with Patrick Raynal, who was then the editor of the famous Série Noire crime novels of the Gallimard publishing house, is a great look at how the world has both changed and remained the same. Raynal is still alive, and about to publish a new book at Albin Michel this year, and the Série Noire continues as well. But it is interesting to see how much a few things have changed since then, like his comment about how few women writers he received manuscripts from in the mid-1990s. Or the role of the agent in France, which while not having grown to the level of so many Anglo-Saxon countries, has nevertheless developed massively since then. It is also a good look at the American writers the French liked at the time, and still do, in fact.
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 Because I myself had written several published crime stories and several unpublished, but agented, crime novels, I grew tired of this not-well-paid area of meta-writing that, while it was vastly interesting, was also vastly frustrating.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.