Didier Daeninckx, chroniqueur de la culture populaire et coloniale

Abstract

Didier Daeninckx's work spans more than three decades, with a multitude of novels, adaptations, short stories and more. We are going to focus on his output at the turn of the 1990s, marked by the end of the cycle of detective novels devoted to Inspector Cadin and the opening up of new genres (the short story, for example) and new themes (colonial culture, for example). Although Daeninckx was not an iconic representative of pop culture at the time, he nevertheless played an important role in the emergence of popular culture in the French literary and broader cultural landscape, in three different ways.

From a generic point of view, Daeninckx helped give new impetus to the crime fiction genre, often referred to as para-literature, popular literature or mass literature. Moving away from the narrative characterizes the works of Agatha Christie or Gaston Leroux, and taking up and elaborating the darker vein of the roman noir developed by American novelists (Hammet, Chandler) and, in the French-speaking world, by Georges Simenon, Daeninckx writes his detective novels in a more realistic tone.

Through this contemporary realist approach to detective fiction, Daeninckx is often working with memory, as the police investigation uncovers more than just the reasons and responsibilities behind an individual crime. While Daeninckx can thus target and denounce persistent political silences on the subject of collaboration or colonization, he also wants to write about a popular, working-class, socialist or communist culture that is in the process of disappearing.

Finally, Daeninckx's contribution to pop culture consists in opening up his work to adaptations in media characteristic of this culture. His aim is not to confine crime fiction to a search for symbolic capital within the field of restricted production, and he readily supports adaptations of his work for cinema, radio or comics.