Sunday February 7th. Ten in the morning. Chapelle de la Trinité, the first baroque style church built in Lyon, between 1617 and 1622. Hundreds of worshipers fill the pews. The officiant of the event contemplates the crowd enthralled and addresses them with the following words: “Wow, so many people, it seems like a Sunday at mass many years ago.” It is worth noting “it seems”, do not be fooled. Those gathered there have not come to be given a sermon, to seek absolution for their sins or to pray, but to listen to two stars of the American crime novel, Dennis Lehane and A.S. Cosby, discuss the sixtieth anniversary of the United States Civil Rights Act. We are in Lyon, this is the Quais du Polar, the most important festival dedicated to the noir genre in Europe – and it could be argued that in the world, if we take collective enthusiasm as a measuring stick – and here crime literature is undoubtedly a religion.
Every spring, this medium-sized city on the banks of the Rhône River and close to the Alps, a benchmark for French gastronomy and the birthplace of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the Lumière brothers, transforms into a Mecca for fans of what the locals call polar. . The twentieth edition, which was held between April 5 and 7, had one hundred and thirty-five guests from fifteen countries, invited more than one hundred thousand people to its impressive and eclectic offering of events and activities, and the network of independent bookstores in the metropolitan region have raised more than 330,000 euros. However, these are nothing more than figures. You have to see it to believe it, the atmosphere is that of three consecutive Sant Jordi days through the busiest arteries of Barcelona.
The most ubiquitous image: the serpentine tail. Queues with numbers for most talks and round tables because people start taking positions half an hour before, queues to obtain a signature that require the patience of a saint… “They had spoken very well to me about the festival, but this surpasses my forecasts, it’s really impressive,” says Barcelona novelist Aro Sáinz de la Maza, creator of the series dedicated to Inspector Milo Malart, which Destino publishes in Spain and Actes Sud translates in France, the only Spanish representative this year along with Jordi Lafebre, also from Barcelona, ??is an illustrator and comic book author, with a long career in the Franco-Belgian market and for whom Norma has just published the graphic novel I am his silence.
At a table, Brazilian author Patricia Melo will talk about how ayahuasca, the medicinal drink with hallucinogenic effects made by various indigenous communities in Latin America, allows its tasters to communicate with the gods through an elaborate ritual. And this is the feeling that one gets walking through the Quais du Polar, that the city lives immersed in a ritual of deep connection with authors whom it venerates as gods, or perhaps as something more earthly in the words of Lehane: ” Lyon is the only place on the planet where I have been treated like a rock star.
This collective fever is explained from the moment in which the organizers have managed to attract all types of audiences to the festival, not only those strictly interested in detective novels, crime novels and true crime, starting with the possibility of enjoying the grandeur architectural-historical of the city by opening its noble rooms, full of mirrors, chandeliers, curtains, gold and stucco baths, for the main events (Hôtel de Ville, National Opera, Palais de la Bourse…).
More relevant, to the traditional offer of meetings with the authors is added a huge offer of very attractive entertainment knowledge: escape rooms and murder parties (fun example: discover who took the head of Medusa from the Museum of Replicas), concerts of classical, rock and electronic music with criminal elements, theatrical performances based on notable episodes of the local black chronicle, master classes on forensic science, tours of the dark corners of the city, novel and television series writing workshops, noir storytelling for children from 7 to 12 years old, conferences by experts in cybercrime and artistic plunder from Interpol (whose headquarters are in Lyon), video game playformances, text translation battles, brunches inspired by agapes present in books…
Now, the more strictly literary, or let’s call it traditional, follow-up of the festival, that is, attendance at the round tables and debates with writers and journalists allows us to take the pulse of the crime genre in its multiple ramifications. And while fictions and research essays constitute a reflection of the world’s ills, this means addressing our most urgent problems and most disturbing perversions that have never been overcome.
The star themes of this edition have been what the American novelist Megan Jennett, creator of a waitress/murderer in You Know Her who emasculates men and cuts out their tongues as a drastic remedy against mansplanning, well defined as “the rabid desires to annihilate to women in a thousand different ways” -patriarchy, sexual violence, feminicide…-; climate change understood as a crime against humanity perpetrated with impunity by large corporations under the passivity of the rulers; the rise of extremists and lunatics with increasingly violent behavior (homophobes, transphobes, racists, denialists, flat earthers, supremacists, plotters, sectarians…), and Artificial Intelligence, its threats to creativity and copyright, but also its suggestive exploitation in noir plots (the Frenchwoman Sophie Laubiére, by the way, has gone against the current and imagined a benevolent and maternal one in Obsolète, where she also fables with a hormonal regulation bracelet for adolescents. The Scotsman Peter May, for his part , confessed to having sent a recording with an avatar of himself speaking Danish to an awards ceremony in Copenhagen and that it crashed…).
Quais du Polar 2024 thus represented an arborescent and detailed x-ray of the global shadow zones, a cork of those that hang in police stations, only of enormous size to accommodate infinite photographs of open cases, a turbulent agora in which to discover that the Sami population is being expelled from their lands in northern Sweden – a country that, by the way, has the most incels per capita in the world and where an average of three hundred are published! crime novels a year-so that the large foreign producers of electricity can get rich, that insurance companies refuse to cover homes in Southern California due to the growing risk of fires, that in Iceland four out of every five bestsellers are crime novels, that John Grisham believes that there are no more presidential candidates in his country’s elections because “the capable and intelligent do not want to expose themselves to a political system that has lost all traces of civility”, or that in matters of foreign relations France hides many corpses in the closet, such as selling submarines to Pakistan or helping the South African apartheid regime to obtain the atomic bomb.
Going back to the beginning. The event had a religious aspect in many ways. Good and evil, guilt, forgiveness, redemption were widely debated. Dennis Lehane stated, “When you stop believing in God, you open the door to believing in anything.” ACE. Cosby declared: The only Church there is is your actions.” Jo Nesbo declared: “The noir genre addresses moral issues, community issues, it takes the place of religious literature.” Lyon welcomes pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago and noir fans Maybe it’s not a coincidence.
