How did you get into crime fiction?
I was a researcher, and it's pretty obvious to do crime fiction because it's very similar to what we do in research. That is to say, at a given moment, we observe something, a crime, just as we observe an effect in society or an effect at work. We wonder what could have caused that. We put forward hypotheses and then we build an investigative structure to arrive at a result that validates or rejects the hypothesis. If it does, we've found something; if not, the hypothesis isn't validated, and we start again. There are a lot of similarities between research and the work of a police officer who is confronted with a murder and reviews the characters who had the opportunity and who had a motive. We construct hypotheses and we test them one after the other. It works, he has a culprit, it doesn't work, and he has to work on another lead.
How did you then go about writing your five thrillers?
I started with the detective novel itself. The characters I portrayed are police officers from the Nancy police station because I lived there, with Commissioner Ney, who is the head of the crime squad, and three groups of investigators who work with him. From one novel to the next, the head works with a different group. I like to show that it's not the work of a single man or woman who suddenly comes up with a brilliant idea. But that it's painstaking work, often arduous work, where several people are needed to scrape the pieces together. And that it's from the group that one or more solutions emerge at some point.
And the thrillers?
At first, it wasn't at all the type of book I imagined writing. And then, a long time ago, like many teenagers or post-teenagers, I tried writing and started a story about a hitman. But it was bad, I gave up, and it all went to waste. Then, six or seven years ago, I wanted to revisit this character and tell his story. Telling the story of a hitman has been done a thousand times, so I imagined something else. A new software program that makes it possible to connect unsolved murders spanning more than 15 years, an investigator who tries to push the killer into making a mistake, and a Minister of the Interior who absolutely wants results. And I wrote, "Don't take it personally."
Do the codes of genre literature leave room for creativity?
It's coded in form, but it's completely free in substance. You can write a thriller that's completely disconnected from reality, just as you can write an investigative thriller that's totally immersed in social realities. And so, you can describe environments and issues that would be the problems of a sociologist, a psychologist, or a historian. But you can construct them and introduce them to a reader who isn't a sociologist, a historian, or anything else, and who will discover things they were more or less unaware of. They will be able to put words to something they wouldn't have looked for on their own in social or scientific literature.
Illusions
was published 9 months ago. Are you working on a new novel?
I'm working on a project that will take time. I'm going to feature characters in Bagnères during a very specific period, the end of the 19th century. So I'll have to do historical research, but also local research, on what Bagnères was like at that time, on its sociological situation. Until now, my novels have been set in contemporary times, so they've been relatively fast-paced. But this one is going to take a lot of time; it won't be before 2027.
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