Marseille has always had a reputation as a distinctly raffish port city. Long a multilingual melting pot of sailors served by the bars, brothels and dens of the infamous winding rookeries of Le Panier and the Vieux Port, Marseille linked France to Africa and Asia. Cargoes came and went (missing!), passenger liners headed out East of Suez and across to the New World on the other side of the Atlantic. Marseille was, from its origins, one of France’s most culturally diverse and colorful cities. Eventually piracy moved on but post-World War Two the city became the centre of the European heroin trade: from Indo-China to America via Marseille, the infamous “French Connection.” Nowadays Le Panier and the Vieux Port are somewhat gentrified, though a trip to the giant housing estates/projects on the edge of the city—the banlieue—reveals that poverty, crime and desperation, as well as a discordant multiplicity of tongues and backgrounds are still prevalent in Marseille.
But back to earlier times. Despite its long-standing reputation Marseilles hasn’t been the subject of as many crime books as you might expect. While researching this column I happened to be reading Maya Jasanoff’s recent biography of Joseph Conrad, The Dawn Watch (2017). Now I associate Conrad with many places—his birthplace in (then Russian) Poland, his adopted country of England, his travels to South East Asia and Australia as a merchant seaman and, of course, his voyages up the Congo River. But Marseille? Well, Jasanoff reminds us that Marseille was the port where the young Josef Konrad Korzeniowski first signed onto a ship: “Marseille, city of olive oil, orange trees, sweet wine, sacks of spice, mouth open to the Mediterranean and eye cocked toward the Atlantic, city of crusaders, revolutionaries, the Count of Monte Cristo.” Conrad’s 1919 novel The Arrow of Gold is almost a crime story. It’s a love triangle set against the backdrop of the 1870s Carlist civil war in Spain and mostly set in Marseille or aboard the Tremolino, which is smuggling arms from Marseille to the Spanish rebels. Arrow of Gold, with its Spanish femme fatale and Marseille-based gun-running gang is rather awkwardly plotted and far from the brilliance of Heart of Darkness (1899), The Secret Agent (1907), Nostromo (1904) or Lord Jim (1900), but it was the second best selling novel in America in 1919 and effectively launched Conrad as a major and best selling writer in the USA.
Another Marseille bestseller now largely forgotten is Sébastien Japrisot’s 1962 novel The 10.30 from Marseille, in which a serial killer stalks the Paris-Marseille overnight train. Japrisot is not that well known in the English-speaking world, though in his home country he is known as “the Graham Greene of France.” He was also JD Salinger’s French translator. The 10.30 from Marseille was a big hit at the time and swiftly made into a movie by Costa Gravas with Simone Signoret and Yves Montand (The Sleeping Car Murders—1965). Also in English is Japrisot’s 1966 thriller The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun which is also set in and around Marseille and the south of France. In 1977 Japrisot published One Deadly Summer, a harrowing tale of a woman raped in a small town near Marseille sparking a series of revenge killings. He hit box office gold again when Jacques Becker turned the book into a hit French film in 1983 with Isabelle Adjani.
Today Marseille (as it is portrayed on TV) is still France’s most violent city. The recent Franco-British TV show The Last Panthers (which begins with a daring diamond heist in the city) described Marseille as “the city of the Kalashnikov.” The Netflix show Marseille, with Gerard Depardieu as the city’s mayor, portrayed “France’s second city” as on a knife-edge, threatened by the political far right, the gangs of the banlieue housing projects, Islamisation and city hall corruption. Yet in many ways Marseille is undoubtedly much improved since the more run-down days of the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to the familiar pattern of inner city gentrification and the publicity of being European City of Culture in 2013. Former “no-go” areas are now “creative clusters.” Of course little has changed out on the fringes, in the banlieue, where the tourists don’t go
The general economic decline of Marseille in the 1990s was best symbolized in Solea, where a giant fire rages around the city threatening to engulf it. The Marseille Trilogy is crime writing as urban tragedy.If there is one writer associated with the pre-gentrification Marseille of the 1990s, it is Jean-Claude Izzo. Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy stands as among the best noir writing about anywhere in any language. The series starts with Total Chaos (1995) followed by Chourmo and Solea and all feature disillusioned ex-Marseille cop Fabio Montale. The books are pure Marseille in that they are about friendships and loyalties based on the city and growing up there, nothing as simple as cops vs robbers. Izzo (who died of cancer at just 54 in 2000) described himself as the quintessential Marseillais—”That’s to say I’m half Italian and half Spanish, with a touch of Arab blood.” Izzo came to crime writing late in his career: he began when he was 50, after reading the American hard-boiled writers of a previous generation. The general economic decline of Marseille in the 1990s was best symbolized in Solea, where a giant fire rages around the city threatening to engulf it. The Marseille Trilogy is crime writing as urban tragedy.
It looked a lot like Marseille was irrecoverably down and out for the count around the millennium. But it wasn’t—it has recovered and regenerated. Sadly Izzo wasn’t around to see and write about that. It would have been fascinating to know if Izzo, and Fabio Montale, would have enthusiastically embraced, or stood apart cynically from, the city’s resurgence.
A few more Marseille-set crime reads:
- The Marseille Caper (2012) by Peter Mayle—Mayle (best known for his A Year in Provence books) wrote this light hearted crime caper set in Marseille that is essentially the complete opposite of Jean-Claude Izzo.
- In a similar comic vein are Peter Child’s Michel Ronay novels featuring a Marseille taxi driver: the trilogy comprises Marseille Taxi (2002), Christmas in Marseille (2003) and Return to Marseille (2007).
- The Detective Daniel Jacquot series starts with The Waterman (2005) and now runs through over half a dozen further adventures. Written by UK journalist Martin O’Brien, Jacquot is a former French rugby star turned cop with the Marseille Murder Squad. Like Izzo’s Fabio Montal, Jacquot enjoys his pastis and long seafood lunches in-between investigations.
Finally there is Commandant Michel de Palma of the Marseille murder squad, the creation of documentary filmmaker Xavier-Marie Bonnot. The First Fingerprint (2002) was followed by The Voice of the Spirits (2010), and The First Man (2013). The Bonnot/de Palma novels are great guides to Marseille: charming yet thuggish local gangsters lead you through the crime infested suburbs as well as the old port town. The books are a criminal tourist trail through the Mediterranean’s most notorious city, as twisting as the lanes of the Vieux Port and as stark as the concrete wastelands of the edge-city banlieue.
Marseille may have gone through some gentrification and have as many hipster coffee shops as Seattle these days, but it still has its decidedly rough edges to discover—if not as a tourist then in the pages of its crime writing.
