La Bibliothèque de Villers, suivi de Tombeau d’Agatha Christie

by Benoît Peeters

Jan Baetens (KU Leuven)

There may be two ways to study the notion of “European identity” through crime fiction. The first one is “direct” and tackles the many ways in which European identities are represented by means of words and images: imagine a train crossing Europe and having on board a wide selection of European citizens, discussing cross-national topics and struggling with each other’s languages and idiosyncrasies (the result can be great – or have the taste of a bad euro pudding). The second one is “indirect” and it performs Europe rather than simply representing it: it is a way of creating a world and addressing issues by using building blocks that are deprived of any specific, that is: geolocalizable and historically datable, feature, but capable of strongly resonating with anybody’s personal and collective concerns, yet without falling into the trap of easy allegories. This is what Kafka is doing in The Castle or The Trial, which are not about Prague (where one can visit the “castle”) or Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy (which the author thoroughly knew in virtue of his work in an insurance office), but which have shaped the way we imagine Europe, and perhaps even the world, today.

Something similar happens in the long short story by Benoît Peeters, La Bibliothèque de Villers (The Library of Villers, first edition 1980, reedited in 2012). This whodunit is the rewriting of many other stories and it appropriates many great references in the field, from Borges to Poe and from Agatha Christie to Hergé (yes, also a crime fiction writer, just reread The Castafiore Emerald). Yet the book is in the very first an attempt –and a highly successful one – to invent both a scenario and a writing style that can be seen as the quintessential form and meaning of crime fiction in the European tradition: a certain type of characters, a certain setting, a certain technique of building tension (and not just surprise: Peeters closely follows Hitchcock on this point), and above all the recognition that one cannot separate form and content. If one writes a novel, one will have to do something with words (instead of simply using them). If one makes a movie, one will have to start from images (instead of seeing them as illustrations of an already existing storyline). Peeters is doing all this in The Library of Villers, and that makes this book a wonderful example of writing Europe in crime fiction.