The City of Algiers in Yasmina Khadra's Noir Fiction

Abstract

Crime fiction has deep roots in history, linked as it is to the need to elucidate and unravel a situation that escapes normalcy. The features of this literary genre are so strongly marked that it has not evolved since Edgar Allan Poe, but has simply developed the characteristics it has always carried in its nature. Its focus on inquiry and investigation are not inventions of the modern world, but owe much to the emergence of urban civilization. In fact, it is in the United States that the element of the corrupt city facilitated the development of the characteristics of noir fiction, the hardboiled fiction pioneered by Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, among others. But it is in Europe, especially in France, that this genre acquired the specificities that define it as noir. The following discussion examines how Yasmina Khadra’s crime fiction portrays the city of Algiers in the 1990s, distinguishing the symbolic city from the real city. I begin with a review of the sociopolitical context of Algeria with regard to Khadra’s work, and I continue with a reading of his noir novels in this context.