From Flâneur to Traceur?: Léo Malet and Cara Black Construct the PI’s Paris

Abstract

In Felicioli and Gagnol’s 2010 Oscar-nominated film Une vie de chat (English title: A Cat in Paris) Dino the cat lives two lives, by day with a little girl whose mother is a police officer, and by night with a burglar he follows across the rooftops of Paris. Although the directors explicitly acknowledge only classic American noir influences,¹ it is clear that in choosing these somewhat unorthodox routes, burglar and cat are connecting to a well-established French topos: crime and detection in the city of light are not limited to ground level,² nor to the classic ‘underworld’. The concept of fleeing a crime scene or following a trail, so central to crime and mystery fiction, has been strongly associated historically with the rooftops of Paris: that was where, after all, Poe chose to set the mysterious events of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), in which the crime was committed by an orangutan swinging between buildings, leaving clues to be tracked and interpreted by Poe’s detective, Dupin.