Armed and Dangerous: Le Poulpe and the Formalization of French Noir

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Jean-Bernard Pouy’s La Petite Écuyère a cafté (1995) (The Little Equestrian Girl Tattled). This is the first volume in a French publishing phenomenon of the 1990s: the Poulpe crime series of over 200 novels, the precise construction of which will become clearer later. This synecdochical reading of the first book is appropriate here, because the entire collection is dedicated to a particular kind of experimentation on and within the crime genre, where the techniques and modalities inaugurated in Oulipo¹ are applied to the noir formula. In fact, the collection developed out of the rubric of one of Oulipo’s lesser-known offshoots, Oulipopo,² creating its own project out of the former’s interest in popular literary forms and formulae. La Petite Écuyère a cafté set the parameters for the grander exercise that is the whole series.