Murder in Memoriam

On the evening of October 17; 1961 twenty-thousand Algerians marched in Paris in defiance of and in protest against a curfew imposed by Maurice Papon; chief of the Paris Metropolitan Police. The protesters were met with ferocious and uninhibited violence. Eleven-thousand were arrested; more than one thousand injured; as many as three hundred were killed; many of them thrown into the Seine; from which their bodies were later recovered. In recreating the scene of the atrocities in Murder in Memoriam; his controversial alarum first published in 1984; Didier Daeninckx introduces a fictional observer of the riot; Roger Thiraud; a middle-aged history teacher in a public school; only steps from his home and his waiting; pregnant wife. In the first few minutes of the demonstration; he will be assassinated; in cold blood; by a member of the anti-terrorist secret police. For nearly forty years after October 1961; France would deny the killings. Upon the independence of Algeria in 1962 an amnesty put its perpetrators safely beyond prosecution. The records were buried. In 1981; Bernard Thiraud; Roger's son; is researching the archives in Toulouse; intent on completing his father's history of his birthplace; Drancy; now notorious as the site of a detention and transit camp from which Jews were deported to Auschwitz. One afternoon; after leaving the town hall; he too is murdered -- the victim of what appears to investigating officers to be a professional killing. When inspector Cadin of the Toulouse prefecture learns of the unsolved murder of the young man's father; he suspects a connection. But why would anybody want to kill two bourgeois; politically unconnected history teachers? Didier Daeninckx has located the link between the two murders in the history that France had yet to confront -- in its colonial racism and its complicity in genocide. Daeninckx made this connection in fiction; deliberately provoking its acknowledgment in fact. Murder in Memoriam anticipated by more than a decade the shocking revelations provided by the exposure; trial; and conviction of Maurice Papon -- the Parisian chief of police in 1961; and the never-named villain whose real crimes; unrevealed at the time of its first publication; haunt this account -- for crimes against humanity; for his part in the administration of the deportation of the Jews from Bordeaux to Auschwitz.