Best 1948 Adventures (7)
By:
July 11, 2018
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1948 adventure novels. Happy 70th anniversary!
Georges Simenon’s crime adventure La Neige Etait Sale (Dirty Snow).
Dirty Snow has been described as one of the best novels depicting what it was like to live in a German-occupied country during WWII. Frank Friedmaier, a teenage pimp and thug, is living well during the occupation of Belgium — because his mother runs a whorehouse catering to Germans. No sympathetic figure, Friedmaier is the missing link between Mersault, the Arab-killing stranger in Albert Camus’s 1942 philosophical novel L’Étranger, and Lou Ford, the cunning and depraved sociopath in Jim Thompson’s 1952 hardboiled novel The Killer Inside Me. (It’s less cerebral, more gritty than the former; more thoughtful than the latter.) Over the course of a long, cold winter, Frank commits brutal crimes: He stabs a German officer; and then, during a petty burglary in his hometown village, kills a former neighbor. He sexually victimizes and humiliates a young woman who is attracted to him. Once he’s arrested and locked up — suspected of a crime he didn’t commit — the hoodlum begins to philosophize.
Fun facts: Reissued in 2003 by New York Review Books, with an Afterword by William T. Vollmann. Simenon wrote nearly 400 books; he is best known as the author of 75 detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret. P.D. James says: “A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal.”
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES (in progress) | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | NOTES ON 21st-CENTURY ADVENTURES.