The nights of St. Germain
The nights of St. Germain (original title: La nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés or Le sapin pousse dans les caves ) is a detective novel by the French writer Léo Malet about his fictional investigator Nestor Burma , published in 1955 and first published in 1986 has been published in German translation by Hans-Joachim Hartstein.
action
The story takes place in the mid-1950s in the 6th arrondissement in Paris between the Seine on the Rive Gauche and the boulevards of Montparnasse and St. Michel. Private detective Nestor Burma is here to track down jewel thieves on behalf of an insurance agency. They stole jewelry worth 130 million old francs from an old lady . As a result, the insurance company is less interested in paying out the compensation than it is to "fob off" the private investigator with a hundredth of the sum.
So Nestor Burma immersed himself in the search for the stolen goods in the then and now St. Germain district, which, however, was the lively European center of jazz ( Claude Abadie , Boris Vian , Hubert Fol , Claude Luter ), the existentialists in the mid-1950s , Surrealists , writers and the bohemians as well as bon vivants who lived out in the nightclubs like the Tabou and the Saint Germain des Prés between the Cafés Deux Magots and the Flore. So Burma hurries away from the usual tourist destinations through the gloomy side streets. It soon dawns on the detective that something is "wrong" about the whole story. When MacGee, a colored musician, was found shot dead, and a short time later a hotel porter was also killed, this became a certainty. A policeman, of all people, confuses the mess around the missing jewelry even more and plays a shady role in it. The self-centered and arrogant wannabe writers Germain St. Germain seems to make things even more complicated. In the end, Burma, who exceptionally more often in this story has his revolver in hand than his beloved pipe, finds himself in a western-like duel with Germain St. Germain and a third person in his living room.
expenditure
- Léo Malet: The Nights of St. Germain . Elster Verlag, Bühl-Moos 1986, ISBN 3-89151-035-7 , 191 pp.
- Léo Malet: The Nights of St. Germain . Rowohlt 2002, ISBN 978-3499127700
background
The center of the district is the Boulevard Saint-Germain , which, like the entire district, was named after the old Saint-Germain-des-Prés abbey .
Peter Stephan added the German-language edition of the Elster publishing a literary " follow up " including a road map in which the change in the 6th arrondissement and its venues was lit 30 years after that. This was also to be found in the later paperback edition of the Rowohlt Verlag, but was missing from the complete edition of the two-thousand-one publishing house for copyright reasons .
reception
radio play
The Südwestfunk produced an eponymous detective radio play in 1994, the Audio Verlag published in 2002 as a CD release and was accepted very positively by the critics: Léo Malet: The Nights of St. Germain . The Audio Verlag 2002; 2 CDs, 102 minutes total playing time; ISBN 3-89813-208-0 . Christian Brückner played the leading role , Felix von Manteuffel the Germain St. Germain. The whole thing was rounded off with music by Sidney Bechet , Duke Ellington , Dizzy Gillespie and Anne Sylvestre .
Movie
As early as 1977 , the material was filmed under the original title La nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés , directed by Bob Swaim . The well-known comedy and character actor Michel Galabru plays Nestor Burma , Mort Shuman plays St. Germain and the young Daniel Auteuil was seen here in the third year of his acting career as Rémy .
In the French TV series Nestor Burma with Guy Marchand in the title role, the present story was surprisingly not taken into account, although it would have given the jazz lover Marchand the opportunity to play the saxophone again.