ABSTRACT
The critical focus on the Romantic ancestry of the genre makes for an apt theoretical match to the anti-rational trend in contemporary literary crime writing, which has evolved in parallel with the turn towards aesthetic and ontological, rather than epistemological, questions in postmodern detective fiction. This chapter focuses on Paul Auster and Daniel Pennac, whose work foregrounds the aesthetic potential of crime writing, and celebrates the instinctive, illogical sense-making possibilities to be found in the gratuitousness, and the materiality, of the amorous encounter. The series in question is Daniel Pennac's Malaussene saga, also commonly referred to as the "Belleville Quartet", even if the adventures of the Malaussene clan have continued to be charted in a fifth novel, as well as two shorter works and a theatrical piece. On the contrary, Benjamin Malaussene, professional impersonator and amateur raconteur–the eldest brother and putative paternal figure in a large, multi-cultural extended family–finds himself embroiled in the most bizarre cases quite by chance.
