Even More Criminal

In the comments to my recent look at Atlantic Books' Crime Classics series, the cunning Tulkinghorn pointed out that I should have a look at the Serie Noir books from Editions Gallimard in France. This extraordinarily long-running series of classic and new crime books includes everything from Jim Thompson to Oedipus Rex.

For much of their time, this series has had uniform, illustration-free covers which use yellow text on a black background, like inverted crime-scene tape. More recently, however, they've gone with a series of evocative monochrome photographs. Looking at these, I wish I had me some French (instead of being the sort of person who swears every time Julian Barnes blithely includes a couple of paragraphs of untranslated Gallicisms in his books).