Le Syndrome [E] - Franck Thilliez

The wayward police investigator with alcohol and family or relationship problems may seem like a cliché, but there is of course a reality to how dealing with crime and criminals every day inevitably has an impact on your personal life. What must it do to you when and how do you cope when you are a criminal profiler tracking down serial killers and you lose your own family? The job spilling over into personal life might be a cliché too, but nonetheless if you want to be convincing in crime fiction, you have to take the personal toll on individuals into account. They are not superhuman, but they certainly have to deal with a lot more than most ordinary people.

And so it is with Franck Thilliez's Commissioner Franck Sharko, who at the start of Le Syndrome [E] is on forced leave and under treatment for schizophrenic episodes. Haunted by the loss of his wife and daughter, he converses with Eugènie, a hallucination who is often a very real presence beside him. Despite still undergoing treatment, he is the only person the police force can turn to when five bodies are discovered buried deep in acidic soil in the north of France. Only discovered when a pipeline was being put in, someone has gone to great trouble to ensure they remain undiscovered and unidentified. The top of their heads have been removed with a surgical saw and scalpel, removing brains and eyes, cutting off hands, with deep cuts on the remains of the bodies presumably to remove any identifying tattoos, although the bodies are in such a state that it's hard to tell. No wonder Sharko has living nightmares.

He's not the only police officer struggling to cope with personal issues. Lille police officer Lieutenant Lucie Henebelle is also on leave and also finding herself drawn into the strangest case. A former lover, a cinephile has just come across a cache of old film reels being sold, has watched one of the short reels and it has made him go blind. Lucie's number was by chance the one that he was able to call for help. Despite what has happened to Ludovic, she watches the film and finds it strangely disturbing. When analysed, she discovers that the film, which is already strange enough on surface, has subliminal frames of pornographic images and shocking brutality cut through it and  and even a film within the film that is not seen by the eyes, but registered to shocking effect on the brain. As it is dated from the 1950s and appears to come from Canada, Henebelle is unsure where to take this until a connection is made with the bodies Sharo is investigating in Gravenchon, Haute-Normandie.

Which likewise unites for the first time two of Franck Thilliez's police detectives. Considering their backgrounds and issues, the two don't get off to a good start, but soon come to recognise something of themselves in the other. As I said in the opening paragraph, they are human and each of them have to find a way of coping with what they have been through. There's plenty of shared experience to build on here as the two of them follow different leads, Sharko travelling to the darkest hottest corners of Cairo following up a report of three women who were killed and mutilated in a similar way fifteen years ago. Lucie, for her part, follows up on the mystery of the film and its provenance that takes her to Montreal in Canada.

"L'affaire l'absorbait, et ce que racontait Henebelle lui parassait à la fois farfelu et d'une justesse effroyable."

Sharko isn't the only one who finds this a bit odd and frightening. If the two investigations seems strange, the revelations and the way the case expands is likewise extraordinary. The initial premise might sound somewhat contrived and unlikely, but there is something compelling about it. Not least, the personal horror and danger faced by anyone who comes into contact with the film and the case of the buried bodies is extreme and that certainly holds attention, but Thilliez also employs his own subliminal effects to draw you in, like any good author does. Here he holds a baseline in reality, from maverick filmmakers like Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau to Francis Ford Coppola going native in the making of Apocalypse Now, to A Clockwork Orange experiments that explore the nature and origin of violent behaviour, he expands this out to connect them in a vast conspiracy but without letting it get too far away from reality, or indeed the initial police investigation of murders that started it off. 

You also have to acknowledge that the two lead investigators have some part to play in making this highly readable. There are perhaps a few too many eccentricities in Sharko, but his schizophrenia and troubled mind at least make him unpredictable. Lucie's personal issues are more related to relationships and family, but there are things in her past that also inform her personality and the drive that takes her to find a resolution to this complex and dangerous case. Put the two of them together and, well, I could have done without the rom-crim element, but it's not distracting and it reinforces them as being human. There are no extraordinary insights then, their investigation methodical, based on experience and following through on leads. I found the ending a little more conventional, but it still managed to surprise. The twist in the epilogue is also conventional and unnecessary; there's more than enough here to convince you to read more Sharko and Henebelle.

Reading notes: Le Syndrome [E] by Franck Thilliez, French edition published in paperback by Pocket. This is the first Thilliez I've read, having been holding off from the bigger bestseller names in the French crime genre in a long search for writers that can match the ambition and unique qualities of Fred Vargas or the range of Georges Simenon. I'll definitely be reading more Thilliez.

Viewing notes: Soon after finishing, I discovered that TF1 are currently running a TV series adaptation of Syndrome [E], so I was interested to see how that compared. Only two episodes have been broadcast so far, and, based on that, it works on its own terms with good casting of Vincent Elbaz for Sharko and Jennifer Decker as Lucie Henebelle (and I look forward to seeing more Dominique Blanc in a new role created for the series), but it soon strays far from the original idea. Inevitably compressed, the six bodies thread is eliminated in favour of a new subplot featuring disappearing children in Casablanca. The short film can't possibly live up to the description of it in the book, but perhaps fatally - particularly if there are plans for further adventures of Sharko and Henebelle - the characterisation is changed. Sharko is fine, but Henebelle is reduced to becoming one of the Syndrome [E] experiments, shooting her police partner in the first episode after viewing the mystery film. The series touches base with the original plot in a few places, but already it seems like it is going to move further and further away from any semblance of fidelity to the original.