A former acquaintance, too, was Pierre Sanary, who was down to speak on ‘The Posthumous Holmes’, which I interpreted to refer to the countless post-Doyle manifestations of the Great Detective in fiction, theatre and film, my own collection of stories perhaps included. Sanary was Swiss, widely travelled but with a home, if I’m not mistaken, in Geneva. He spoke an English so impeccably unstilted that to the English themselves it sounded haughty and condescending, as if every perfectly calibrated cadence were a rebuke to their risibly imperfect French. Stupendously erudite, an editor, publisher, anthologist, literary historian and I know not what else, he had written a series of monographs on such petits-maîtres of primitive pulp fiction as Jean Ray, Ernest Bramah, Sax Rohmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as a two-volume, thousand-page history of the whodunit, Poë et Cie: Histoire du roman d’énigme de Poë au postmoderne,* which covered all the usual suspects or, rather, all the usual detectives: Dupin, Lecoq, Holmes, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Harry Dickson, Nick Carter, Gideon Fell, etc. He was also the author of a single whodunit of his own, one I wish I had written.
Titled simply and superbly Fin – the English translation, The End, although both literal and unavoidable, forfeits half the original’s clipped concision – it revolves around a group of American whodunit writers. One of them, we soon discover, is a serial killer, and all of them are in frantically competitive pursuit of the ‘legendary’ twist ending that was supposedly mentioned in passing by Poe in one of his letters to Hawthorne but never used by him because he never could think of a plot to which it would constitute the logical conclusion. Needless to say, at the end of Fin itself, at the very moment the serial killer discovers the nature of the twist, so equally, to his own rage, is revealed the utter futility of his quest, since the brilliantly original method by which he himself has contrived to dispose of his rivals is shown to be exactly that which was posited by Poe.
In, I would say, his early fifties, the totally bald Sanary resembled, with his poached-egg eyes and pale thin legalistic lips, a transvestite whose wig has just been snatched off. I had met him through my close friendship with the Chilean, Paris-based film director Raoul Ruiz, who had long and in vain nurtured the project of a cinematic adaptation of Fin. We had both been invited to supper at Raoul’s flat near the Père-Lachaise cemetery and, even if Sanary displayed scant interest in anything I contributed to the table-talk and none at all in what I had achieved in my professional life, he himself proved to be so amazingly incapable of making a dull remark I could almost forgive his boorish manners. He had an inexhaustible pool of anecdotes and allegations involving instances of witting or unwitting aesthetic plagiarisms which he would serve up to us with a series of meaningful leers. He informed us, for example, that the out-of-control-carousel climax of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, absent from Patricia Highsmith’s source novel, had been appropriated, soi-disant ‘Hitchcockian’ touches and all, from Edmund Crispin’s donnish Oxford-set whodunit The Moving Toyshop, published in 1945 and therefore predating the film by six years. Also that the plot of Cocteau’s pretty much forgotten boulevard play Les Monstres sacrés (1940) was too similar to that of the still remembered and indeed cherished Joseph L. Mankiewicz film All About Eve (1950) for it to have been a coincidence. Also, most intriguingly, that in the first movement, with a reprise in the third, of a Sonata for Violin and Piano composed in the twenties by the Russian-born pianist and conductor Issay Dobrowen there can be heard a tune indistinguishable from ‘As Time Goes By’, which was reputedly conceived a decade later by one Herman Hupfeld and of course immortalised in the film Casablanca.
As for another of the Festival’s invited speakers, Meredith van Demarest, I cannot honestly say that it was with much enthusiasm that I anticipated meeting her again. A hellish Hellenist from an obscure Californian college, she had sat next to me at a lunch in Antibes to which I had been invited by friends of friends many years ago, all the other guests being left-wing American academics spending their sabbaticals in sexy France rather than in dreary England, even though it was the latter country’s language and literature most of them were being paid to teach.
