The following is a translation of my exchange with the author which was conducted in French. The original appears below. Zehira Houfani is an Algerian writer who started publishing in the 80s. She published two detective novels among which “ Pirates of the Desert ” in 1986, a story set in Tamanrasset ( Les pirates du desert ) . Few women have written crime fiction in Algeria, in Arabic or in French. Zehira Houfani is one of them and she might even be the first to have published a detective novel in DZ. She now lives in Canada, and from there, she kindly answered a few questions about her experience as a writer in Algeria at the time, and about her detective novel Pirates of the Desert . What brought you to crime fiction initially and what inspired you to write not one detective novel but four of them, two published and two manuscripts? I guess my readings led me to it. This was at least the case for my first novel. Later, two factors encouraged me to pursue this...