God et la trinité (God
and the trinity) is a detective novel by Assia Dridi. Assia was born in Tebessa in 1949, from an Algerian father, and an Egyptian mother. I learnt about this novel from the recent recension of Algerian dectective novel by Dr Issam Boulksibat (University of Oum el Bouaghi), guided in his research by Prof. Saïdi (from the University of Batna) (see discussion here).
As discovered by Dr Boulksibat, critics slammed this novel when it came out - a critic in particular called Jean Déjeux, a scholar who has written several studies on Algerian literature written in French. It looks like Assia was criticised for two things. First, she posed nude on the back cover, and it seems to have rattled stuffy boys. Apparently, Assia was working for the photography section of the adult magazine called Lui (Him), a mag that published nude photos, kind of soft porn) and this might have inspired her choice of an author's photo. Personally, I see it as a young woman of 24 having a laugh. Secondly, the novel was said to be a joke - a silly criticism because the novel is no more a joke than James Bond's.
Having read the novel now, I bet that what shoked critics is that this is an erotic detective novel, with explicit sex scenes, unashamed to feature homosexual characters, and happy to be funny about an investigation. Comedy, sex, and politics written by a woman, an Algerian woman at that, seems to have been too much for French male literary critics to bear. But as Dr Boulksibat remarks in his recension, Assia's publisher was a well known editor of spy and detective novels, and if he backed her novel, it's because he believed in it. Here's some background.
God and the trinity was published by SEF Philippe Daudy, the publishing house of Philippe Daudy, in March 1973, in France. By 1973,
Philippe Daudy was well known on the publishers' scene. He had
previously created, for Plon editions, two collections called
"Nuit Blanche" and "Espionnage" focused on spy and detective
novels. By the mid-60s, he had convinced the author Gérard de
Villiers to create a character like James
Bond, after Ian Fleming died in 1964. De Villiers agreed, and created the SAS series with Malko Linge, a series of spy novels known for their graphic sex scenes. From the moment SAS came out, it was very successful. I myself read many as a teenager. It made Daudy, who even managed to secure the publishing rights for James Bond's novels in France.
Assia's novel, published in 1973, very much fits the criteria that Daudy obviously supported and looked for in detective fiction. God and the trinity is centered around a murder mystery that develops as an international political conspiracy. It is uninhibited sexually - several
erotic scenes (none violent) pepper the story. It's a well written novel, Assia's prose is elegant, and she knows how to shift gear from lyrical to street smart remarks and slang, just what is expected in a hard boiled novel. I only found it disappointing because it is too slow paced for my liking, it's not clue-driven. I prefer my crime fiction to focus on the speedy discovery of clues, but I've read plenty, from golden age crime to contemporary thrillers , that prefer to take it slow and follow characters' actions. Which is what Assia does here.
So what is God and the trinity all about? The novel opens with
the discovery of a stabbed angora cat in an abandonned car by the train station, which leads the train master to finding a group of passengers all murdered in the train about to depart from the station. All, including the cat, were stabbed
with long picks made of ice (which have not melted, funnily). One of the
murdered women, a hippie, had previously been seen with 4 other
friends on the platform, none of them now in the wagon. This quickly leads the police to their haunt: a mill in the countryside. All four are amateur porn actors led by Jacquot who is making a
porn movie with 40 cats, whose star was the murdered angora (lol). In typical police fashion (at least in
France), the police bursts in on their filming, slap them all around,
threaten the women with rape, and begin to arrest them. In the
kerfuffle of the arrest, one of the women, called Olympe, manages to
escape the police and goes to find Godrey (the 'God' of the title), who
is a kind of urban legend, venerated by many people underground. He is their beloved
'peace-and-love hippie', a shepherd to them all, and very wealthy which
will help during their investigation. He also can jump really really
high (I know, loool), which will come in handy - another comedic aspect of the novel.
When Olympe explains she's no idea what happened. God takes it upon
himself to investigate who is behind the murders, and why whoever it is wants to
frame his hippie friends. He is not a private investigator however, nor has he any
training in investigations. He's just going to use common sense with the help his close group. God is always
surrounded by several followers, 2 women, 2 guys, an elderly
couple, and a wise farmer (I'm not joking, Assia is). They are all quite diverse in cultural backgrounds
and include a gay man and a bisexual woman (both with leading roles in the
story and in the sex scenes). Heteros weren't forgotten, Godfrey sleeps with women.
As soon as the investigation begins, it seems clear that a well organised group is behind these murders. Godfrey will (very very slowly) uncover an international plan led by 'The Trinity' (of the
title) who are planning to control Western countries as well as their allies elsewhere. In the process they want to
kill all hippies (more lool), who represent the non-confirmists that these right-wingers so hates. They are a kind of fascist group on a killing spree, and will attempt to kill God and his friends, while
trying to reach their ultimate goal.
Assia is very vague with respect to the manner in which these fascists are going to take over the world, how they control their
members. I felt that she didn't quite know
how this would work anyway, and wasn't really interested in technical details. She may not have been tech-oriented, after all it was 1973 when people weren't walking around with phones. All we know is that they can control minds
with 'machines' and a kind of 'magnetic rays', and can do this by having access to 'satellites'. Assia is much more interested in building
characters and scenematic scenes. In so doing, she explores how French society reacted to hippies as a cultural movement in the 1970s, especially how they were viewed in
small rural communities. In Assia's novel, villagers and farming communities are weirded out by hippies' lingo and politics, but are impressed by the way hippies treat nature which is close to their own customs, and is put in opposition to how urbanites and
politicians are destroying rural ways.
Hence, from the beginning of the novel, we follow Godfrey and each member of his group as they uncover, in
turn, one aspect of the mystery, which includes prostitution rings, the grooming of young women, and an international plot to destroy citizens' liberties. Godfrey remains central to the story
both as the main sleuth and as their leader, but his assistants do get a lot of limelight too. As for the erotic scenes, they are peppered throughout the
novel, and I did not find them self-indulgent or off-putting. Assia
decided to follow a specific genre and pulled it off.
It seems simpler to me to call this an 'erotic crime' novel just to warn readers of what they'll find, but there aren't that
many scenes sex. The erotic element also has a function I think:
it fits within the 'peace and love' of the hippie movement, and no
scenes were violent.
I enjoyed reading this novel, and to me it fits well with the sexy spy novels on the market in France at the time. As I said earlier, I'm familiar with SAS, but I'm not sure how readers who come new to erotica would react.
I don't think her novel was ever distributed in Algeria (we would have heard about it, right?), but as an Algerian woman, her novel belongs to the Algerian crime fiction corpus as well, and I was thrilled to have discovered her work. Wherever you are Assia, I wish you well, and I hope you continued writing.
If you too want to read this novel, you're going to quickly find it's practically impossible to get, and that the second hand copies floating online are expensive. I was lucky to find a cheap copy, so I scanned it and you can download here as a PDF. Happy reading, and Peace and Love.
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