Machaho Tellem Chaho

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...

Adel s'emm ê le [Adel gets entangled] is Algerian novelist Salim Aissa’s second detective novel. It was published in 1988 by ENAL editions. His first was Mimouna , published the year before in 1987. I've found no information about who Salim Aissa is, and found no other books published by him after these two, and what a shame that is. Adel s'emmele is one of the best Algerian detective novels of the 80s I've read. By that I mean it is (finally) a detective story written for adults, it doesn't have the (excruciating) excess of wisecracks, no adjectival abusem its narrative is tight and flows (great editing for once). And crime is not glazed over. Adel is a bullheaded police inspector who works in Algiers, a chaotic capital in which crime abounds. There, further injustice is created daily by a lethargic public system in which all involved are corrupted. In an environment that is becoming increasingly aggressive and violent, Adel and his colleagues, Che...

Les pirates du d ésert ( Pirates of the desert ) is a detective novel, written by Algerian author Zehira Houfani. Houfani was born in 1952 in Kabylie (M'kira). She moved to Canada in 1994 and continues writing. Zehira Houfani published her first novel Le Portrait du disparu [Portrait of a missing person] in 1984, with ENAL eds. Then came Les pirates du desert (ENAL, 1986), followed by L’Incomprise [A woman misunderstood] in 1989 (ENAL). Since then, Houfani seems to have only published non-fiction. Her latest book Jenan, la condamnée d’Al-Mansour [Jenan, the convict of Al-Mansour] was published in 2008 and recounts the bombings she experienced while working in Iraq for an NGO. Les pirates du désert (Pirates of the desert) is a light, and entertaining detective story set in Tamanrasset where Omrane, the political representative of the Algerian government there, is trying his utmost to stop crime in Tam, but to no avail. A gang has rapidly grown from small time...

The story is set in February, we are not told the year but we are in the second half of the 90s when war raged in Algeria between factions, armed groups, police and army cells, using civilians as ammunitions. Events unfold in Algiers and Tamanrasset. Djoudet, or Djo, is a retired Chief Superintendent, widowed, with a son who lives abroad and with whom he rarely speaks. He had gone to live in Tamanrasset but had returned to Algiers for a few weeks, which turned into months. One morning, he receives a phonecall from Zedma, the Kalashnikov-ed leader of an Islamic group. Zedma asks Djo to repay an old debt. He had once saved Djo’s life during an ambush. The government had always tolerated Zedma and those like him. But now, mysteriously re-emerging after a six-year absence, Zedma reappears on the scene protected by the government. Zedma, still head of an armed Islamic group, asks Djo to find a young boy, Amine, who has disappeared. The young receveur , a bus driver assistant w...

French crime novelist Jeremie Guez, who often features Algeria, the Maghreb and Algerians in the background of his stories, will see his third polar novel published in English translation (by Edward Gauvin) on 10 November with Unnamed Press . Read my review of Eyes Full of Empty and its links to other Algerian crime novels here ( in French for Huff Post Algerie) .

This review originally appeared on El Watan 2014 .   "What are monkeys waiting for to turn into humans?" This question is the axis of Yasmina Khadra's new novel titled What are monkeys waiting for ( Qu'attendent les singes ) and it fits Algeria's current political situation well, with the presidential elections coming up and talks of a transition. But first, you might ask, who are the monkeys in question? Nora, chief inspector in Algiers' police force, is called one early morning to Bainem forest where a young girl has been found murdered, mutilated. Nora begins her investigation in a seemingly present-day Algiers, where the city's background are cursing taxi drivers and former hustlers turned power-holders. Its foreground, a corrupted Algerian press and a gangrened intellectual scene. With a will of steal, incorruptible and supported by a team of male colleagues only misogynist and homophobic on the surface, Nora begins investigati...

Shadow 67 ( Ombre 67 ) briefly begins in Algiers with two cousins who go to pick up their tourist visas to go to Paris and Madrid. Rashid is a scientist working for an international company and is taking his closest friend, his cousin Karim, with him on a week holiday. The next morning of their arrival in Paris, on their way to visit the Eiffel Tower, Rashid pales before a man he sees far away in the crowd and who advances towards him calling him Hassan. Panicked, Rashid hurries his cousin back to the hotel, and with no explanation forces him into a cab and orders him to return to Algiers, then disappears. Karim of course does not return home, makes his way back to their original hotel and begins to search for his disappeared cousin. After having alerted the French police, the Algerian Embassy in Paris and enrolling the help of a woman journalist looking for a scoop, he becomes embroiled in a case a lot more threatening than had at first appeared : the 11th century sect the A...

In the Algerian-authors-who-write-detective-novels league, Yasmina Khadra has to be top man. It pains me to say this I must confess, not because interviews have put the spotlight only on his egocentric traits making him a rather indigestible character, but because of the sheer Russian- roulette-style of his work.  I’ve often wondered, how can a man write so outstandingly well (see his work’s crown-jewel L'Olympe des infortunes, 2010), and in parallel write so shockingly badly (see the abysmal L’Attentat translated in EN by John Cullen as The Attack ). These manic up-and-down literary turns leave me baffled, but admittedly, keep me interested.   This aside, he never fails in the detective fiction genre. His very enjoyable and well-netted Inspector Llob series can't be put down. The central theme of Khadra’s detective stories is corruption within the police force and politics, and he explores how these corrupted worlds both merge, clash, and merge again, ...

It's the end of the day, and a taxieur last fare forgets her bag in the car. N ext morning, he goes back to the address to return the bag to the woman. For this, he doesn’t expect to spend seven months in jail. It was not Mourad's unsuspicious nature that sent him to El Harrach’s 7 Hectares jail, it was the unpretentious belief he’d been struck by love at first sight by Farida as he drove her to her parents’ home. Farida, though, had been murdered 18 months previously, and had long been buried.  While investigating a crime that wasn’t one, and a murder that never took place, Mourad discovers that Farida is in fact Ghislaine, a twin born in Algeria and stolen away by a gang trafficking babies just before Algeria’s independence. In Intrigue at Sidi Fredj , Khaled Mandi tells a tale in an Enid-Blyton-style that plays with djinns, ghosts, folklore, the reality of jail life, inmates’ solidarity and a crushing Algerian justice system. Should Mandi have closed the st...

{(under expansion)} Although titled "Top 10", this is now a Top 11 and expanding. These detective novels are by far the better crafted crime novels I've come across. Check out the whole list here however, they're all worth a read! 1- Maurice Attia - Alger la noire (2012, Barzakh)  [Alger, the black city] Available with Barzakh here  and with Actes Sud here .   2- Amel Bouchareb Sakarat Nedjma (the flutters of the star) (Chihab eds, 2015) See here for a review . 3- Amara Lakhous  Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, (transl. 2008) Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet,  Europa Eds, 2014 4- Rahima Karim - Le meurtre de Soma Zaïd (2002, MARSA eds) (The murder of Soma Zaïd) 5- Salim Aïssa  Adel s'emmele ... Alger, ENAL, 1988. Mimouna, Alger, Laphomic, 1987.  6- Abahri Larbi  Banderilles et muleta. Alger, SNED, 1981.   ...