French culture has a long fascination with serial killers | Letter

Richard Tomlinson points to the wide interest in the trial of Henri Désiré Landru 100 years ago, in response to an article that claimed the serial killer concept was not yet ‘a cultural vogue’ in the 1990s

Scott Sayare (What lies beneath: the secrets of France’s top serial killer expert, 9 November) is wrong to suggest that “the serial killer was not yet a cultural vogue in France” when Stéphane Bourgoin held forth on the subject at a dinner party in the early 1990s. By coincidence, Sayare’s article appeared during the centenary of the trial of Henri Désiré Landru, the French serial killer who eventually inspired a wildly inaccurate 1963 film by the voguish director Claude Chabrol from a script by the avant-garde novelist Françoise Sagan.

Chabrol and Sagan’s cinematic atrocity tapped into a French cultural fascination with serial killers that goes back to Bluebeard, the mythical medieval nobleman who slaughtered his wives. Revealingly, the French press dubbed the bearded Landru the “Bluebeard of Gambais”, after one of the villages near Paris where 10 of his fiancees had vanished.

At Landru’s trial, Colette was among the press pack who struggled to make sense of this lethally deranged misogynist, whom the prosecution alleged had made “romantic contact” with 283 women during the war (a provable underestimate). She reported that she had “searched in vain for any sign of cruelty in his deeply entrenched eyes”.

Colette was writing for a mass French readership that was already familiar with infamous serial killer cases from abroad, via newspapers and dozens of true crime magazines. Seen in this historical light, Stéphane Bourgoin was not a trailblazer, even on his own terms. He was selling his tales of interviews with US serial killers to a public which was already steeped in the subject.
Richard Tomlinson
Author, Landru’s Secret: The Deadly Seductions of France’s Lonely Hearts Serial Killer

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