Joël Dicker's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Joël Dicker was born in Geneva in 1985. He credits his mother, who works in a bookshop, for his love of literature. There may well be some truth in that, at the age of ten, he started a nature magazine that he kept up for seven years. Not bad for a child; I can hardly persuade my daughters to put down their phones, let alone pick up a pen.

Prize-Winning Writing

He progressed to novels and, in 2010, won the Geneva Writers’ Prize for unpublished manuscripts. His winning submission, Les Derniers Jours de Nos Pères, was bought by a Parisian editor and published shortly afterwards. His next novel, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, won the Grand Prix du Roman, one of France’s most prestigious literary awards, and was subsequently translated into 32 different languages.

Like “The truth…” his subsequent two novels, The Baltimore Boys and The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer, were set on the northeastern seaboard of the U.S.A. His choice of location is puzzling for a man born and brought up in Geneva. Countless childhood summer holidays spent in Maine had fuelled his imagination.

Critical Rift

Joël Dicker’s books are heavy on intrigue, with more breakneck turns than the Cresta Run. They are also equally rich in linguistic cliches and cultural stereotypes. Despite the hype, this is not French intellectual literature; think Dan Brown, not Victor Hugo.

These two facts have led to a transatlantic rift. In Europe, his book sales are phenomenal, and his novels are praised, whereas, in the U.S., his writing gets pummelled:

“When I finally shut the book and tried to decipher the story, I struggled to think of an adjective to describe it all. In the end, I settled on ‘hollow’.” ~ Pitsburg Post-Gazette

“It’s hard to tell whether the novel is as wooden in the original French, but I’m told that it is” ~ The New Yorker

“laughable but subtly insidious portrait of American culture” ~ NPR

My American friends could not get past all those stereotypes and cliches. In their defence, there are plenty.

Page Turners

Dicker isn’t that phased. When given the backhanded compliment that his book is a “page-turner”, he rolls his eyes and says

“Well, yeah, so that means you want to turn the page. If you don’t want to turn the page, then it’s not a good book.” (New Yorker)

His latest book, L’Énigme de la Chambre 622, has yet to be translated into English. It is set in Switzerland and, if the form is anything to go by, will be a combination of stereotypical Swiss culture — maybe lederhosen and cuckoo clocks — plus a breakneck plot.

Will that make it a transatlantic hit and a flop in Europe? That would show how shallow we are… on both sides of the Atlantic.