Karim Miské

Karim Miské (born 1964 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast) is a French-Mauritanian writer, documentary filmmaker, and novelist best known internationally for Arab Jazz. His background is notably transnational, the son of a Mauritanian diplomat and a French/Breton mother, who spent parts of his formative years in Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Senegal, and France. This strongly influenced his later interest in multicultural identity, migration, religion, postcolonial politics, and hybrid urban cultures. He later settled in France and became known first for documentary filmmaking before publishing fiction.

Miské, Karim, (Arab Jazz [translated from the French by Sam Gordon, hc, MacLehose Press, 2016]) 978-1681446141 [pb, MacLehose Press, 2017] 978-1681446059 [The novel is set in Paris’s multicultural 19th arrondissement and combines noir, police procedural, and social commentary about Muslim-Jewish relations, radicalism, immigration, and identity. The murder at the center of the plot appears to have ritual or sectarian overtones: a young woman is found mutilated with pork placed near the body, immediately provoking speculation about religious motives. It is virtually the only widely recognized French crime novel where a Jewish detective is part of the main investigative team. She is Rachel Kupferstein — a Jewish police lieutenant investigating the murder alongside her partner, Jean Hamelot.

Rachel is one of the more distinctive elements in the book because Miské deliberately uses her character to explore contemporary French Jewish identity in a multicultural and increasingly polarized Paris. Reviews and summaries describe her as intellectually inclined, emotionally complex, and deeply aware of the tensions between secular France, Jewish communal life, and rising Islamist radicalism. She is portrayed as culturally Jewish rather than stereotypically religious. Her surname and background place her within Ashkenazi/French-Jewish Parisian society. She operates in a world where Jewish and Muslim communities interact uneasily but constantly. Miské avoids making her merely symbolic; she functions as a competent noir investigator while also embodying anxieties about antisemitism and communal fragmentation in contemporary France. The novel includes encounters with Hasidic and neo-Lubavitch milieus, as well as Salafist networks, creating a parallel examination of Jewish and Muslim fundamentalisms. Her investigative partnership with Jean Hamelot also follows a classic “odd-couple detective duo” structure common in neo-noir police fiction, but refracted through France’s postcolonial ethnic and religious tensions.

Note that the novel is a “one-off”: neither Rachel nor any other Jewish character features in any other books or films of Miské’s. As far as English translation goes, Arab Jazz appears to be the only one of Miské’s novels widely available in English at present. Most of his other work has been documentary filmmaking rather than translated fiction.

What makes Rachel unusual in crime fiction is that she is not written in the older “Jewish intellectual detective” mold associated with figures like Rabbi David Small (in Harry Kemelman’s series) or Ariel Kafka (in Harri Nykänen’s Helsinki police novels). Instead, Rachel belongs to a newer European noir tradition where Jewish detectives are embedded in multicultural urban conflict zones. Her Jewish identity becomes one axis among many — alongside Arab identity, secularism, race, immigration, and religious extremism.] [ChatGPT]

See comments on Claire Gorrara’s book, French crime fiction and the Second World War, in the non-fiction section below; and on the 2006 movie, Tell No One, in the companion Movies-Films list.