Joelle Guillais, La Chair de l'autre: le
crime passionel au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1986).
'The law that was designed to deter professional gunmen and gangsters could become the instrument that hangs a cuckolded husband; an offence that in France would be treated as a '
crime passionel' and as such only lightly punished, attracts here the death sentence.
He murdered his wife in a
crime passionel and William had thought of writing an opera about him.'
too, had just taken your once-in-a-lifetime shot at a
crime passionel. But Chesnais's finest moment comes when the character is standing on his own doorstep.
And the plot, centring around a crime of passion - or rather, '
crime passionel' - unravels a deceptively simple open-and-shut case to reveal familiar webs of playboy deceit, greed and hypocrisy under the Caribbean sun.