One Big Murder Mystery: the Algerian army’s leading novelist
Adam Shatz, 7 October 2004
“Khadra brings to the policier an unrivalled flair for capturing the coarse argot of the Algerian street, and an intimate knowledge of Algiers, from its opulent villas to the wretched slums where Islamic radicals rallied the poor, or the nightclubs popular among ‘high officials with a fondness for virgin boys – which is why one notices a surreptitious odour of Vaseline in the air.’ Inspector Llob, Khadra’s deadpan narrator, is a faithful husband, good Muslim and fierce patriot . . . Like his creator, he writes detective novels in his spare time, under the name of Yasmina Khadra . . . As a cop and a writer, he is doubly a target for the Islamists, who have turned Algiers into ‘a barbecue suspended between God’s hell and the purgatory of men.’”
