The pink and the black, Romance novel vs. crime novel? Romantic quest and criminal investigation in the novels of Léo Malet

Léo Malet, the surrealist poet who converted, as André Stil put it, to “police pedagogy”—read: the crime novel—found himself torn between a number of simultaneous and, it appears, incompatible commitments. His character Nestor Burma is confronted with a theoretical difficulty, an internal fault line that will prove fertile.