A review by quirkycynic
The Executioner Weeps by Frédéric Dard

4.0

God how I'm loving these really old fashioned French crime novels so far... they're all just so sexy and sophisticated and completely unafraid to veer into high romantic melodrama instead of hardboiled realism. This book in particular feels like it has a lot in common with that other classic of French noir Vertigo, in that they both play on variations of Pygmalion but as a psychological thriller -- both are about men becoming obsessed with their own psychological projections of specific women and how this leads them to spiral into tragedy. Sometimes the female characters in these books do feel pretty regressive but I think the depiction of gender roles on the whole is pretty interestingly subversive if you read it a certain way, especially in how it relates to the totally-destructive masculinity at the centre of the story.