Paris (AFP)

Franck Thilliez, the French champion of the black novel, very black, is as rooted in his northern region as he has a wandering soul.

And with his last thriller, "1991", he went 30 years back.

"Sharko's First Investigation," reads the cover of this volume published Thursday by Black River.

Franck Sharko, the hero, was born in the first book of the man who was then only an engineer, "Train d'enfer pour ange rouge" (2004).

Today, the writer (full time) is the fourth most read in France, behind the indebted Guillaume Musso, then Virginie Grimaldi and Michel Bussi.

All of them have brighter universes, to say the least.

Between sexual violence, voodoo, torture, perversions and violent deaths, "1991" is not to please all audiences.

All this comes out of the mind of a balanced, discreet, reserved man.

Extremely kind even, his personality eliciting nothing but praise: he is described as humble and even-tempered, and not at all tortured, unlike the criminal intrigues that made him successful.

A series of TF1 adapted from his novel "Le Syndrome E", whose filming begins, should make him even better known.

Vincent Elbaz will play the hero, and Jennifer Decker his partner Lucie Hennebelle.

Franck Thilliez speaks easily of Sharko, and less of himself.

"I wanted to find a Sharko in the energy of youth, who wants it, who is also a little naive, because he thinks that the 36 quai des Orfèvres [headquarters of the Paris judicial police], it is is all he wants, when he is going to be faced with very raw violence from the start. And he will say to himself: am I made for this job? 'there is worse in the human being ".

- "Something genetic" -

This investigator, therefore, comes like him from the Pas-de-Calais mining area, a country of workers.

That also of the Bruay-en-Artois affair, the very publicized murder of a teenager in 1972. Franck Sharko, in the fiction, was in the front row as a child, as recounted "1991".

And Franck Thilliez, born in 1973, remembers that in reality, history had marked the conscience in the region: the murderer was never found.

"My grandfather was a baker among the miners. He lived in the settlements, near Liévin. When I speak of the environment of Sharko, it is a bit mine that I am describing. Sharko's past is perhaps where there is the most common points between him and me ", explains the novelist.

The young policeman keeps wondering if he will be able to stay in the capital for a long time, and if she will not "devour" him.

As for the novelist, he has always kept away from the Parisian literary world.

Ile-de-France is a setting for a novel that he knows well, and the place where he meets his publishing house, journalists and readers.

No more.

“I stayed in my North because the roots matter to me. All my family, all my relatives are there, and I feel like there is something almost genetic. Since 1700, the most far where I was able to go back, all the Thilliez lived within a radius of 30 kilometers ", he underlines.

"It allowed me to devote myself to writing, in my campaign. It's a life that suits me, and I bring it out with Sharko."

But beware, a big change: the novelist is moving, and will be leaving his town of Mazingarbe (Pas-de-Calais).

To go to ... the countryside around Lille.

© 2021 AFP