Le diable en rit encore

Finally finished reading "Le diable en rit encore" (Régine Deforges) for the "Double Agents de Chagny" project, about two years after I started it! The unfortunate book has been entirely soaked in the bath where I fell asleep when reading it a month or so back -- indeed, I was pessimistic about whether I would ever be able to finish it at all after that, or whether the pages would end up permanently papier-mâchéd together, but my labours in individually peeling each one gently apart paid off, though the book has swollen and the spine is coming apart in consequence.

And of course I haven't taken any notes as I went through, and can't remember anything about the beginning by this stage :-p

Fairly gruesome stuff: a high proportion of the characters end up dead by the end of the novel, and the author contrives to shoehorn in the fall of Berlin and the relief of Belsen to add to the native French horrors (the protagonist's uncle and cousin get lynched after the liberation, while her aunt gets burnt alive by the Germans, for example...) And fairly late on in the war (1944–1945), being the third part of a trilogy, so probably not all that relevant for my purposes: I didn't plan to write about Christine and Raoul taking part in the liberation of Paris, for example, although I've already had material covering that in "The Collaborators" (this goes into more detail).

It could be useful for its depiction of life in Paris under occupation and for general countryside resistance activity, though, if I ever did an 'episode' where the characters leave Paris for some mission or other; quite likely to happen if I did write a series of these stories, since a lot of the source material I've got covers events elsewhere in the country. But realistically speaking I'll be lucky to do even one... and any interest is likely to be in the 'backstory' which echoes canon, rather than in new adventures with Erik definitively out of the running :-(