—There are two hundred yards from my block of flats to the garage where I park my car. Before I covered them in a few strides. Today it’s an expedition. 
Everything seems suspicious to me. There is danger in every step, sometimes I’m so scared I think of turning back.
The caretaker is a good man. He feels sorry for me. To his way of thinking I’m as good as dead.***
If you watched and liked the recent thriller ‘Cairo Confidential ‘ by Tarik Saleh then now is the moment to go back in time to Khadra’s Morituri (Those who are about to die) set in Algiers in the early 1990’s during the Algerian civil war and published in French in 1997. Behind the name Yasmin Khadra hides Mohammed Moulesouhoul who was an Algerian army officer and wrote under this pen name to avoid censorship.
In Algeria caught between corruption and Islamic fundamentalism, where the police are fair game, inspector Llob is asked to find the rich powerful Ghoul Malek’s daughter, Sabrine (Ghoul’s name is a play on words meaning the Ogre). Not an easy task, I mean who would take the risk of being seen talking to a policeman, a dead man walking, and risk his life. As Llob pursues his enquiry, we learn that an ‘Abou Kalypse’ (apocalypse) is orchestrating the murder of famous writers and entertainers, well those that are left, they have always been fair game for the fundamentalists.
Khadra sets the scene, there is no hope such as here for instance:
—As of now, in my country, a stones throw from the point of no return, there are children gunned down simply because they go to school and girls who are beheaded in order to scare the others.***
As the enquiry advances further and one of his team is tortured to death by the terrorists after straying into a known zone at risk where his father had died, Llob tells us:
—We have become used to the terrorist’s inconceivable abjectness, they have been known to kill a mother with the sole purpose of ambushing the son the day of the burial and to kill a cop in order to mow down his colleagues come to pay their respects at his tomb***
This is a quick read and if you are looking for signs of hope, well there are some, for instance Llob’s partner, Lino, who is scared to inaction at the start of the book, when pushed to his very limits, lets his pent up anger pull him out of his stagnation.
First published in French as ‘Morituri’ by éditions Baleine in 1997
Translated into English as ‘Morituri’ by David Herman and published by Toby Press in 2003
*** My translation
South of Paris books 