Cover of Dirty Snow

Dirty Snow

Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snowopens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go.

Hans Koning has described Dirty Snowas "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.

Genre
crimenoirmysteryliterary fictionthriller
Themes
murderphilosophy
Setting
world war IIeuropeeuropean
Subject
history
Audience
adult
Length
medium · 272 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.