The directory «Plots»

Ray Jean
(1887—1964)

Jean Ray is the best-known pseudonym among the many used by Raymundus Johannes Maria de Kremer, a prolific Belgian French language writer. Although he wrote straight journalism, stories for young readers in the Flemish language under the name John Flanders, scenarios for comic strips and detective stories, he is best known for his tales of the fantastique written under the name Jean Ray. In the English-speaking world, he is famous for his macabre novel Malpertuis (1943), which was filmed by Harry Kümel in 1971. He also used the pseudonyms King Ray, Alix R. Bantam and Sailor, among others.

Ray was born in Ghent, his father a minor port official, his mother the head of a girls' school. Ray was a fairly successful student at school but failed to complete his university studies, and from 1910 to 1919 he worked in clerical posts in the city administration.

By the early 1920s he had joined the editorial team of the Journal de Gand. Later he also joined the monthly L'Ami du Livre. His first book, Les Contes du Whisky, a collection of fantastic and uncanny stories, was published in 1925.

In 1926 he was charged with embezzlement and sentenced to six years in prison, but served only two. During his imprisonment he wrote two of his best-known long stories, The Shadowy Street and The Mainz Psalter. From the time of his release in 1929 until the outbreak of the Second World War, he wrote virtually non-stop.

Between 1933 and 1940, Ray produced over a hundred tales in a series of detective stories, The Adventures of Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes. He had been hired to translate a series from the German, but Ray found the stories so bad that he suggested to his Amsterdam publisher that he should re-write them instead. The publisher agreed, provided only that each story be about the same length as the original, and match the book's cover illustration. The Harry Dickson stories are admired by the film director Alain Resnais among others. In the winter of 1959-1960 Resnais met with Ray in the hope of making a film based on the Harry Dickson character, but nothing came of the project.

During the Second World War Ray's prodigious output slowed, but he was able to publish his best work in French, under the name Jean Ray: Le Grand Nocturne (1942), La Cité de l'Indicible Peur, also adapted into a film starring Bourvil, Malpertuis, Les Cercles de L'Epouvante (all 1943), Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944) and Le Livre des Fantômes (1947).

After the war he was again reduced to hackwork, writing comic-strip scenarios under the name of John Flanders. He was rescued from obscurity by Raymond Queneau and Roland Stragliati, whose influence got Malpertuis reprinted in French in 1956.

A few weeks before his death, he wrote his own mock epitaph in a letter to his friend Albert van Hageland: Ci gît Jean Ray/homme sinistre/qui ne fut rien/pas même ministre ("Here lies Jean Ray/A gent sinister/who was nothing/not even a minister").

Belgium, 2004, Jean Ray

Belgium, 2007, Scene from film «Malpertuis»