Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette, translated from the French by Kate Briggs, for Women in Translation Month 2026

If there weren’t twenty minutes before anyone went to fetch the neighbor, a doctor, then the crime could not have been staged. 

“Because, clearly, that’s what they were doing during those twenty minutes of darkness. 

For:

  If:      the lights weren’t off 

            the telephone wires weren’t cut 

            the drawers weren’t pulled open 

            the sideboard was not in disarray  

Then no one broke in from the outside with the intention of committing murder.”

This novel’s poetic prose, almost too beautiful to discuss murder, asks us to consider each detail. Who killed the father with a hundred mil in the bank? Was it the child, a fifteen year old son? His mother? The maid? Who killed the father at 3:00 a.m. and neglected to throw the gun in the sea, but left it out in the yard? No, it was in the cupboard. It was in the car.

With such statements, Besette leads us through conflicting accounts to uncover the father’s murder. 

The mother did it.

The son did it.

The detective novel is turned on its head, almost made into a mockery, as we read the lines of this particular crime novel. It is like no murder mystery I have ever encountered, so elegant is the phrasing, so masterful the word plays.

The son says, “I am the child who killed his father. - I’m the one who shouted out loud, loudly, with blood calling to blood (here is the true bloodline), and bloodily I shouted this: for the children, for us the children, it is not enough to be well raised, fed when hungry, nursed when sick, to have a lawn, a croquet set, a racket, a jacket, a packet, a (bad) hiding place, a double bass, a briefcase, a shoelace, playing cards, a great big backyard, a towel, a trowel, to eat guinea-fowl, pork chops, to wear flip-flops, to have hot meals, wheels, a trike, a bike, a piano, a radio, a diabolo, photos, records, a chessboard, electricity (whether it was off or not) and…”

The conclusion?

“-But what if we haven’t seen it all, says the man at the door. What if it wasn’t her, what if it wasn’t him?

NOT THE END.” 

How can there be an end, when each has reason to kill the father? (The husband?) Who, in turn, has given probable cause to be a murderer himself, if murder can be committed by words and actions alone. 

(Twenty Minutes of Silence is published by New Directions, and it is a most outstanding read.)