André Cornélis Reading Order

André Cornélis (1887) by Paul Bourget is his most accessible and most widely translated novel, a psychological thriller structured around a young man's investigation of his father's death: André Cornélis, seventeen years old when his father dies under suspicious circumstances, grows up with the conviction that his stepfather is the murderer and devotes his adult life to proving it. The novel is simultaneously Bourget's most direct engagement with the detective novel tradition (it was read on publication as a French Hamlet) and his most concentrated psychological novel: André's obsession with his father's death is analyzed with the same precision that Bourget brings to love and social lying in his other novels, and the investigation is structured as a study of the psychology of obsession rather than as a puzzle-plot. The novel predates Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story (A Study in Scarlet was published the same year, 1887) and belongs to the same moment of the emergence of the detective and psychological thriller genres, but Bourget's interest is entirely in the psychology of the avenger rather than in the puzzle. André Cornélis's moral problem — having identified his stepfather as the murderer, what should he do? — is a genuine moral puzzle that the novel refuses to answer simply, and the ending has disturbed readers and critics since the novel's publication.