Every Saturday evening, travelling salesman Fernand Ravinel returns to his wife, Mireille, who waits patiently for him at home. But Ferdinand has another lover, Lucienne, an ambitious doctor, and together the adulterers have devised a murderous plan. Drugging Mireille, the pair drown her in a bathtub, but in the morning, before the "accidental" death can be discovered, the corpse is gone—so begins the unraveling of Ferdinand's plot, and his sanity... This classic of French noir fiction was adapted for the screen by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques (The Devils), starring Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot, the film which in turn inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. A second movie version, Diabolique, followed in 1996, starring Sharon Stone.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. French author who collaborated with his countryman, Pierre Ayraud (aka Thomas Narcejac), to write crime fiction as Boileau-Narcejac. In 1938 he was awarded on of the most important literary awards in France the Prix du Roman d'Aventures, for Le Repos de Bacchus . It is given to the author of the best example of detective fiction in the world each year. He met Narcejac in 1948 at the awards dinner when Narcejac received the same award for one of his novels.
